Underfoot: The Facility

Yarra Bend Park is both beautiful and haunted. The site has been home to an insane asylum, a women’s prison, a Native School, a police barracks, an AIDS hospital, and more. The land tells the story of carceral logics over the last 150 years, and the whispers of resistance that still resonate today.

Underfoot: The Facility is an immersive soundscape by Liz Crash and Jinghua Qian, a multimedia journey through this lovely bit of Wurundjeri country where the Yarra River meets Merri Creek – and where thousands of people met grisly regimes of containment and control.

GUIDE FOR LISTENERS

We suggest you leave autoplay on for a more immersive experience, with the best chance of hearing ghosts, but you can also play audio manually for a less spooky, more self-guided tour.

Yarra Bend Park is huge and parts of it are inaccessible, so we’ve suggested a few different ways you can explore the park and its history.

1. Follow the STORY trail (easiest)

A pleasant 30 minute walk on mostly level, paved surfaces. From the Dights Falls picnic area, go north on the Main Yarra Trail as Liz and Jinghua introduce you to the key institutions that have defined Yarra Bend. This is the same audio as Episode 1 of the Underfoot podcast, in the form it was originally meant to be heard, on site.

2. Visit each KEY SITE (harder)

Takes most people a couple of hours and some huffing and puffing. Each area marked KEY SITE is the physical location of key sites and institutions mentioned in the MAIN STORY tracks, with further information and geolocated audio. Some key sites are on or near the main trail, some aren’t.

3. Do whatever (????)

Have a wander through the park and see what you find. We’re not the boss of you, there’s really no wrong way to do this. Except!

SAFETY AND CONTENT NOTES

Please be careful near water. The river banks are extremely slippery. Don’t do the tour at night, you won’t see anything and there’s a real risk of injury.

Underfoot: The Facility is not suitable for all listeners. It’s about institutional abuse, trauma, suicide, and nasty old racists (who we quote). We also swear a lot and talk about sex.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Underfoot: The Facility was produced with support from 3CR Community Radio, the City of Yarra, and the Public Records Office Victoria, on Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung land. We pay our respects to their elders past and present.

You can find out more about Underfoot at 3cr.org.au/underfoot.