Body outlines (Watch this space)

16 August 2025

The chalked outline of a corpse is a crime fiction cliché. It is seldom used in real police investigations and yet the image has been assimilated into our everyday visual vocabulary. Advertisers, illustrators and safety authorities have appropriated the familiar shape to encapsulate their warnings about crime and violence. In Sydney’s inner west, young professionals are gradually replacing the students, activists and artists living in what used to be cheap accommodation there. But as I photograph the increasingly upmarket streets of Newtown, I find that graffitists still use its pavements to broadcast their protest messages and sometimes they make their point by filling in the blank forms of body outlines.

(This article was originally published in 2009 the first issue of Second Nature: International journal of creative media, produced by the School of Creative Media at RMIT. It was meant to be the first in a series of essays examining the pavement as a medium of expression. Unfortunately Second Nature did not continue and even that first issue is no longer available on-line.

As a blog post it fails miserably according to WordPress – it has too many long words, long sentences and long paragraphs, too much passive voice, and not enough subheadings. Surprisingly WordPress does not mention that the content is a little dated even though it is. Fortunately I am not trying to sell anything and I hope my literate readers enjoy the post despite these failings.)

IT LOOKED AS IF THERE HAD BEEN A MASSACRE – the position of several corpses had been marked with outlines on the footpath near the railway station. It wasn’t the first time this sort of thing had happened in the area. I had seen crime-scene outlines on Newtown pavements about fifteen years before. I have seen them intermittently since then and these days I photograph them to preserve some permanent record of their existence. Chalked bodies fade quickly under the assault of passing feet; spray-painted versions last longer, but eventually these disappear as well. Newtown being the sort of place it is, they are inevitably replaced by fresh ones sooner or later.

As it turned out, this latest batch of outlines was evidence of a series of homicides that had happened, not here in Sydney’s inner west, but nearly 1000 km away. Recreated homicides, actually. The drawings were part of an outdoor marketing campaign for the 2008 television series Underbelly – a fictionalized memorial to Melbourne’s 10 year ‘gangland war’.

On the other hand, those first body outlines I had seen in Newtown many years previously were commemorating a different kind of wartime event – the bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. Every year peace activists around the world observe Hiroshima Day by holding rallies, and sometimes they draw bodies on their local pavements. These are supposed to simulate the marks left when people were vapourised by the bomb’s heat blast. Judging from the few photographs taken in Hiroshima that day, the real body shadows were blurred and formless, and yet it is the clichéd homicide silhouette that activists have chosen to use in their peace demonstrations. The outlines make the street look like a crime scene, and for anti-war protesters that is the point.

Newtown has a high rate of metaphorical crime. Body outlines are pressed into service for all sorts of causes.

In peace protests their manifestation is not limited to 6 August. There was, for example, a spray-paint installation that appeared in Goddard Street early in 2003, when Australia joined the war in Iraq. ‘NO WAR’, written in huge letters on the side wall of a café, was accompanied by a slew of life-size figures on the footpath. Their stark remains decorated the asphalt in that tiny side street for several years.

Around the corner, in the main street of Newtown, synthetic bluestone pavers are gradually replacing the asphalt footpaths, just as young professionals in renovated properties are gradually replacing the inner-city students, activists and artists living in what used to be cheap accommodation in the area. But despite the upward mobilization of Newtown, pockets of resistance still exist, from old leftie Bob Gould in his chaotic book arcade at one end of King Street, to young anarchists in crusty flats above the shops at the other. And although the gritty monochrome of old asphalt was more suitable for inscriptions in chalk and paint, protesters still manage to use the footpaths of King Street as a billboard for their messages, defying the unfriendliness of the new pavers’ neatly repetitive grooves and shiny mottled surfaces.

Take, for instance, the trail of crime-scene outlines that I photographed in September 2005. These marked the progress of a mobile street performance by students belonging to an anti-capitalist collective called 30A. Suited ‘capitalists’ had rolled a giant gold coin along the footpath in King Street, mowing down ‘workers’ as they went. Shapes were traced around the ‘victims’ and the space inside the outlines was filled with slogans like ‘Howard kills jobs’, and ‘Work is death’. It was all pre-publicity for a mass protest to be held later that week, not in Newtown, but outside the Forbes Global CEO Conference at Sydney Opera House.

Newtown often acts as outrider for demonstrations happening elsewhere.

