Reflections on Kororoit Institute’s and friends’ planning interventions in light of Supervenience project and where to from here, presented at Melbourne Emergence Meetup 14 November 2019. Contains main text and images of a submission to the Australian Infrastructure Audit 2019, save for the Supervenience Project principles which are developed in other presentations and with the introductory background of that submission expanded into a longer account of the history of Kororoit Institute's interest in infrastructure. That history also draws on text of submission to VEAC re Coastal Reserves to provide a shortish explanation of the Nepean Bay Bar proposal.

1. Infrastructure Growing Pains
reflections on Kororoit Institute’s and friends’ planning interventions
in light of Supervenience project and where to from here?
Tony Smith
Melbourne Emergence Meetup
14 November 2019

2. Our oldest industrial infrastructure: Budj Bim,
UNESCO World Heritage Cultural Landscape
Photo: Tyson Lovett-Murray, Gunditj Mirring
Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation
From V/Line coach at Macarthur
12 November 2019

3. Starting with a quick history tour of Kororoit
Institute's expanding focus on infrastructure
• Reexamination of public transport was precursor to KI
• Moonee Ponds Creek parallel seed of focus on urban hydrology
• Critiqued East West Link proposal and joined successful campaign
• Interest in Waterways of the West, Healthy Waterways Strategy
• Maribyrnong truck plan, West Gate Tunnel and lower Stony Creek
• Victorian volcanic plains grasslands, quarries, rubbish tips
• Transport Camp session seeds paper on keystone issues for Geelong
• Travel focuses on decentralisation c.f. Rail Futures Institute
• Holdgate et al 2011 paper suggests tidal barrier on Nepean Bay Bar
• Wye River fire accelerates destabilisation of Great Ocean Road
• Adjacent industrial fire floods toxic waste into Stony Creek
• Bill's journey from Military Industrial Complex to Climate Change

4. Reexamination of public transport was precursor to Kororoit Institute

5. Stephen Moynihan in The Age, 9 August 2007:
Rail City: blueprint looks at city's options
The Trails of Two Cities
Knowledge Cities
November 2010

6. Moonee Ponds Creek parallel seed of focus on urban hydrology

7. Elderly Chinese Home Victoria
Everything of interest
has its own history.
EW proposal both has
and ignores history.
Its failed decision making
is steeped in history.
Constraining to East-
West was first misstep.
Subsequent decision
making amplified error.
At every step the world
said Wrong Way Go Back
but ill-founded political
timing “imperatives”
pushed on regardless.

8. Critiqued East West Link proposal and joined successful campaign

9. Interest in
Waterways
of the West,
Healthy
Waterways
Strategy

10. Presentation to West Gate Tunnel Project
Inquiry and Advisory Committee
Tony Smith
for Kororoit Institute
13 September 2017
Proposal targets
from newly opened
West Gate Distributor
shared user path bridge
Maribyrnong
truck plan,
West Gate
Tunnel and
lower Stony
Creek

11. Victorian volcanic plains grasslands, quarries, rubbish tips

12. 🚢
★Bay West
★Outer Metropolitan
Ring Road+Rail
★Newport Tunnel
★Central Geelong
Underground
★Power Easement
★Eastern Bypass
★Nepean Bay Bar
Transport Camp
session seeds paper
on keystone issues
for Geelong
All trains heading to or returning from south of Geelong
Station must pass through this single track tunnel opened
in 1876 which is too low for modern container freight

13. Rail-led decentralisation:
a proposed rebalancing
Tony Smith
Melbourne Emergence Meetup
12 November 2015
Travel focuses on
decentralisation
c.f. Rail Futures
Institute

14. Holdgate et al
2011 paper
suggests tidal
barrier on
Nepean Bay Bar
Nepean Bay Bar is a geological structure across the
southern section of Port Phillip which is highly
visible on "satellite" maps and marine charts, often
labeled "Great Sands" and centred on Mud Island.
Holdgate et al [2011] shows that this structure had
closed the Bay 2,800 years ago, Lake Phillip
evaporating down to 22 metres below current sea
level, until the barrier was breached and the Bay
reflooded only 1,000 years ago. While obviously
longer, reinstatement of this natural barrier looks
more practical than any closure closer to the Rip,
if Melbourne is to be protected from sea level rise.
(Geelong can be added as a bonus by diverting the
Barwon along an old course into Corio Bay and
reinstating the lava flow barrier between Hospital
Swamp/Reedy Lake and Lake Connewarre.) It
appears to be well within engineering competence
to reinforce and built transport links across such
barriers and some intervening lowlands to provide
protection against at least the first 20 metres of sea
level rise, but in the process making what would no
doubt be strongly contested changes to way too
many coastal reserves (and even more exclusions)
to discuss individually here.
This is also not the place to get into discussion
about the misperceived environmental health of
Port Phillip, but as an off the rocks diver along
much of the coast between Lorne and Cape Otway,
the Bay held no appeal. In turn that should not
distract advice on climate change from full
awareness that the last 7,000 years of almost stable
sea level (outside Port Phillip) is an historical
aberration, with reasonably rapid change being the
Pleistocene normal. So all these coastal and marine
policies need to be developed in full awareness that
ecosystem succession is a normal and necessary
process which restores natural health, but doesn't
look like anybody's fantasy of sustainability.

