Graffiti in hiding

Sometimes graffiti is hidden in secret places, sometimes it is in plain sight but its meaning is hidden.

Not so long ago a Sydney builder was surprised when he pulled up an old carpet and found two large messages painted on the floorboards underneath – so surprised that he posted photos of them on his Facebook page.

It’s not all that unusual for renovators and demolishers to find hidden graffiti left by tradespeople at some earlier date in a building’s life. But these personal statements composed by two young sisters in 1983 are extraordinary both for their size and for the detail of their content. They are like secret/not secret teenage diary entries concealed by floor covering.  Those girls wanted someone in the future to read all about them, but they could never have anticipated the mediatisation of their words via digital photography and social media.

Hidden graffiti can be revealed not only by accident but by determined sleuthing. Researcher Susan A. Phillips, for example, photographed pencil, charcoal, and scratched graffiti hidden under the bridges and in the drains and culverts of Los Angeles. Written mostly by people who were “transient, ethnic minorities, or queer” these marks were up to a century old. Phillips spent over twenty-five years collecting images and stories for her remarkable book The City Beneath.

Phillips remarks on graffiti’s versatility as a clandestine form of expression. The condensed messages she found in hidden places were most often related to the name of someone or something, or were sexual words or drawings. But there was also enigmatic writing and what she called “odd hieroglyphics”.

Odd kinds of graffiti whose meaning is hidden are sometimes referred to as cryptic graffiti. These might be written in secret places, as Phillips’ examples were, but it are just as likely to be easily visible in public places. One practitioner of cryptic graffiti is the Hawaiian artist who rather unimaginatively calls himself Cryptik. This person hand-paints Eastern philosophy iconography on Western walls. His Cryptik Movement “is dedicated to helping humanity evolve towards greater awareness and understanding through public art”. While his walls are aesthetically pleasing they do not represent his philosophy in any obvious way.

A few years ago The Age journalist Tom Cowie wrote about some “cryptic drawings appearing on Melbourne footpaths”. When interviewed, the artist, Astral Nadir, explained that philosophy was his inspiration and that the theme of space and forests was a recurring motif.  Nadir called his marks ‘glyphs’ but, curiously, he maintained that his work was not graffiti. I would disagree – of course it is graffiti. But I do agree with the journalist that ‘cryptic’ is an appropriate term to describe Nadir’s work.

The origins of the word ‘cryptic’ ultimately lead back to the Greek kryptós, meaning hidden or secret. But since its first known usage in the English language in the 17th century, the term seems to have always carried connotations of ‘hidden meaning’ rather than ‘physically hidden’. Common synonyms offered by the Merriam-Webster Thesaurus are: ambiguous, dark, enigmatic, equivocal, obscure, and vague. But the thesaurus cautions that, while all these words mean ‘not clearly understandable’, ‘cryptic’ implies a purposely concealed meaning.

A common type of graffiti seen on roads and footpaths everywhere is made by surveyors who, aided by remote sensing devices, draw maps of the underground with fluoro spray-cans. I am tempted to use the word ‘cryptic’ for this writing because for most passersby like me it is meaningless. But for the government agencies and utility companies who need to know where tunnels, pipes and cables are buried, the survey marks impart important advice. They do not purposely conceal information but deliberately reveal it. They are not cryptic.

There is one more type of graffiti I want to mention that is cryptic. How could I not? The history of the worldwide phenomenon of ‘name’ graffiti that began as New York subway-style ‘writing’ in the 1960s is a history of encryption. Graffiti forms – including the ubiquitous ‘tag’ and the wall-sized ‘pieces’ that use highly stylised calligraphy – encode a graffiti artist’s street name or their ‘crew’ affiliation and make territorial statements. Their meanings are understood only by the cognoscenti.

