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Spotswood

from Loom by The Orbweavers

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about

This song is a tribute to the historic Spotswood Sewerage Pumping Station, which pumped Melbourne’s waste water out of the city, and uphill to the Werribee treatment flats, between 1897-1960, by means of huge steam powered engines. To this day, Melbourne’s sewerage still flows through the same pipes and wells beneath the historic building, but the pumping has been taken over by a modern facility in nearby Brooklyn.

Melbourne’s houses and buildings are connected to the Pumping Station through a networks of underground pipes and drains, flowing right under the Westgate Bridge, beneath the river bed. Without a sewerage system the city would be awash in foul and noxious effluent, as it was in the late 1800s, earning the the boom time moniker ‘Smellbourne’.

This song is also about water flowing through the city, and through us, and about returning home.

lyrics

Down by the river where the factories lie,
And the Westgate stretches across the sky,
I’ve lived north and I’ve moved south,
But I always return to the river mouth.

Out from the city all the secrets pour,
Through the pipes that were laid a hundred years ago:
Love and ruin in the straining wells,
Rags and bodies and teeth and gold.

A woman of science in the tower above,
Her laboratory a labour of love,
There she worked while the war raged on,
Never to marry or she’d loose it all.

When I was young,
I never knew
That I’d be brought back here to you,
No stranger thing than how we’re drawn
Back to the place from which we’re born.

credits

from Loom, released October 28, 2011

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about

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The Orbweavers Melbourne, Australia

The Orbweavers are Marita Dyson & Stuart Flanagan, multidisciplinary artists working in song, performance and visual art. Their work responds to history, memory and place. They are interested in local waterways, industrial history and environmental change.

They have written and recorded 3 albums, co-produced by their greyhound companions, Fern (RIP 2018) & Susie, released through Mistletone. ... more

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