An enchanted garden reminds us how civilisations are built on taxes

A T-shirt Saturday morning. Autumn light filters through the high spread of big old trees.

A granddaughter disappears down pathways into dark green tunnels, bursts across wide lawns and flops beneath an avenue of elms, giggling as she tosses into the air a fall of leaves.

Venturing into a tunnel of green in the Fitzroy Gardens, East Melbourne.Credit: Tony Wright

The Fitzroy Gardens seem almost a miracle at the edge of Melbourne’s high-rise centre. The hum of busy streets does not penetrate.

Every great city has its parks.

London breathes because of its vast network of eight royal parks.

Millions of New Yorkers and visitors wander Central Park, which is merely the sixth largest of New York City’s public spaces.

Paris has the Tuileries and the Luxembourg gardens, plus another 419 municipal parks and jardins.

Among the most transfixing is the Place des Vosges in the Marais. Its name tells a story worth knowing.

Once the Place Royale, where the French nobility gathered, the square was renamed Place des Vosges after the French Revolution put a hideous end to royals and aristocrats.

The new name honoured the district of Vosges in eastern France, whose citizens paid the first taxes to the new republic.

The Place des Vosges is immensely popular with Parisians on a sun-drenched day.Credit: Tony Wright

Taking a baguette and wine and sprawling beneath a linden tree on the lawn of the Place des Vosges is one of life’s lovelier experiences, as a daughter and I discovered last year.

The idea of a park named after a district authority (departement) happy to pay taxes to a new government dedicated to liberty, equality and democracy seems exotic these days. And yet it is a reminder that civilisations are built on taxes.

Which is what the tranquillity of Fitzroy Gardens – and numerous other parks around Melbourne – might teach us if we pay attention.

Charles La Trobe, the first superintendent of the Port Phillip District and subsequently the first lieutenant-governor when Victoria became a separate colony in 1851, believed Melbourne, if it were to become a society serving the needs of its new citizens, both material and ethereal, should be a “garden city”.

Ignoring that the land had long been the Indigenous garden of the world’s oldest continuing civilisation, he brought his ideas from world travels as a young man, which he had captured in several books.

The American writer and diplomat Washington Irving was much taken by La Trobe, with whom he travelled from New Orleans to Mexico.

Irving wrote of him: “Having rambled over many countries, he had become, to a certain degree, a citizen of the world ... He was a man of a thousand occupations: a botanist, a geologist, a hunter of beetles and butterflies, a musical amateur, a sketcher of no mean pretensions; in short, a complete virtuoso.”

When La Trobe took the reins of Melbourne in 1839, it had only 3000 European people.

Regardless, he envisioned it becoming a majestic city. Despite opposition, he ensured large areas were set aside for numerous public parks and gardens, including what became Princes Park, Albert Park Reserve, Fawkner Park, Yarra Park, Carlton Gardens and the vast Royal Park.

A portrait of Victoria’s first lieutenant governor, Charles La Trobe.

He reserved the land for the bewitching Fitzroy Gardens in 1848, two years after he had established the site for the Royal Botanic Gardens.

How he expected to pay for the development of this great patchwork of parks was not clear: Melbourne’s population was growing, but it was no more than about 15,000 in 1848, and Australia would have no income tax until 1915.

The discovery of gold in 1851 solved the problem.

Suddenly, tens of thousands of gold-maddened and furious diggers were each required to pay 30 shillings a month (later reduced to £1 a month) for licences entitling them to dig.

The tax brought in £600,000 a year, worth about $144 million today.

Customs duties (also known as tariffs) on virtually everything imported by sea to meet the wishes and needs of the population – the wealthiest in the world at the time – became the administration’s own gold mine. These duties swelled Victoria’s Treasury by well over a £1 million a year by the mid-1850s, worth at least $200 million now.

Tariffs have a deservedly bad name these days, but if an administration was to become fat on the imposition of such taxes, even the stiff shirts of the 1850s recognised there was a moral imperative to distribute the wealth in the interests of the citizenry.

And so, surveyors, landscape designers, gardeners and squadrons of labourers were employed to develop Melbourne’s parks and gardens on the land La Trobe had set aside.

Tony Wright’s granddaughter Charlie plays among autumn leaves in Fitzroy Gardens. East Melbourne.Credit: Georgina Wright

Taxes also paid for a water supply and sanitary works, for street paving, for trams and a railway network, a state library, Melbourne University, a museum, and really, all the things required by what might be called a civil society.

By 1872, a free, secular and compulsory public school system was established in Victoria – ahead of most of the world.

An army of civil servants was established, and has grown ever since, often enough imperfectly, to meet the expanded needs of civil society.

And here we are.

Across the Pacific, in the richest nation the world has known, a madman and his sidekicks are reversing the idea that civilisation is built on taxes.

In the US, hundreds of thousands of public servants – educators, health workers, defence employees, agriculture advisers and, yes, even those who look after the parks, among many others – are having their jobs eliminated to pay for tax cuts for the obscenely rich in a rapidly fracturing society.

Such scorn the madman and his cronies would have for “a man of a thousand occupations: a botanist, a geologist, a hunter of beetles and butterflies” who believed ordinary people should be granted the free pleasure of park lands for no better reason than it would lift them up and soothe their spirits.

But then, La Trobe, unlike the madman, undoubtedly knew that the word city derives from the Latin civis, meaning citizen, which is the genesis of the word civil. And civilisation.

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