Libraries of books have been written about these forms of graffiti, but I still like to quote Robert Reisner, an academic graffiti historian from the 1970s. Reisner was not interested in what graffiti looked like. His books were basically compendiums of old-fashioned graffiti transcribed by him and given some sort of sociological or linguistic explanation.   He dismissed the “recent phenomenon of the spray-can artist” because its content was “relatively unimportant”.

Reisner had no inkling that ‘name’ graffiti would become international, dominating worldwide public places for decades.  He complained that the spray-can art itself had become the message. He was right about that. But he did not understand that the message was meaningful, with the meaning intentionally hidden in the aesthetic possibilities of invented lettering and unconventional spelling.

Images and references

‘After pulling up some old carpet, Camperdown [Sydney, NSW]’, two photos by Vince Righi on VSR Construction Facebook page, 2020. 

Phillips, S. A. (2019) The city beneath: a century of Los Angeles graffiti, New Haven and London, Yale University Press.

POW!WOW!HAWAII 10 Year Anniversary, photo on Cryptik web page, 22 February 2020.

Peace on the streets, Vandalog – A Street Art Blog, 16 August 2012   

Cowie, T. (2018) The story behind the cryptic drawings appearing on Melbourne footpaths, The Age, Melbourne, 3 December 2018. 

Photo Instagram @astral_nadir

Merriam-Webster Thesaurus, ‘cryptic’ synonyms.  

Survey marks, Surry Hills, NSW, 2009, photo Megan Hicks.

Reisner, R. (1971) Graffiti: two thousand years of wall writing, New York, Cowles Book Co., Inc.

Reisner, R. & Wechsler, L. (1980) Encyclopedia of graffiti, New York, Galahad Books.                               

Hicks, M. (2013) Pavement graffiti: an exploration of roads and footways in words and pictures, PhD Thesis, Macquarie University, NSW.

Juxtaposition of carefully explicit and extravagantly cryptic graffiti, Enmore, NSW, 2008, photo Megan Hicks.

Remembering the museum

Early last month I visited the Powerhouse Museum on the last day before it closed indefinitely.  I perused the 1001 Remarkable Objects exhibition but most of the other galleries had already been gutted. Government obfuscation means that there are conflicting reports on what kind of venue it will turn out to be when and if it reopens. My visit prompted me to look back at several contributions I have made to the written history of this once great Sydney museum.

Protestors’ flier with the Powerhouse Museum in the background, Harris Street, Ultimo, February 2024 (photo Megan Hicks)

Nearly twenty years ago the Powerhouse produced a large and handsome book to celebrate its 125th anniversary. The authors of its chapters ranged from museum staff to academic historians. The diversity of their topics covered not only the sometimes colourful history of the museum, but the  spread of its vast collections, representing as they do science, technology, design, decorative arts and social history.

Yesterday’s Tomorrows published in 2005

My colleague Martha Sear and I, both of us curators at the time, wrote a chapter titled ‘Prescribing’ where we followed the museum’s intermittent efforts to encourage health and hygiene amongst the general populace. Indeed its first name was the Technological, Industrial and Sanitary Museum. Original exhibits included an arrangement of sanitary appliances, such as toilets, sinks, ventilators and pipes, for the instruction of tradesmen and householders.

From the early educational displays of human bones and papier-mâché anatomical models as well as plumbing, through the eugenically ideal Transparent Plastic Woman of the 1950s, the confused 1980s Mind and Body gallery, and on to exhibitions about contraception in the 1990s and sustainable futures in the early 2000s, Martha and I found a common philosophy underpinning the museum’s intentions in its health and hygiene displays.  

We concluded that, despite changes in its name, site, and governance, and despite the evolution of international museum trends, the Powerhouse and its precursors had always assumed an admonitory role in those displays. That is, it insisted that visitors were responsible for managing their own health, and it showed them what it regarded as the means to make informed choices about how to achieve that.