15. Wye River fire accelerates destabilisation of Great Ocean Road

16. Adjacent industrial fire floods toxic waste into Stony Creek

17. Bill's journey
from Military
Industrial
Complex to
Climate Change

18. Kororoit Institute Proponents and Supporters Association Inc.
Annual General Meeting 14 November 2019
The primary purposes are to facilitate and to provide community liaison for the
Kororoit Institute, (“the Institute”). The Institute has been established to
engage in and support interdisciplinary basic and applied research crossing
emergence, systems, complexity, organisation knowledge management,
community consultation, service corridor and public land use planning. The
Institute will develop and make available information technologies, outreach
activities, services and expertise to improve urban and regional development in
growth areas like those to the west of Melbourne.
Attendance:
Apologies:
Reports:
President focus on climate change
Secretary Supervenience project explorations
Other Marcus Lancaster PhD graduation
Financial no change
Election of Office Bearers

19. Too Funny for Words
Abstractions, Category Errors,
Epistemic Cuts
Life on an Active Planet The Two-edged Sword
Multiple Paths to Emergence
Constraints and
Degrees of Freedom
Birds and Others Interweb to Facebook
Better than Out of Control
Information,
Maps and Territories
Urban Hydrology out of Sight
Going Down with
the Egg Basket
Self-organising, Adaptive
Codification and
Communication
Exploiting a
Dissipating Gradient:
creaming, trickle down
Dystopian Utopias and
Science Fiction
Towards Healthy
General Knowledge
The Inside View:
knowing when you're dreaming
Verbal Blindness
Accepting Cosmological
Responsibility

20. Continuing with topics explored in submission
to the Australian Infrastructure Audit 2019
• Changing the transport mix, reducing car and fossil fuel reliance
• Supply-side vulnerabilities in what is becoming a sellers market
• Responding to climate change, coastal vulnerabilities in particular
• End to end issues of Stony Creek in context of Waterways of the West
• A decade of rail projects threaten to overload Sunshine Super Hub
• IA's inclusion of social infrastructure, Community Knowledge Network
The following slides contain the text and images (sans repetition)
of a submission to the Australian Infrastructure Audit 2019,
written in the first person as it also draws on experience
prior to and beyond the scope of Kororoit Institute,
as earlier slide re Holdgate et al 2011 draws on
a submission to VEAC re Coastal Reserves.

21. Changing the transport mix, reducing car and fossil fuel reliance
Chair Nick Wimbush
and advocate Stuart Morris
doing it all again for North East Link
Beyond their unacceptable impacts on urban
waterways with which I’ve been directly
involved, opposing irresponsible megaroad
projects has taken more than its share of my
last eight years, because I’d rather be working
on more constructive tasks. However the
failure of Australian “authorities” to learn
lessons now obvious to many in the wider
community and elsewhere is serious cause for
concern.
Having become familiar with quite a few
American and European cities during the late
1980s, I developed a rule of thumb that once a
metropolitan area passes four million
population, 100% of growth in radial
transport capacity has to be on heavy rail so
that invaluable inner road space can be freed
up for more efficient and essential uses. Living
in western Sydney in the lead up to the 2000
Olympics showed the change of public
expectations could be achieved and increasing
personal use of both Melbourne’s public
transport and mobile devices this century has
underlined the practicality.
After been disappointed in the cost of fully
participating in and the unhelpful outcome of
the EES IAC process for the West Gate Tunnel
proposal, the City of Melbourne chose not to
participate in the corresponding process for
North East Link, instead focusing its efforts on
finalising its just endorsed 2030 Transport
Strategy which aims to increase the recent
historic decline in non-essential cars traveling
into the inner city and thereby undermining
the supposed justification for at least the
dominant radial components of those two
projects.

