The feral fixer tackling urban eyesores

BY CAROLINE LAI
It’s an overcast Saturday afternoon and Glenn William Wall is working on his latest covert assignment in a quiet Pyrmont cul-de-sac.
He and his neighbours are busy converting a small traffic island into a plush new garden. They call this “feral gardening”, and it is something that Glenn Wall has been obsessed with since the early 1980s.
Since then, he’s transformed numerous urban eyesores in Woolloomooloo, Darlinghurst and now Pyrmont.
“The basic concept of feral gardening is’ Find a piece of land and just do it. Don’t ask permission. Expect to cop lots of dissent from the urban neurotics that are now moving in to the inner city,” says Wall.
Long before guerrilla gardening became a trendy past time for bored uni students and eccentric retirees, Glenn Wall was spending most of his free time cultivating neglected public spaces.
In his feral gardening manifesto ‘ obtained by The City News in September ‘ Wall dismisses guerrilla gardening as a gimmick.
“We of the feral gardening movement do not have any leaders,” Wall writes, “we just do it and get on with it without any authority, lest we become captive to the rules.”
For him, feral gardening is a great way to keep some ecological diversity in a place like Pyrmont, which has become a mass of high-rise apartments.
“The problem with the urban neurotics moving in to the inner city and bringing all their baggage with them is that they want conformity, and don’t understand that the inner city is not conformity,” he says. “It’s multiple layers like any pavlova.”
His and the community’s efforts have transformed the laneways and streets of Pyrmont with an array of native plants, herbs and flowerbeds. He says they are constantly under threat from council-hired gardeners who prefer the city’s flora to be arranged in an orderly fashion.
A self-avowed “chronic recycler”, Glenn Wall also believes that while we should strive for a more sustainable city, we shouldn’t sacrifice what is left of its heritage.
Another concern of his is the City of Sydney’s removal of convict-era trachyte (light-coloured igneous stone) gutters to make way for the new King Street bike lane.
These gutters were originally imported from South Africa in the early 1800s, he says, and were used to pave the city’s sidewalks as a replacement to the initial wooden gutters. They can still be seen in certain parts of the city.
“City Projects have been ripping them out, in the middle of the night, on street corners… and replacing the trachyte with new bluestone because it conforms to the radius of the turning circle.
“Fortunately, Clover Moore saved Oxford Street in totality. I was trying to save William Street and Park Street from the RTA.”
A history aficionado and a member of the Stone Committee, Wall is incensed by the general disregard for local heritage, which he claims, became more apparent during the recent local government election.
“They were dumping the trachyte, ripping it out, smashing it… Clover joined me and we stopped the RTA destroying it.
“But you can only find it in parking bays. There’s basically only a third of what was originally there.”
Wall says he will continue fighting to save the city’s heritage gutters – with the Lord Mayor’s help. He now hopes to motivate the community to do the same.