 

Transparent ‘Chocka Bits’, modelling an array of medical implants, went on display in the Mind and Body gallery, which opened in the new Powerhouse Museum in 1989. Although it was fabricated as an exhibition prop it was accessioned into the museum’s collection in 2004. The anonymous author of the entry in the museum’s catalogue wrote candidly and poignantly, ‘Chocka Bits has been retained for two reasons. Firstly, it is a tangible link to an exciting period in medicine when implant and transplant science and technology burgeoned. Secondly, it is also a link to an equally exciting period for museums, when the Powerhouse was at the forefront, both in Australia and internationally, of innovative approaches to exhibition technology and techniques’ (2004/112/1 Display figure ‘Chocka Bits’. Commissioned by the Powerhouse Museum 1989.  Photograph Ryan Hernandez)

But even though the purview of Yesterday’s Tomorrows was wide, I was disappointed that the book gave little attention to the viewpoint of visitors. Once our chapter had been signed off I saw the opportunity to go on and fill a research gap. Across the world few studies had been made of people’s experiences of museum visits made before the 1980s, which is when the field of visitor evaluation emerged.

With encouragement from Bruce Hayllar at the University of Technology Sydney I conducted a series of interviews with people who remembered visiting the Technological Museum (as the Powerhouse was then known) as children or teenagers between 1935 and 1969. Over those decades the museum suffered from lack of funds and its didactic and overcrowded exhibits barely changed. 

The Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (popularly known as the Technological Museum) in Harris Street, Ultimo, in the 1950s. It is not far from the site of the present Powerhouse Museum (State Library of NSW)

I do not have much of a following as a researcher/writer but, of all the articles and chapters I have published, my study of young people’s experiences of the Technological Museum is my most cited work. That’s probably because there are – or were – more students and researchers interested in visitor studies then there are aficionados of pavements and pavement graffiti. Nevertheless I thank Bruce Hayllar for prodding me into making this a much better article than it might otherwise have been.

By taking a phenomenological approach to the interviewees’ fragmentary long-term recollections I was able to capture an insight into the lived experience of museum visits from a young person’s perspective. I concluded that there were three themes characterizing their experiences. These were City Life, Adulthood and Independent Discovery. Linking these three themes was the fundamental experience of Growing Up. For young people of the period 1930- 1970, visits to the Technological Museum contributed to their transition from childhood to adulthood.

For a retrospective visitor study of a museum that was at the time old-fashioned by world standards, that was a pretty remarkable finding.

A young person pores over a model of an engine in the Technological Museum in 1957 (State Library of NSW)

References:

SCORRANO, Armanda (2006) (Book review) Yesterday’s Tomorrows: the Powerhouse Museum and its precursors 1880-2005 [etc ]. Public History Review, 12, 111-113.

DAVISON, Graeme & WEBBER, Kimberley (Eds.) (2005) Yesterday’s Tomorrows: the Powerhouse Museum and its Precursors 1880-2005, Sydney, Powerhouse Publishing with UNSW Press.

HICKS, Megan & SEAR, Martha (2005) Prescribing: salutary instruction at the museum. In WEBBER, K. & DAVIDSON, G. (Eds.) (2005).

HICKS, Megan (2005) A whole new world: the young person’s experience of visiting Sydney Technological Museum. Museum & Society, 3, 66-80.

Dirty pavements and disease

Roads, footpaths and sidewalks in our towns and cities are dirty. They are surfaces where dropped food is irretrievable, where grit is picked up on shoes to be tramped indoors, where take-away wrappings blow, and where oily cars leak and spitters spit and canines shit. And because dirtiness is associated with disease the pavement, rightly or wrongly, often takes the blame for spreading infection.

Roads and footways were even dirtier before they were paved. In wet weather pedestrians used to slog their way through mud, and when it was fine carts and carriages threw up clouds of dust and pulverised horse manure.

