Commemorative Parkland M3 Eastlink

Commemorative Parkland M3 Eastlink. 

Eastlink Tollway. Image of first road fatality on Eastlink. February 18 2010. Herald Sun. Photograph by Tony Eccleston.    

This intervention explores Marc Auge’s concept of the non-place through one part of his definition of a place as being where the “dead may dwell”.  

The single piece of urban infrastructure known in 2006 as the M5 (Motorway 5) is treated as a timeline in space and form of the 1960s transport solution to what Aiden Davison described as the Suburban City of Melbourne, Australia. A suburban city is one which builds its suburbs before developing an urban core. Melbourne has experience two sustained periods of massive suburban expansion in its brief 175 years of urban history.

I wanted to conduct an experiment connected to the long-standing roadside memorials in the F19 Freeway (see Nature Stripped) and the fundamental difference in permissible use between the same form and continuing line of a piece of infrastructure being designed, built and managed by a public institution compared to a private organisation.

As a privatised extension of the publicly owned and managed F19 free-way the Eastlink Tollway more closely approximates Marc Augé’s definition of the non-place, through its ‘solitary contractuality’ of relations.  The tollway is mediated via the non- human exchange of the toll as “proof of innocence” for entry, and through the monitoring and maintenance that are combined in a contradictory customer service of remote surveillance and immediate response. The carriageways and landscape of Eastlink are kept immaculately clean. A fleet of Incident Response vehicles patrol the tollway from end to end and neither roadkill nor rubbish nor car breakdowns stay in the carriage for any length of time. In addition to the tolling, surveying and and way-finding gantries being integrated into the design, the signature coloured Plexiglas hoardings, sound walls and bridge barriers register the whole of the tollway as a continuous space for its 39 kilometres. There is no other urban space of this scale in metropolitan Melbourne that has a single author who is the operator.

Like it’s public continuation of the F19 freeway, within the Eastlink Tollway there are reminders of mortality. However these are private or sanctioned and can be found in four locations of this user-pays space. The first two are places of worship whose adorned exteriors are visible by day and at night from the tollway’s carriageway by default of location. In the north, this is the headquarters and temple of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints in Wantirna. Capturing the rays of the rising or setting sun, a golden trumpeting Gabriel is visible atop the building’s spire that reaches for the heavens outside but visible above the sound wall of the tollway. In the south, the Shri Shiva Vishnu (Hindu) Temple in Carrum Downs with its multitude of deities rises above and just outside the landscaped flora of the tollway corridor.

The second two reminders of mortality are billboards. The highly effective and graphically explicit road safety advertising campaign of the Road Traffic Authority (RTA) is visible upon entering Eastlink from the north via the F19 public Freeway.  Among its campaigns against drink driving and speeding is featured the image of a roadside memorial. At the southern end of this tollway a billboard for a memorial park named after the local aboriginal language and group, Bunurong, occupies territory just outside but facing the audience of the tollway corridor. The memorial park has no direct relation to Aboriginal people. These two billboards tell us that the visual space and time of the tollway’s passage can be respectively bought or borrowed.

Unlike the F19, that was constructed in four stages and opened progressively over 25 years, Eastlink Tollway took four years to be constructed and opened in its entirety in 2006. The first fatal accident occurred on the Eastlink on February 18, 2010 with the death of the driver of a semi-trailer who lost control and collided with a sign gantry in the centre of the tollway and burst into flames. This was visually captured and communicated in a spectacularly horrific image published online the same day by The Age and Herald Sun online newspapers. The ‘live’ broadcast implications of the published image, viewed through the detachment and saturated colours online, render the image of the accident as reminiscent of a disaster film. It is also reported live, cinematographically recorded and transmitted in image and text as mass communication to a frustrated commuting audience. The visual impact of this reportage is distancing yet uncannily more familiar as it is in the film set like landscape of Eastlink – a type of autoparkland/leggoland.

Two further deaths occurred on Eastlink up until 2012. On March 15, 2011 a male motorcyclist catapulted to his death from his motorbike as he overshot an on‐ramp in Ringwood at the northern end of Eastlink. The second of these reported fatalities was also a male driver who crashed his vehicle by missing an exit for a freeway in the southern end of Eastlink. The driver attempted to flee the site of the single car/single passenger accident, ran across the Eastlink carriageway and was struck and killed by a northbound vehicle on August 16, 2011. 

Visiting two of these fatality sites and getting out of the vehicle felt like a strange recollection of media reports. It is not possible to stop where the motor cycle fatality occurred but in the centrifugal force of entering the on-ramp the reporting of the accident can be imagined if known and recollected. The descriptive texts and images of the accidents from print and electronic media paint nightmare scenarios visibly rendered in RTA advertising against speeding. This form of reporting and representation is not unique to fatal accidents on Eastlink or free/tollways in general for that matter. However, it is curious that there have been no visible markings at any of these three sites as of September 18, 2012.

This question was raised but not answered in the work Nature Stripped F19 about the existence of the roadside memorials i.e. who and what is commemorated, by whom and in what way?  Firstly, is this a public matter for other users of these public and privatised spaces and secondly what is my intention in engaging with these places of private mourning? Unlike the two lines of black and white print reporting the twin fatality on the F19 late one night in 1998 (Nature Stripped), the burning vehicle of the first fatality on the Eastlink in 2010 is reported live and the day time 'event' is witnessed by thousands and then possibly millions on the night time news.

I bought plastic flowers to match the colours of the ‘palette’ of Eastlink and secured these to the repair/replaced structure that marks the site of fatality. Discrete and mounted to this black gantry with the use of black plastic cable ties to avoid damage, the action was simply to see if this was permissible. The flowers were removed after one week. 

I repeated the action several months later but this time with plastic flowers painted black. Attached to the fatal gantry, the flowers were unnoticeable by anyone approaching from the singular perspective of the tollway. Those who knew this as a site of death and glanced sideway when passing would notice the profile of the commemorative offering. The black flowers remained in site until they were blown apart by gale force winds several months later. When inspecting the remnance of these flowers much later, I noticed a single, white plastic rose at the base of the gantry. Another offering permitted to stay through a gap in the attention of the maintenance regime.