Greetings

 

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The Festive Season is upon us and, in response, the blizzard of pavement markings in Sydney’s central business district has taken on an appropriately merry appearance, with designs based on traditional Christmas colours.

A recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald about ‘Sydney street scribbles’ goes some way to translating what these symbols indicate about the pipes and cables buried beneath the pavement. However, here is my alternative translation of the photograph above, taken on the corner of George and Bathurst Streets.

It is a double manhole or service cover, cleverly decorated to represent a Gingerbread House covered in snowy frosting. There are fairy lights draped on the roof and hanging by the window and front door. The chimney, in the shape of a Christmas stocking, also has fairy lights. These are focussed on a point in the sky (E9-1) which may be interpreted either as the star in the EAST, or the route Santa’s sleigh will take on Christmas EVE.

The ELVES who live in the manhole gingerbread house have festooned it with codified greetings to Sydneysiders as they go about their daily work. E1, for example, stands for EXPRESSIONS of cheer to each and every one of you; E4 means EVERY good wish for the New Year. F10 is an interesting one. It reads FORGIVE us for any TENsion or aesthetic discomfort we may have caused by making such an unholy mess of Sydney’s bluestone footpaths.

Points and boundaries (Guest spot)

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Photo: meganix

When I blogged about a chiselled, painted and Post-it noted survey mark recently, I invited Scott Taylor to comment and tell us more about survey marks. Scott is a surveyor who hosts the website Global Surveyors. This is what he had to say:

 

The red and white Post-it is actually called a Red and White!!! We aim our surveying instrument at the centre or join between the two colours, which we have positioned centrally over the survey mark.

There are many marks surveyors use, some placed in kerbs, rocks, trees, or buried under ground (hidden), and all on public record noted on a Deposited Plan.

Here are a couple of survey marks I happened to have on my phone. They are  called Drill Hole and Wings. Like the blue mark in your photo, they are used for boundaries and are noted on a plan as being at a corner, or being a certain bearing and distance from a corner. They assist the surveyor to re-establish a boundary corner when that corner has disappeared or been destroyed.

Photo: Scott Taylor

Photos: Scott Taylor

 We paint almost every mark we place. Surveyors have no particular colour. I use whatever is available and feel as though I’m a graffiti artist most of the time.

Here is a rock mark from the 1800s, before and after it’s been painted. It’s referred to as a Broad Arrow. For those interested in survey marks there is a great publication called Marking the landscape: a short history of survey marks in New South Wales.

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Photos: Scott Taylor

Photos: Scott Taylor

 

 

Three degrees of permanency

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Some time in the past this arrow-shaped survey mark has been chiselled into the concrete kerb of Regent Street, Redfern (Sydney). It will last as long as the kerb does. But to make it more visible it has been painted blue. Eventually the paint will be weathered away. Last week there was a man surveying the boundaries of a property that adjoins the pedestrian laneway off Regent Street. So that he could see where the survey mark was through his theodolite, he had stuck a red and white post-it note next to it. The post-it note was probably gone by the next day, blown away by the wind.

I have only presumed that’s what the post-it note was for. I don’t really understand survey marks. I wish I had thought to ask the surveyor about this one. But anyway, I have contacted Scott Taylor at the Global Surveyors website and invited him to comment on this Pavement Graffiti post. According to a blog post by Scott about ‘Interesting survey marks’, surveyors like him are magnetically attracted to survey marks in kerbs, roads and bridges, and drive their friends crazy saying, “Look, there’s a level datum”. Here at Pavement Graffiti we understand this level of fanaticism.