So it is no wonder that the great British social and public health reformer of the 19th century, Sir Edwin Chadwick, was an admirer of asphalt. In his 1871 article ‘On the sanitary advantages of smooth and impermeable street surfaces’ he wrote how the new ‘asphalte’ roads in the City of London powerfully affected the cleanly habits and health of people and especially of children because they were always playing in the street. He remarked that, compared to macadam pavement, which was made from packed stones, asphalt was quiet, dried quickly, eliminated mud and dust and could be hosed clean.

Since that time hosing down seems to have become an imperative whenever ‘dirty’ pavements have been implicated in the spread of disease, especially during epidemics. Even when the actual mode of transmission of a disease is reasonably well understood, health authorities have made a show of decontaminating the streets.

This happened in 1900 when Sydney experienced a terrifying outbreak of bubonic plague mainly centred around areas close to the docks. Rats were considered to be the carriers of the contagion and householders were instructed to kill rats and prevent them from coming into their houses. They were also ordered to clean and disinfect their properties, so large amounts of rubbish were cleared out and piled in the streets ready to be carted away. The city pavements were part of this vast cleansing operation and crowds gathered to watch the streets being washed using fire hoses.

Another measure to disinfect the pavement was described poetically in a Daily Telegraph article of the time:

“Some men were put on during Thursday night to whitewash part of the streets within the quarantine boundaries. They made the footpaths like a succession of long white sheets.”

Street disinfection continues to be used as a public health measure during epidemics. In 2019 a new and fatal coronavirus disease began to spread around the world. It came to be called COVID-19.  There was (and still is) no cure but it was fairly quickly established that the virus was transmitted through the air by droplets sprayed out when  an infected person sneezed, coughed, or talked, and that it could also be picked up from high-touch surfaces like doorknobs and handrails where it lingered. 

Nevertheless, just as in the past, the pavement was also implicated as a factor in its spread. By 2020 news services were publishing photos from many countries showing trucks or workers in protective clothing hosing down streets and plazas, or spraying them with disinfectants such as bleach. Scientists from other countries, commenting on this phenomenon, concluded that these measures were almost certainly ineffective and may even be harmful to people and the environment.

It would seem that these street cleansing activities were as much about authorities being seen to do something as they were about actually stopping the spread of COVID-19. Some commentators even added that in many countries people like to see large-scale public action by the government and that, since it had been carried out in previous emergencies, this sort of action may be embedded in a country’s culture and tradition. At such times the pavement is co-opted into a show of government effectiveness and dependability.

References

Chadwick, E. (1871) On the sanitary advantages of smooth and impermeable street surfaces. Journal of the Society of Arts, 19, pp. 789-792.

Prevention of Plague: Instructions to Householders, issued by the Department of Public Health, Sydney, 1 March 1900.

Bubonic plague. Fighting the Disease. The Quarantine Area Enlarged. Clarence and Richmond Examiner. Grafton NSW, 27 March 1900, p.8 (quotes the Daily Telegraph).

Bricknell, L. & Trott, D. (2020) Sanitising the city: does spraying the streets work against coronavirus? The Conversation, 5 May 2020.

Bhat,  S. A et al. (2021) Environmental and health impacts of spraying COVID-19 disinfectants with associated challenges. Environmental Science and Pollution Research International, 29, 85648-85657.

Chung, E. (2020) Is spraying disinfectant in public spaces a good way to fight COVID-19? CBC News, 18 April 2020.

Images

1. Street flushing machine on Meagher Street Chippendale, 1928. (City of Sydney Archives)

2. Children playing on Bankside in London, 1893. (Paul Martin photographer. Daily Mail Online, 17 May 2019)

3. Crowds gather to watch the streets being washed using fire hoses in the docks area of Sydney, 1900. On one corner a barrel of whitewash can be seen.

