Published in Overland Issue 203 Winter 2011 · Main Posts Merri Creek Ali Alizadeh Rivers are all the same. Dirty water if you’re lucky, smelly mud and silt increasingly the case. And dreary water sports, flotillas of filthy plastic bottles and bags; I’d like to emphasise the stench. Caesar’s Rubicon on the other hand, soaks my head in a tale of courage, confrontation I read when I was seven. On Twain’s Mississippi, in my room, I floated away from the indisputably evil place I was born in. And the Seine luminous, a Third World dream for life in a Western city. I swam in the weird, inexplicable words of your Hawkesbury, a migrant with little English, holding my breath under the phonetics of birds’ names and scales of fishing metaphors. Then I was drawn to Melbourne, and lonely in the struggle with life and poetry I kept my head above the dark surface, the swamp of desire and alcoholism, by drifting alone on the rundown trail along Merri Creek. I’d scowl at geese and unwittingly infuriate the drakes on macabre winter days, menacing summer evenings. Banks, hardly scenic after routine floods, beaten willows cobwebbed with human waste: cable wires, shoes, tyres, etc. I repeat the river reeked, a feral fusion of organic and manmade decay. But what can I say; leafy corridors, sunlight accentuating algae on stream’s translucent face, even rusted didactic plaques; picture of these usually soothes, protects me when I’m hurt or restless, marooned in China, Turkey, Dubai, Sydney; it’s just a river, like I said, and just about the only place I’d call home. Ali Alizadeh is a writer of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, drama and literary criticism. The collection of poetry Ashes in the Air (UQP, 2011) is his sixth book. © Ali Alizadeh Overland 203-winter 2011, p. 74 Like this piece? Subscribe! Ali Alizadeh Ali Alizadeh's latest books are Towards the End and Marx and Art. He's a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at Monash University. More by Ali Alizadeh › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 28 March 20249 April 2024 · Main Posts Why we should value not only lived experience, but also lived expertise Sukhmani Khorana In the wake of this year’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, I want to extend the central idea of El Gibbs’s 2022 essay on 'lived expertise' and argue that in media accounts of racism, analytical expertise and lived experience ought to be valued together and even in the same body. 5 March 2024 · Main Posts Andrew Charlton’s school assignment Alex McKinnon Australia's Pivot to India exists for three reasons: so that when Andrew Charlton is interviewed on the radio or introduced on Q+A, his bio includes the phrase "he has written a book about Indian-Australian relations"; to fend off accusations that he is another Kristina Keneally engaging in electoral colonialism in western Sydney; and to help the Albanese government strengthen economic and military ties with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.