Winning a London Garden Allotment
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Melbourne’s MCG has a members’ club. To get in you have to be sponsored by two existing members, fill in a form, and wait. The wait list is something like 15 years. [0]
I had this form in 2006 and thought, eh, too long. I didn’t submit it. But my time is now, and I remember that moment, and clearly remember younger me thinking that this day would never come. I was in my late 20s, I couldn’t imagine being 45.
Well, here I am.
[0]: https://www.mcc.org.au/about-the-club/membership/latest-memb...
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples should be aware that this website contains images or names of people who have passed away."
#itscomplicated
They know more about this land than you’ll ever find in a book as a result of being a mostly spoken word culture.
It is their land and you should pay respects, a small ceremony isn’t too much of an inconvenience.
The problem, IMHO, is that it's become meaningless. I mean they say it at the start of some of our meetings at work FFS. I work for a large IT systems integrator! The person just says the words, clearly having never rehearsed them, with no emotion. This isn't helping.
It just alienates otherwise empathetic people who think, "this pointless crap again?"
Is it meaningless to take a minute silence for fallen humans in a war? Is it meaningless to pay respects to your close ancestors?
Maybe! Maybe not. I know which side my soul falls on.
Everyone. The person saying it doesn’t mean it. The people they’re ostensibly saying it to receive no benefit.
> Maybe! Maybe not. I know which side my soul falls on.
On the side of meaningless gestures and self-righteously signaling how virtuous you think you are?
Now they are a distributed culture so I know that the local communities don’t speak for other communities.
But I’m curious to know how deep your connections go into any indigenous community. I will readily admit that I don’t have huge amounts of contact with my locals, but speaking FOR them and saying they receive no benefit is a bit weird…
Also, why does anyone have to benefit at all?
I’m sorry, is that an argument?
Are you giving them back the land? No?
Then what benefit do they receive, exactly, and why are they owed it?
> Also, why does anyone have to benefit at all?
If you’re going to ask everyone to expend energy genuflecting to your religious dogma, surely there must be some benefit to someone beyond merely benefiting your own social power/standing?
To use your analogy, if everyone took a minute silence but spent it browsing Facebook on their phone, would that be respectful? No, it would be pointless.
Edit: to be very explicit, I think Australia needs to reconcile with its Aboriginal people. I don't know how that looks, I'm not an expert. We should probably ask NZ. But reading a boilerplate statement at the start of a meeting doesn't do that. It makes it look like we're doing something whereas in reality we are doing literally nothing. And it makes good people who might actually want to do something cynical, because they just think "this pointless nonsense again?"
Yikes! Maybe the people who are asking us to do a welcome to country might know what it looks like!
Honest question, have you ever spoken to an elder about the topic of welcome to country?
If instead we all just went about our business while being silent: checked Facebook, had a piss, replied to an email, then it would cease to be meaningful. And you'd say "oh but what would you know about meaning, the people who know say that you should be silent for a minute!"
I may be totally wrong -- no, I've not spoken to an elder -- but if they think that they're actually getting any respect, or moving forward their cause, by
having companies have someone read the Welcome to Country in broken monotone at the start of a meeting, or
having companies put up banners on websites that you have to click through, or
having the Qantas crew say "laides and gentlemen welcome to Melbourne where the local time is midday and it's eighteen degrees outside and we would like to pay our respects to the people of this land past and present" at the standard cadence of an airline steward,
then I'm going to be politically incorrect and say that they're deluded. And they're worse than deluded: this is at best doing nothing and at worst it is causing harm, because this is causing your regular Aussie to become sick of the whole sorry charade.
Words have a literal meaning, but you don't get the emotional meaning for free. You have to earn that part. I can say "I love you", but I don't love you. This entire country is saying these words but they have lost all meaning in the vast majority of cases.
If you think that's good I don't know what to tell you.
" ... or at least, it was their land, until we, colonizers from overseas, won a war against them, or at least left them them so powerless that it is now left to us to say these meaningless platitudes to remind people, without reminding them of the violence, genocide and destruction that we rained down on the original inhabitants."Laws don’t change that they were cultivating this beautiful country for some tens of thousands of years prior.
You can write silly words on a page and say it’s law and has meaning.
And you can disagree with those words.
That no culture knows this land better than their culture is indicative.
What an embarrassing and shameful situation that we have rid this land of their culture and people can’t be bothered to let their guard down, open their hearts and love their fellow humans…
> "their culture"
Native Americans are not all a monolithic block, and in my part of the world, for example, the Hopi still "remember" (as a part of their own oral history) when Athabascans from what is now called Alberta & British Columbia migrated (with a certain level of violence) into their area (and eventually became the Dine). From the tone of my Hopi neighbor, I'd say there is still some resentment about that. The Americas were essentially just as full of conquests and land-grabs as Europe or Asia.
The big difference, or at least the one we register today, is inter-continental colonialism combined with genocidal intent. That is not exclusive to western European cultures, but for reasons that I still don't pretend to understand or know, that part of the world seems to have operated in this manner far more and far effectively than any other.
However, the notion that a particular part of the Earth "always was, always will be" the home and place of a single group of people is just not a description of human history on this planet.
Clearly, it’s not their land. Are you giving it back? No? Then it’s still your land.
> It is their land and you should pay respects, a small ceremony isn’t too much of an inconvenience.
We’ve already demonstrated that it’s not their land. If it was, we wouldn’t even be discussing an acknowledgment.
As for “should”? Why should we?
If you’re asking everyone to subscribe to your religious dogma, shouldn’t you be able to present even a modicum of an argument as to why?
