• Footscray, Yarraville, Braybrook Star

21st July 2009 11:05:40 AM

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Very Cross ... Rayna Fahey is part of the Melbourne Revolutionary Craft Circle,they put cross-stiches on the fence of the vacant blocks of land in the area. They are protesting about the vacant land in the area not being used for housing. By Charlene Gatt

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THIS is not your typical knitting circle. The Melbourne Revolutionary Craft Circle used their cross-stitching skills last week to leave their mark on a vacant piece of land in Footscray.

The group was out in force on Thursday night in a covert operation to re-brand a fence covering a vacant block near the corner of Geelong and Ballarat roads with four bright green question marks.

The fence had previously displayed a piece of cross-stitched art that read “I wanna live here”.

The original piece was put up nearly a year ago in a silent protest against all the disused vacant land in Footscray. The work was taken down early last week.

The land is thought to be privately owned.

“It’s not like they’ve taken it down because they’ve started building or anything,” Rayna Fahey from the Melbourne Revolutionary Craft Circle said.

“The land is still sitting there vacant and we’re just concerned that there’s that site plus all these other sites in Footscray and yet the State Government has just given the land developers land the size equivalent to Canberra…but what about the in-fill where we’ve already got roads and schools and hospitals and trains and all that sort of stuff?”

Ms Fahey said the group did a quick scout around the neighbourhood on the night and discovered 12 vacant blocks within a 50m radius of Footscray Primary School. She said some blocks had been vacant for more than 20 years.

“There’s so much land being unused – what’s going on? We don’t have enough space to keep sprawling like this, we need to start using our land much more sustainably,” Ms Fahey said.

Ms Fahey said a lot of private developers were buying the pockets of land and selling them off after a couple of years to take advantage of rising prices.

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