4.  In Napoleon Street, rubbish has been cleared from properties and piled on the roadway ready to be carted away. The footpaths have been whitewashed. (This and previous image are from a series of albums in the State Library of NSW containing ‘Views taken during cleansing operations, quarantine area, Sydney, 1900, under the supervision of Mr. George McCredie, F.I.A., NSW’)

5. A worker spraying the street with disinfectant in Moscow, 2020. (Maxim Shemetov/Reuters, published in Chung 2020)

6. Municipal tankers spray disinfectant as a precaution against the coronavirus in Moscow, 2020. (Andrei Nikerichev/Moscow News Agency via Associated Press, published in Chung 2020)

Still life with birds

Krimsone (Janne Birkner), Herons, Rozelle

There has been an irruption of street art birds in Sydney and other cities of the world. For several years now, accumulations of avian fauna have been flattened and pinned to the walls of the open-air urban museum.

But why birds? In this post I canvass some thoughts about birds and humans, and birds and walls. I let Guy Debord have the last word.

Mulga (Joel Moore), Cockie, Marrickville

put a bird on it: Phrase exclaimed when placing an image of an avian creature on any item, especially one that was “handcrafted” or “thrifted” so as to make it totally adorable and artistic.
Urban Dictionary

Birds are everywhere. This prevalence ensures that images of our airborne friends are easy for an audience to connect to, making them as commonplace in artwork as they are in everyday life.
Unimelb, Birds and street art, Street Art de Tours

Thomas Jackson, Owl faced kings, Camperdown

Fascinated by the local animals and landscapes … Thomas Jackson puts a modern take on ‘Natural History Illustration’, painstakingly creating smaller scale works for galleries and translating these into large scale public murals.
Thomas Jackson website

In a culture of globalised brands and neo-liberal ideology, this new one-size fits all style of public mural art is ideal for clone developments & gentrification projects, it’s middle of the road, middle class and middle-brow. It is fast creating a culture that seeks nothing more than your uncritical attention and adoration.
Martyn Reed, nuart journal

Anthony Lister, Parrots, Alexandria

I imagine we’ll always fetishize birds. They fly, for one thing, and for us ground-bound mammals, all gangly limbs and big brains, their flight symbolizes something like freedom.
Erik Anderson, Bird

Freedom is a word closely associated with all forms of graffiti, urban and street art. Painting in the street offers a place to create away from the restraints of the studio and the gallery … Birds are a constant and popular theme to appear in murals. Perhaps street artists just happen to like birds a lot, or perhaps it comes back to this idea of freedom again. Who hasn’t watched a bird take to the air and wondered just how it would feel?
Steve Gray, Ten street artists who love to paint birds, Widewalls

Tracy Emin, The distance of your heart, Sydney

Birds are perched on buildings all around the city, but look carefully and you might find some that don’t fly away. Renowned British artist Tracey Emin has placed more than 60 bronze birds throughout the city centre. The artwork is called The Distance of Your Heart and is a reflection on feeling homesick.
City of Sydney News

Phibs (Tim de Haan), Seed bearers, Newtown

Two birds represents everything from freedom to animals that spread seeds across the world. This encourages new growth and plants, combined with a heart and hand represent the power we have in the world around us. My work signifies the symbolic, engaging the urban with the organic.
Phibs (Tim de Haan), Street Art Cities

Birds have always been small agents charged with carrying the burden of our feelings simply by following the logic of their own existence … Yet for all our emotional investment in them, we’ve never treated birds particularly well.
Delia Falconer, Signs and wonders: dispatches from a time of beauty and loss

Native animals offered a former “colony of miscreants” a powerful and inspiring metaphor for cultural evolution and burgeoning nationalism at a time when Australia was beginning to assert its separate political destiny.
Jazmina Cininas, Antipodean bestiary: reconstructions of native fauna and national identity in the work of eleven contemporary Australian artists, PAN : philosophy activism nature

Scott Marsh, Bin Kingz, Chippendale

No other animal encompasses the nature of Australia like the bin chicken, foraging it’s way into our bins, and our hearts. At the same time, no other artist extracts the essence of Aussie humour like Scott Marsh, with his iconic wall murals piercing the Australian sensibility like a six inch curved beak to a council bin bag.
Scott Marsh, Bin Kingz