I’m not asking anyone to do this. It was and STILL is a cultural normal in Australia and surrounding islands for some incredibly long amount of time (30,000 years perhaps?). Long long time. Not hard to honour is it?
> Protocols for welcoming visitors to Country have always been a part of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. Boundaries were clear, and crossing into another group’s Country required a request for permission to enter.
>When permission was granted the hosting group would welcome the visitors, offering them safe passage and protection of their spiritual being during the journey. Visitors had to respect the protocols and rules of the land owner group while on their Country.
> An Acknowledgement of Country is an opportunity for anyone to show respect for Traditional Owners and the continuing connection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to Country.
>An Acknowledgement of Country can be offered by any person and like a Welcome to Country, is given at the beginning of a meeting, speech or event.
https://www.reconciliation.org.au/acknowledgement-of-country...
Yes, it’s empty dogma. Do you believe in their spiritual and cultural practices?
What gives you the right to welcome anyone to a country that you, by your own admission, do not own?
Are you going to give it back, or not? If not, then stop trying to guilt others into participating in your empty, hypocritical posturing.
> This is a respect thing like saying thank you or you’re welcome. Not religious at all.
Do you have an argument for your empty religious platitudes or not?
So far, it seems “not”. “Yikes” and “woah” are not arguments.
Did you read the quote? Elders perform a welcome to country. Non elders perform an acknowledgement. None of this is based is faith or religion. It’s not posturing either, these things are just good manners in the cultures of the people who past present and future live on this land.
I’m not even trying to make an argument out of these things, just highlighting that it is a tradition that has been practised for many TENS of THOUSANDS of years.
I’m not guilting anyone to do anything. It’s not even posturing. It’s tradition for the people who walked this land long before me.
It’s performative, hypocritical, and a form of social aggression used to assert your own standing/power, not to actually help a single person.
“Acknowledgement” has not been practiced for “many TENS of THOUSANDS of years”.
> I’m not guilting anyone to do anything.
Of course you are. See all the “yikes” and “woah” you post, and weird capitalization of “TENS of THOUSANDS” above. You absolutely are attempting to leverage vapid social aggression to guilt people into following your silly religious dogma.
> It’s not even posturing.
Of course it is. It’s a meaningless, modern, invented platitude used by people like yourself to advertise how virtuous you believe you are.
> It’s tradition for the people who walked this land long before me.
Your useless “acknowledgement” of having stolen the land while refusing to give it back? That’s not some ancient tradition.
Every group prior took land from others, claimed it at their own, and didn’t pretend to performative “guilt” over having done so.
Actually, many London boroughs have good tracking information. Here is one. It even shows the application date at the top of the list.
https://www.richmond.gov.uk/media/22784/allotment_waiting_li...
Note the strict bar on using the allotment to improve your economic situation. I laugh at the idea that property rights create freedom because the history of property rights is one of property owners acquiring more property by force.
The sites aren't designed to keep livestock on either, and they are small enough that you have to be a bit careful with hives disturbing neighbours.
Yes, this is the exact point I am making.
I suspect a lot of the produce would be bartered, away from prying eyes.
Allotments are very much not property rights (or at least, they're a much more limited form of ownership than land titles); they harken back to the tradition of common land. Property rights advocates argue that enclosure and sale of land (that could be used freely by its owner) is a better model. So I don't follow your point at all here.
Naturally, people with the most affluence would prefer the free market approach. Everyone else would prefer a non-zero chance of getting a plot eventually rather than a zero chance of being able to afford one at all.
Secondly, you should be extremely skeptical about the 40 year claim. After all, people move, and the popularity of allotments waxes and wanes.
Thirdly, the people who allocate allotments are mostly looking for someone who is going to show up and take care of their plot so it doesn't get overgrown. Expecting a lot of manual labour and then pricing out anyone with a background in manual labour might not be the smartest move.
Couldn't the owners address that by including a clause like "if you let your plot get overgrown, you have to pay a penalty (maybe 3x what it costs to pay someone to come take care of it), and if you do it twice, we're not renewing your lease"?
So you're buying a kinda-5-year-lease. But the exact length of your lease depends how well you look after it.
We live in a fucking society. Not everything needs to be minmax rent seeking.
It effectively becomes land you own permanently. And the price would probably go from 'a few hundred bucks for something that will entertain me for a year' to 'an investment that will rise in value and I can give my children, so $400k'.
Knowing that a fixed percentage of owners will be stripped of their holding each year makes it a very unattractive investment, while not preventing most of the other uses of an allotment.
Which is stack-ranking - fire the lowest x% of performers every year. Yeah nahhh, no problems with that idea, nope.
That is an analysis by choice. There are other ways of looking at the world, and at economics, than "measure everything".
The "metrics" methods of analysis are useful, but insufficient. Human dignity/happiness cannot be measured, and from the evidence of this New Yorker piece, it is both that the writer is getting from the allotment.
I'm pretty sure I've spent more in equipment, consumables, seeds, etc. than I've got out of it so far but it's very enjoyable.
Edit: should have googled, seems my town does indeed have it! https://www.mountainview.gov/depts/cs/rec/facilities/garden....
(Edit: Just to be clear I think the wait time was a year or two, not 40.)
In bigger cities there have been various community garden projects, but they often are wildcat projects using vacant lots and constantly facing eviction by property owners to avoid insurance and adverse possession claims.
Wow, so 60 sqm is still typical? Around here a typical community garden plot would be maybe 4 to 6 sqm.
Although perhaps they meant 6 msq
Only a traitor would allow any of their food to come from the EU post brexit freedom. The only way is to grow your own, hence the need for a plot to grow on.