A hashtag on a skateboard at Lincoln Square. Credit:Darrian Traynor

Walking along the suburban banks of the stagnant Yarra in the heat of this year's dry summer, it was difficult not to notice the enormous black pipes pumping public water onto the golf courses. No one was hurrying to reconstruct the sacred banks of the precious river in order to stop golfers from playing on lush green fairways.

Just as perplexing is the vehement desire of some community leaders to drive the skaters away from the Lincoln Square Bali Memorial. As Australians, we rushed to commemorate the lives of those who died while they were expressing their right to dance and do things that come naturally to young people. And yet now we are happy to waste valuable resources destroying a beautiful environment, rather than modifying or maintaining it, just because young people are expressing their right to gather, live, skate and play at a place of commemoration.

As journalist Vince Chadwick wrote several years ago in Eureka Street magazine, how is skating at Lincoln Square any different to children climbing over the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, or Pentagon staffers eating their lunch on a 9/11 memorial in Washington – practices that are deemed acceptable in those cities? And one can only wonder what the Bali victims would have to say about the skaters who live mostly in harmony with the users of the other 80 per cent of the park. Certainly, whenever wreaths are being lain at the memorial fountain, even the most avid skaters stay away.

The attack on the skaters has been led by the lord mayor, Robert Doyle. Mention his name to many young people, and watch their eyes roll – eyes that possibly see before them the image of a schoolyard bully, or some child-and-fun-hating teacher who lives for power and teenagerless spaces. Theirs are the eyes that may well carry deep into Melbourne's future the memory of the man who smashed up Lincoln Square to stop kids from skating.