This explains another outbreak of body outlines in King Street in February 2004 – it coincided with a riot in Redfern a few kilometres away. Anti-police violence had erupted after Aboriginal teenager TJ Hickey came off his bicycle and was fatally impaled on a metal fence. Redfern locals claimed a police car had been stalking the boy. While the aftershocks of the riot were still happening, crudely chalked bodies appeared on Newtown pavements, accompanied by slogans such as ‘Stop racist police brutality’, ‘Cops kill children’, and ‘To kill an Aboriginal is to kill history’.

The grim form of a hastily circumscribed corpse is a crime fiction cliché. It is a recognizable image that has been appropriated, not only by social agitators, but by graphic artists everywhere who want to allude to crime or violent death in a metaphorical way. The pudgy, larger-than-life human form has become a regular symbol in our visual vocabulary, so familiar that it is available for parody. Newspaper artists exploit the image to illustrate feature articles. Cyber-crime? A chalked body holding a computer mouse. Car theft? The silhouette on the asphalt of a disappeared car. Advertisers have flogged it to death. Telstra MessageBank? A taped outline of a phone left off the hook by ‘flatmates murdering messages’. iiNet broadband? A forensic investigator drawing round a computer thrown to the ground by its frustrated owner.

The murder-scene outline has caught on as a pop-culture motif despite rarely being used in true police investigations. Old Sydney detectives are adamant that they never drew them, if only because the chalk dust would have contaminated evidence. Archival police photos seldom show them. The body outline is largely a construct of fiction thrillers and television dramas, but it has taken on a life of its own.

Its featureless form captures the essence of the human body – the shell that remains after the soul has departed. It evokes the murderous act but lacks the ugly complications of a real corpse. It is an empty space that allows room for the imagination. A thought bubble where the violent event can be visualised. Or a speech balloon that radical students can fill with slogans.

Although homicide detectives do not draw body outlines, police at motor vehicle accidents do, or at least they used to until fairly recently. Hardy crash investigators joke about the ‘gingerbread men’ spreadeagled at the scene of ‘fatals’, but admit that they were distracting to motorists and distressing for passers-by. These days they spray-paint the scene with esoteric patterns of lines and arrows instead.

But it was their very potential to distress passers-by that prompted traffic authorities to resurrect body outlines for a series of pedestrian safety campaigns around Sydney in the late 1990s. The aim was to scare reckless road-crossers by stencilling a plague of flattened figures at danger spots on roadways. ‘Step safely’ warned the adjacent pavement signs, ‘Think before you cross’.

Newtown being the kind of place it is, it was not long before local culture jammers tampered with these spray-painted silhouettes. They were especially active during the annual Reclaim the Streets demonstration in 1999, when King Street was blocked to traffic and rebellious pedestrians commandeered the roadway. Challenging the safety campaign’s insinuation that pedestrians are responsible for road fatalities, RTS activists reanimated the stencilled corpses with painted hair and eyes, with Mickey Mouse ears and tomahawks. And they filled the empty outlines with slogans like ‘Cars kill’.

Sources

Adams, Cecil, ‘Do crime scene investigators really draw a chalk line around the body?’, The Straight Dope, 13 April 2001.

Campbell, Nerida, Curator, Justice and Police Museum, Sydney, pers.comm. 2005.

Gibson, Ross, University of Technology, Sydney, curator of ‘Crime Scene’ installation, Justice and Police Museum, Sydney, 1999-2000, pers.comm. 2005.

iiNet, ‘Don’t take it out on: your computer’, advertising brochure, c.2008.

Jenkins, Peter, Senior Sergeant, NSW Police Crash Investigation Unit, pers.comm. 2005.

Jones, Quentin, photographs for ‘Steal traps’ article by Bob Jennings, Drive, pp.1, 6-7, Sydney Morning Herald, 8 June 2001.

Members of 30a (Annonymous collective of streat theatre bandots [sic]), pers.comm. September 2005.

‘Photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki’, Gensuikin.

South Sydney Council, ‘J walking: deadly walking’, Babylon Creative postcard, c.1999.

‘Sydney prepares for Forbes Conference and 30A protest’, Wikinews, 30 August 2005.

Telstra, ‘Stop flatmates murdering messages’, AvantCard postcard, 1999.

Tremain, Cathryn, picture for ‘Catch me if you can’ article by James Hall, Next, p.1, Sydney Morning Herald, 11 March 2003.

‘Underbelly [Uncut]’, DVD, Nine Network, Australia, 2008. Walker, Emily, ‘Shadows of death. Atomic bomb hit Hiroshima 60 years ago’, Kalamazoo Gazette, 7 August 2005.

Original publication

Hicks, Megan, ‘Outlines (Watch this space)’, Second Nature, 1, March 2009.

Graffiti in hiding

19 March 2024

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 17^th 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.

