It’s a grey, soggy afternoon, and after finishing a long day of classes you have decided to brave the foreboding weather and make the arduous journey down the Law Library steps, weaving between canoodling couples and fervent club executives planning their next event on the verdant turf. With a spring in your step and a squelch of the mud, you stroll towards the picturesque view of Lake Northam, breathing the fragrant, earthy aroma of bonded asbestos.
But when you turn past the swimming pool and danger signs to face the lake, what greets you is not the natural paradise you had imagined. Instead, the water is dark brown, and so shallow it would barely reach your ankles. You can see plastic bottles littering the far corner of the park from passersby who weren’t bothered to walk five metres to the nearest bin. A pool of frothy pollution clouds the water around them. When you edge past the bird crap and opportunistic seagulls to squint into the murky depths of the lake, looking for a sign of the iconic Lake Northam eels, you see no movement at all. Even the ducks seem to be fed up with it — they’ve all pissed off to another park.
What the hell has happened?
Those who have studied at USyd for years will fondly remember the eels that graced our beloved park before their unexpected disappearance. But few will know that the lake was originally natural, and predated colonisation. It was surrounded with rainforest vegetation and dense tree coverage, and collected stormwater which drained to the larger Blackwattle Creek. Later, it was imaginatively named Horse Pond by colonisers who brought their horses to drink at it. It was also nicknamed the ‘University waterhole’ which inspires the unsettling image of unwise students crouching down to quench their thirst. Finally, it received the name Lake Northam in the 1960s, after William Northam, who worked as an alderman for the City of Sydney Council.
Eels are dependent on high water levels to make the journey from their birthplace in the tropics of New Caledonia. Unfortunately, at this impressionable age, youngsters have a tendency to spurn their idyllic upbringings in favour of wider horizons, and so the young eels would travel thousands of kilometres to find themselves in the bottle-cluttered, seagull-dense muck of Lake Northam. Hindsight is everything.
A spokesperson from the City of Sydney Council stated that, “We have not removed any eels from the wetlands.” Rather, the culprit for the missing eels is the eels themselves, who have decided at this critical junction of the year when Sydney’s weather is at its worst, to speedily evacuate themselves from the area and slither off to the blissful beaches of New Caledonia. The Council added that “Mature eels can migrate via the stormwater drains connected to Victoria Park. This happens in autumn when rainfall and water levels are higher.”
Over in New Caledonia, these eels — at least the females; we don’t know what the blokes are up to — are busy laying 20 million eggs in a trench off the coast. Some of them are even running into their old mates from Centennial Park, who shared the Uber Pool for the 20,000 kilometre journey. Only one of every million eggs will survive, and for their courage and tenacity will be dubbed ‘Elvers’. Thankfully, our eels can lay claim to the feat of travelling about eight kilometres to get to Botany Bay and to the wide open ocean, while the rusty old Centennial Park eels do only six.
For those intrepid travellers who don’t want to miss out on any eely excitement, you too can follow the eels on their tropical getaway in the Pacific. Not only is New Caledonia a hub for our local eels to gather, but it also boasts an impressive variety of sea snakes; notably the New Caledonian sea krait, which is both highly venomous, stripy, and very cute.
In some of the particularly beautiful beaches like that of Amedee Island, the sea krait can be spotted nestled in patches of shade near the jetty, or floating whimsically on the ebbing waves by the shore. Meanwhile, the warm waters hold a host of tropical fish and exotic animals, including green sea turtles. Nothing short of madness could delude a million baby eels that what awaited them in Glebe was a step up from this.
Unfortunately, unlike the sun-tanned stripy sea krait, our eels are an irredeemable shade of mud-brown. The only real defense for their incontrovertible ugliness is that Lake Northam is a very similar shade of mud-brown: the result of it being a “constructed wetland that functions as a filtration system for stormwater runoff from King Street and the surrounding area.”
While the City of Sydney hopes for us to overlook the water quality of Lake Northam and its environmental disappointments, they have the advantage secrecy on their side: the lake is currently covered with a thick layer of impenetrable moss, which has covered the lake like an over-enthused tween using lipstick for the first time. A previous Honi investigation in 2022 analysed the profusion of algae, muddy sediment and rotten plant matter, discovering that the mud was the result of heavy rainfall, wherein the Council reported that “some of the sediment was left to act as mudflats as there was a variety of wading birds using the area for foraging.”
It is unclear where the line in the sand (or mud) is for the Council. On the 14th of May this year, the Bureau of Meteorology declared a La Niña “watch” was declared, following intense rain in Sydney and falling sea surface temperatures in the Pacific since Dember. The bureau states that there is a 50/50 chance of Australia experiencing La Niña, signalling that our Council should be addressing the inevitable increased sediment in Lake Northam that has followed heavy rainfall.
The amount of rubbish in the lake may not be as severe as in previous years, as there were only one or two dozen items including bottles, a shoe and bizarrely, a bicycle helmet. However, it was abundantly clear where the rest of the rubbish had gone. An incriminating pile of junk — a mixture of bottles, pinecones, rotting plants and miscellaneous plastics — had been fished out and dumped on the side of the lake, with no effort to clean it up. Either the Council put in the effort to take this mess out of the lake and leave it in the park, or else some charitable passerby had taken the time to clean up the park, and leave it on the sidewalk as evidence of their hard work.
Either criticism or salutes are in order. In the meantime, the moss on the lake continues to hide all the other dirty secrets that have been thrown into its murky depths. Although I would still prefer today’s moss to yesterday’s toxic algal blooms, particularly for the enterprising swimmer.
Tragically, we shall never see the eels again, as they have left our homely old Lake Northam for good, to die in an Instagrammable nirvana after having spent 20 to 80 years in our lake, depending on how many hard drugs they commandeered from Oxford St.
But for all the die-hard eel fans out there — do not despair! For their ingenuous progeny are sure to come in a scant few months, in the hope that what lies beyond New Caledonia may be even more exotic and glamourous than the tropical seas they left. To that, we say: it isn’t. Hopefully when the young Elvers arrive, our lake will look more like a lake and less like a golf course sprinkled with plastic paraphernalia.