Egg Picnic (Camila de Gregorio and Christopher Macaluso), Birds of Australia, Glebe

Egg Picnic wants to be the Disney of conservation – they create illustrations to make us fall in love with, and feel compelled to protect, our beautiful fauna.
Egg Picnic with City of Sydney Creative Hoardings Program

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth …
King James Bible, Genesis 1:26

Nature is not an accessory, nor is it peripheral to our happiness. It is our happiness – civilization itself – that is an accessory, the four billion year continuum of life on the planet that is primary. But if the best we can do is to care about nature from the position of one equipped to redeem it , I’m not sure it’s worth saving.
Erik Anderson, Bird

Knoswet (Xander Zee), Kookaburra sunrise, Surry Hills

This is one way of bringing the bush to the city. We found this gorgeous kookaburra down the back lanes of Surry Hills today.
The Daily Telegraph Home Magazine

 As urbanism destroys the cities , it recreates a pseudo-countryside devoid both of the natural relations of the traditional countryside and of the direct (and directly challenged) social relations of the historical city.
Guy Debord, The society of the spectacle

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(All photographs taken by Megan Hicks in and around Sydney, Australia)

WATERSHED MOMENTS. EXCURSION 4. FOREBODING.

11 July 2021

I am back at the magnificent Stanmore Sewer Vent. It is going to rain, but I have started out on this episode of my walk around the rim of the Johnstons Creek catchment because I want to photograph the vent under an overcast sky. Last time I was here the dappled shade from street trees obscured the details of its flaking sandstone plaque which, it turns out, reads METROPOLITAN BOARD OF WATER SUPPLY & SEWERAGE 1900.

As I stand back to get a full-height shot of the vent and its accompanying house, a man runs across the road, angrily kicking a piece of wood as he goes, and enters the cottage’s front gate. I call out, ‘I hope you don’t mind’ and he growls, ‘You can take photos of a sewer vent any time’.

Our route takes us round into Percival Road, the main street of Stanmore, flanked by more neat turn-of-the-20th-century houses and leading down to a park, the railway station and a small cluster of shops. The sky to the south is looking ominous.

The rim line runs between houses and emerges in the lane behind, where I find a garage roller-door tribute to the composer Philip Glass complete with sketch portrait.

In an adjacent lane a man is taking his kids and dog for their permitted outdoor exercise in their local government area.  Apart from the cranky sewer vent resident we have, as usual, seen practically no-one on our walk. People are all inside as the Covid situation worsens. In the state of New South Wales there have been 77 new cases today and one death.

(The previous paragraph now seems ridiculous. I need to point out here that, although I took this walk on 11 July 2021, I have not got round to transcribing my notes until six months later. The Covid comparison is staggering.

I am composing this blog post on 1 January 2022, when 22,577 new infections have been recorded in New South Wales and four deaths. The reasons for the differing case number statistics (but reasonably similar death rate) between July and January include the intervening advent of the Delta and Omicron variants of the virus, the lifting of lockdowns and restrictions on movement, and a very high proportion of the adult population fully vaccinated.)

It is spitting now and we have not brought umbrellas, so we loop back around to the car, passing a cute domestic wall decoration on the way. Safely ensconced at home I think I might listen to some favourite music – Philip Glass perhaps.

WATERSHED MOMENTS. EXCURSION 3. REVELATIONS.

4 July 2021

When I began my circumambulation of the Johnstons Creek catchment rim I was prepared for the unexceptional. Unlike last year’s explorations of the creek itself – when I found offbeat backstreets and mini banana jungles – on this series of excursions I expected that only the occasional quirky garden ornament or letterbox would relieve the familiarity of the suburbs I passed through.

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To some extent this is turning out to be the case, but on this third excursion I have a moment of revelation, and I also come across very large infrastructure treasure that somehow I had overlooked in all the years I have lived in the inner west of Sydney.