22. Supply-side vulnerabilities in what is becoming a sellers market
A few of the
police called out
to ensure 3rd try at
contracted destruction
Writing for the Australian trade press in the early 1980s I became aware of the
potential of well targeted government purchasing to stimulate economic and even
commercial research activity, Ike’s Military Industrial Complex notwithstanding.
More recently it has become apparent that not just industry but also workers and
service organisations have become ever more adept at targeting areas of Political
expenditure that are unlikely to receive thorough scrutiny. Our submission to the
West Gate Tunnel EES IAC included an officially out of scope reference to the
project bubble already foreseen which that project could only compound, a
warning which is now playing out with cost and time blowouts which undermine
its original justification.
While I’ve been openly hostile to the Victorian government granting a toll road
operator a role in “city shaping” planning, once they have a construction contract
the very few consortia welcomed to play in that game get away with murder (at
least of iconic 130 year old native trees).
I’ve also long been advocating that the Great Ocean Road needed a billion dollars,
but now that proportionate money has started to flow there has been capture by
geotech businesses able to be both the self-appointed experts determining the
scope of work and the delivery contractors, aggravated by the cliff-hanging section
being in a sedimentary geology that behaves very differently to the volcanic plains
which otherwise dominate the region.

23. Previously stablest of cliffs adorned with geotech ropes and paint marks
Best place to show off container wall,
cover of crowd-funded reference

24. Nepean Bay Bar
Can reinstatement and enhancement of
this natural barrier save Melbourne?
Mud Island is at
the centre of the
Great Sand.
Its southern
beachfront
dominates the
view north from
the Queenscliff-
Sorrento ferry.
Tony Smith
Melbourne Emergence Meetup
9 February 2017
Responding to climate change, coastal vulnerabilities in particular
Envisaged plus two current attempts to erosion-proof Great Ocean Road
on Mud Island, presentation cover slide
The Ocean Road issues gained attention because of
specific impacts of climate change: forest drying
increasing bushfire vulnerability, more intense rain
events accelerating erosion and sea level rise, all of which
continue to accelerate, have implications for Emergency
Response, and create a growing need for protective
infrastructure.
A very recent DELWP project for something at the top of
my personal priority list was to develop a proposal for a
track to connect the Surf Coast Walk at Fairhaven to the
Great Ocean Walk at Skenes Creek. The first draft
canvassed sections of boardwalk below the Road but atop
rock walls which might serve the double purpose of
protecting the base of cliffs from direct wave action. A
couple of low sections of the road approaching Kennett
River have during 2019 gained sloping rock barriers
which provide an interesting prototype quite different to
some pinned vertical walls below higher sections of road.
The Christmas Day 2015 Wye River Fire breakout and
the road closing landslides late the following winter
exposed many issues with the Victorian Emergency
Response and Recovery regime instituted with
singleminded focus on the Black Saturday Royal
Commission recommendations and supposedly under
current review, an area where unpacking the vast gulf
between indigenous and DELWP conceptions of “cool
burn” is fundamental.
While preparing a presentation on keystone planning
opportunities relevant to Geelong, a 2011 paper by
Holdgate et al revealed a structure called Nepean Bay
Bar, now submerged save for Mud Island, which had
joined the Bellarine and Mornington peninsulas and
allowed “Lake Phillip” to evaporate down to 22 metre
below Holocene sea level until it was breached only 1,000
years ago. That structure’s base is still clearly visible and
offers a practical foundation on which to base transport-
carrying embankments that could protect Melbourne
(and Geelong) from the first 20 metres of sea level rise.

25. End to end issues of Stony Creek in context of Waterways of the West
On the morning of 29 August 2018 a ministerial announcement of formation of a Waterways of
the West advisory committee was made on the banks of the Maribyrnong. Early next morning
radio news reported an industrial fire on the banks of Stony Creek, water from fighting which
was flushing the creek downstream to the Yarra with toxic chemicals.
Repercussions include joining with communities affected by earlier and later industrial fires in
Coolaroo and Campbellfield to form the Anti–Toxic Waste Alliance which is keeping the issues
exposed on the Political agenda alongside the recycling industry crisis. Those plus legacies from
the long coupling of basalt plains quarrying and under-regulated land fill demand serious
investment in waste reduction, reuse, reprocessing and residue disposal, and in technologies for
tracking supply and transport. Similar issues with diversion of state levy imposed on
municipalities in Sydney have been reported nationally.
Long before the fire, I had been researching the severing of the original course of Stony Creek in
response to 1940s flooding of the Sunshine Harvester factory complex, in its time Australia’s
leading manufacturing industry. More recently a multiparty Upper Stony Creek Transformation
Project aiming to naturalise an old retarding basin where the Sydney and Bendigo rail lines
separate was suddenly suspended with seemingly over $10 million spent. The largely
constructed original course of Stony Creek could centre an active transport corridor from St.
Albans to the foot of West Gate Bridge with ongoing passive surveillance and ecological benefits,
a prospect similar to many other waterways whose natural slowing and cleaning of flow was
obliterated by inappropriate concrete containment last century.
Upper Stony Creek Transformation Project
as suspended and abandoned
Stony Creek
toxic fire water flood
next night Cruickshank Park

