To Notice a Mangrove
Felicity Castagna was engaged by Powerhouse as the commissioning editor and a contributor to The River, a series of new writing and photography responding to the landscape, communities and histories surrounding the Parramatta River.
To Notice a Mangrove
The Parramatta River is where the saltwater meets fresh. It is hard to introduce the subject without introducing the place and also without saying that this is my river: That I live here and feel it and know it and also that I know it has never really belonged to me and that I know no collection of words, no collection of writers, will ever be able to capture what it means to be here.
Every day I walk on the paths between the mangrove forests that line the river and the fences that try to contain all the new buildings and all their steel and glass and concrete and the men in hard-hats who hold the whole city of Parramatta in a kind of strangulated rapture.
To be clear, I’m not a mangrove person, I’m a building person – this is all a way of saying that I lie in my bed at night and the view out my window is one of the endless cranes that line the river and their blinking lights, and the metal skeletons of buildings and I find the great, gritty machinery of the city a sublime and compelling dreamscape.
And that makes me forget that the mangroves have been sitting here in the soft sticky mud for over 15,000 years. But I’m trying to notice it more, all of the details of this place I live in, I’m trying to suck it in through my skin so that they will always be a part of me.