I started where the imaginary catchment line emerges from between two small, pretty and unremarkable brick houses in a style common to this neighbourhood of Stanmore. Nothing much is going on in the street except for an elderly woman taking in some sun on this cold but bright day.

I stand in the middle of the road and look southeast down the slope. From here I can see across to the other side of Stanmore, and beyond that what must be the telecom tower on the opposite ridge in King Street, Newtown. I am surprised to realise I am looking across the valley of Johnstons Creek. This may seem obvious – I am, after all, standing on the catchment rim – but momentarily I understand the topography of the area without the distractions of urbanisation. There is no way I can properly capture what I am seeing in a mobile phone photograph.

I do not walk down the slope, but keep following the ridge as best I can as it winds between houses, across streets, down back lanes. I am getting closer to the less respectable surrounds of Parramatta Road; graffiti and garage-door murals are starting to appear.

Then, beyond the Seventh Day Adventist Church, I spot another surprise. It is the top of a tall, brick sewer vent.                                                  

My route takes me through more twists and turns until I come to the entrance of Percival Lane. And there, on the next corner, is the magnificent sewer vent standing in the front yard of a little house. White wisps of condensation float from the chimney into the cold blue sky.

Just half an hour ago I had a flash of insight into this area’s geomorphology. But now I have reverted to admiring the monumental accoutrements of civilisation.  Later I will read that this is a ‘classicist late Victorian sewer vent’ with Sydney Water heritage number 4572732.

I have had enough excitement for the day and resolve to resume my walk on an overcast day when I can get photos of the vent and its house without the dappled shadows cast by street trees. I return to the car via a lane beside the Seventh Day Adventist Church, where earlier I noticed a rustic little table in a throwout pile. I will use it as a plant stand in my backyard.

Watershed moments. Excursion 2. Tin bird territory.

There’s a man up a ladder picking inedible figs as his dog watches on. Eye-catching in its simplicity, this back-lane mural will turn out to be today’s most interesting find as I resume my tracing of the Johnstons Creek catchment rim.

I am in the staid north-western corner of Stanmore, which is characterised by rows of neat, late 19th century houses. Yaz, the Completing Sydney blogger, visiting this suburb for the first time not so long ago, decided that ‘here is that combination of historic and adorable that we come to expect from the Inner West’, making it ‘the kind of place you might want to live in if you’re after that quiet suburban life, not too far from the city – perfect for small families who also happen to be multi-millionaires’.

As I emerge from a knot of neat, rubbish-less back lanes there is an imposing house opposite with bird cowls on its chimney. Spot the real bird on the television aerial! I’ve had to look up ‘bird cowl’, the correct term for these covers that apparently increase the draft of a chimney. In this neighbourhood there are flocks of them. Perhaps the original builders of these houses did not foresee that ridge-top winds would blow smoke back down the chimneys. Original features, such as mantelpieces and fireplaces, are a real estate selling point in Sydney’s older suburbs, but I wonder how many owners persist with wood fires for their heating in winter?

After turning a few street corners I come to a place where the ridge line ducks between two houses. Detouring round the block to get to the spot where the line emerges in a rear lane, I will use the tall palm tree as a marker.

I find the palm tree, but I have been out for the allotted Covid-safe outdoor exercise hour so it’s time to head back to the car.

In any case the clouds are louring and it’s going to rain again. I turn my back on another flock of bird cowls bracing themselves for the worst.

29 June 2021

Walking and Listening

An almost unnoticeable incident while I was on my first Watershed Moments lockdown walk. A small inner west street on the rim of the Johnstons Creek catchment area sandwiched between the railway line and the north-south runway flight path. As I stand and take in the ambient noises, another sound catches my attention. Later I write a poem about it and submit it to a competition run by Walk Listen Create for their Sound Walk September celebration. It’s been long-listed and published on their website!