26. A decade of rail projects threaten to overload Sunshine Super Hub
Victoria’s coordinated 2009 announcement
of a westwards Urban Growth Boundary expansion, Regional Rail Link (RRL),
Volcanic Plains Grassland reserves and an Outer Metropolitan Ring (OMR)
corridor overnight transformed the role of the Sunshine–St Albans–Sydenham
rail corridor that forms the main axis of the City of Brimbank from “end of line”
to regional service hub.
That new role has since been concentrated more at the Sunshine end by a series
of practical decisions, including several heavy rail developments that seem to be
treating Sunshine independently as their own blank slate.
There has rarely been a clearer opportunity for some longer focus foresight work
to start with an inventory for 50+ years in the future, including surrounding
network development, and work back to how the impending major upgrade of
the old Braybrook Junction site of the 1908 rail disaster should be future-
proofed, unlike the recent RRL upgrade compromised by late political cost
cutting.
The September 2019 Melbourne Rail Plan 2020-2050 by Rail Futures Institute
(RFI) provides wider context for committed projects and proposals impacting
Sunshine, my list of which includes:
• Melbourne Metro 1 increasing capacity of the Sunshine-Dandenong corridor
(construction well advanced).
• Melbourne Airport Rail Link and any role that may play in the Airport to
Sunshine section of the Suburban Rail Loop (SRL).
• Western Rail program to improve regional services to Geelong and Ballarat
by electrifying to at least Melton and on new tracks via Wyndham Vale with
loop closure back to Werribee, also slated as component of SRL.
• Inland Rail’s Tottenham to Albury project for which there is a “temporary
hold (…) on the section south of Beveridge” attributed to uncertainty over
intermodal terminal location but also influenced by the disproportionate
cost of metropolitan grade separation modifications needed to handle double
stacked containers on the originally presumed alignment.
• RFI’s proposal for separating Sunbury line metro services from Bendigo line
regional services by diverting the Bendigo and potentially Shepparton-
Seymour services via the Airport and OMR.
• Historically Sydney and Adelaide trains have stopped at Sunshine but the
RRL blocked pedestrian access to the northeast standard gauge line and
Adelaide via Horsham now follows the standard gauge freight path with
elbows just east of Sunshine, at Newport and just short of North Geelong.
• It remains an open question as to why a state aspiring to be “the freight
state” can’t get its gauges sorted, with freight through Sunshine likely to need
more than a single standard gauge path plus negotiated use of paths
controlled by rail passenger services.
• The rapidly expanding west will only truly belong to Melbourne when it is
better connected to the city’s definitive tram network, with various proposals
around for extensions beyond current West Maribyrnong and Footscray
termini or along Dynon or Footscray Roads. RFI has made alternative
suggestions for “medium capacity transit” connections.
Top of next slide:
Views of and near Sunshine Station
from steam train ride fund-raising for
Essendon Historical Society fire recovery
on Jacana-Newport broad gauge

27. IA's inclusion of social infrastructure, Community Knowledge Network
From 1981, my computing career focused heavily on
publishing technologies and networks, between
1985 and 1990 heading a start up which found itself
at the forefront of the introduction of desktop
publishing. That enabled me to provide technical
support for my mother’s retirement interest in local
history, more recently inheriting her involvements
and lately as acting co-ordinator of Melbourne’s
Western Metropolitan Region of Historical
Societies. Between 1992 and 1996, I was also
involved in a series of consultancies for federal
agencies on technology policy including one
producing a reference report for the Broadband
Services Expert Group.
That combined experience leaves me horrified at the
political debasement of the NBN but still keen to see
Australia reclaim the position of leadership we once
had through my alma mater’s pioneering role as .oz
national ARPAnet gateway. While the cohort
attracted to voluntary involvement with local
heritage and ecological efforts tends to be older, the
half century that has passed since both were areas
with motivated Political support sees the ageing of
those who have been involved close to crisis with
much deep contextual knowledge held in the heads
and bottom drawers of such people in near term
danger of irretrievable loss.
Local libraries have long tried and continue to try to
play a role but their physical space is at a premium
so records which are not recognised as having
special value in the lifetime of those with custody
are most likely to become one more inappropriate
component of the waste stream. While we are finally
learning to appreciate the value of orally maintained
and mnemonically indexed indigenous knowledge,
at stake here is a vast resource of at least partially
encoded (hand/type written) knowledge. It is also
my experience that there is a significant pool of
people on income support who have or can easily
acquire the skills to sort and curate such archives
and may require little more than flexible working
conditions and space to operate in.
Next? Life’s Infrastructure: soil, swamp, stream, sand, sea shore, shallows

28. Suggestions!
Questions?