Compass by Megan Hicks – walk · listen · create (walklistencreate.org)

Watershed Moments. Excursion 1. The water tower.

Another lockdown. A new walking project. I’m still fixated on Johnstons Creek, but this time I’m following the rim of its catchment area, a route that will take me along the ridges of Petersham, Stanmore and Annandale. And that is as far as I will get while restricted to my local government area.

I begin at the highest point west of the Sydney CBD before the Blue Mountains. You might call it Sydney’s upper inner west. It’s right where the landmark Petersham Water Tower is poised – this heritage-listed, concrete engineering marvel. This afternoon a group of currawongs is enjoying the rim of the tower and its updrafts.

Using Sydney Water’s stormwater catchment map, detailed down to individual blocks of land and house numbers, I head north along Crystal Street, stopping to turn around and photograph a relic of traffic signs past. It’s a ‘SLOW’ warning written in metal studs on the concrete. I manage to photograph it (not for the first time) during a traffic light-induced gap between vehicles.

Where Crystal Street crosses the railway line I am still on high ground. From the bridge you are supposed to be able to tell if it is snowing in Oberon, on the other side of the Blue Mountains. My friend who lives there says I should look for a green cloud. Today there is no faraway green cloud but I do catch late afternoon shafts of light.

The perimeter of the Johnstons Creek catchment area, as it is indicated on the Sydney Water map, is sometimes curved in places where old roads have followed natural ridges. But more often it becomes a series of straight lines at angles to each other, where streets have been laid out in a grid that disregards topography. In those places the map outline fudges the lie of the land in order to conform to the alignment of streets, lanes, buildings or water pipes.

I turn east off Crystal Street but come to a point where the map line darts between two houses. Since I can’t walk through people’s property (nor am I physically able to climb over back fences) I must backtrack and walk all the way round to meet the imaginary line in the next street parallel. I can see that this is going to happen over and over again on my series of excursions.

The last part of today’s trip takes me through some disappointing back lanes. In this neat part of Petersham there are wheelie bins in the lanes but no piles of discarded junk for me to cast my eye over, only the occasional mystery abandonment. It is starting to rain and I turn back.

Monday 28 June 2021

Bill posters won’t be prosecuted

Despite galloping gentrification, the Newtown-Enmore ‘destination precinct’ of Sydney’s inner west retains remnants of its former underground student activism, most notably in the form of fly-posters promoting leftist and anarchist causes.

Bill posting is illegal, with the local Inner West Council defining posters as ‘visual pollution’, along with other forms of ‘unwanted graffiti’. However, unlike the City of Sydney, which administers the north-eastern end of Newtown, the Inner West Council does not carry out an aggressive program of graffiti and poster removal. This might mean the Inner West has a smaller budget for street beautification, but over the years I have come to realise that it also indicates an uneasy tolerance on the part of Council, and that this tolerance is based on ambivalence. 

Inner West Council trades on the image of Newtown-Enmore as a ‘vibrant’ and edgy area where there is always something to see and do. Its arts program, tellingly named EDGE, seeks to reinforce the area’s position as ‘the cultural engine of global Sydney’. It is noteworthy that the 2019 EDGE program was themed Art and Activism and that it included works of pseudo-graffiti, such as a series of giant paste-up illustrations celebrating the Reclaim the Streets activist movement, and trails of animal stencils on footpaths described as a ‘guerrilla pavement art project bearing witness to The Sixth Mass Extinction’.

With this kind of endorsement of graffiti and paste-ups it’s not surprising that unauthorised fly-posters have become an intrinsic element of Newtown-Enmore’s cultural capital. Political posters draw attention to the locality’s history as a seat of activism and this history is encouraged by Council’s arts programs to be regarded as an element of cultural ‘heritage’.

This blog post is an edited excerpt from:

HICKS, M. (2021) Flyposter graffiti and the change in a Sydney streetscape during the time of COVID-19. Visual Studies, 36, 141-146.

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