Still life with birds

14 June 2022

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 Jac kson 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

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

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

…………………………………………………………………………………….

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

The name

1 July 2017

I am researching the history of a nineteenth century row of houses in Sydney’s inner west. It’s not my usual kind of writing gig but it has been interesting following the money. Wealth accumulated in good times by an enterprising immigrant from Yorkshire, shared with his son as a business partner, lost when the son’s extravagant ventures are caught out by a national financial depression.Â What’s left is a smattering of properties that have been salvaged for heritage listing by repurposing â€“ gentlemen’s residences divided into flatettes, a wool store fitted out as university outpost campus, a private mansion transformed into a Catholic educational institution. Â

The buildings are notable for the need these colonial nouveau capitalists had to monogram their possessions. The firm’s name is embossed on the wool store â€“ an understandable commercial imperative. But on the gateposts of the father’s 1860s villa his initials AH are stuccoed in botanical calligraphy so elaborate that they are barely legible.

The son’s entwined initials JH in more restrained but authoritative capitals decorate the interior of his opulent 1880s mansion. I can imagine the thrill of self-satisfaction this sleek young mayor experiences as he glimpses the stained glass panel on his way upstairs from the expansive vestibule of his domicile.

Fast forward to the late twentieth century and an upsurge of the monogram for marking property â€“ though more likely someone else’s property or else a piece of public infrastructure. Taggers appropriate territory with marks that are generally illegible except to themselves or to cohorts that matter.

Â I came across a graffiti supplies website recently, and this comment from a user:Â ‘ I wrote the name test when i was in high school. I liked it cause every time iÂ saw the word test in a context totally unrelated to graff i creamed a little’.

Â Here is the thrill of self-affirmation. This graffitist has gone for ordinariness over illegibility for his tag, and finds satisfaction when he sees, Â not only the property he has marked, Â but every single item where his moniker ‘test’ happens to appear â€“ books, advertisements, notices, school whiteboards. His mind (and his member) believe that all these base are belong to him.

Â At least what you don’t really own and have not mortgaged will not send you bankrupt.

Images by meganix, taken in 2017 in Sydney: Stanmore, Circular Quay, Newtown and Strathfield.

Rainbow politics

4 June 2016

“The removal of the Taylor Square rainbow crossing created an even bigger stir than its original installation. To mark its passing, people attached unofficial rainbow flags to poles in Taylor Square and tied rainbow ribbons to safety fences. But performer and activist James Brechney had a fresh idea for an alternate location that somehow captured the zeitgeist.”

My exquisitely objective article on the history of the DIY Rainbow Crossing is now available to read in the Dictionary of Sydney.

Some time ago I wrote a blog post on the symbolism of pedestrian crossings. It’sÂ here.

(Photos by meganix, taken in Darlinghurst in 2013 and Summer Hill 2015)

Parramatta Girls Home

6 September 2015

Writing graffiti can be a way of claiming or re-claiming territory. That is what has happened at the former Parramatta Girls Home, as I found when I visited the site this week. I did not go with the intention of photographing pavement graffiti, but I unexpectedly came across the letters ILWA and the silhouettes of children sprayed on footpaths and concrete verandahs there.

The former girls’ home is part of the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct whose history of incarceration and ‘care’ of women and children extends from 1821 to 2008. Numbers of inmates at the Parramatta Girls Home peaked in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, as courts committed hundreds of girls every year to spend months or years in the facility.

Sent to this institution at the age of 15 for being ‘in moral danger’, Bonney Djuric is now an artist, activist and historian. In 2006 she founded the support group Parragirls and was inundated by responses from women still living with memories of the physical, sexual and psychological abuse they suffered there. Now the Director of the Parramatta Female Factory Memory Project, Bonney has been instrumental in the campaign to preserve and dedicate the Parramatta Girls Home and the adjacent Female Factory as a Living Memorial to the Forgotten Australians and others who have been marginalised by society.

One of the buildings, renamed Kamballa in the 1970s, is now the centre of the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Memory Project, and it was Bonney who sprayed the ghostly silhouettes on the concrete in 2013 as a way of reasserting the presence of those forgotten children who passed through the institutions on this site.

More puzzling is the symbol ILWA, also sprayed by Bonney at the same time. It mimics graffiti scratched into the woodwork at the Parramatta Girls Home, she tells me, and stands for ‘I Love Worship and Adore’. Bonney showed me examples of the original graffiti, some of it dating to the 1940s, on doors that have been preserved. Not only a message of affection, it also represented solidarity and resilience amongst the girls. It was a way of asserting ‘I am here’.

In a blog post several years ago I wrote that all inscription is about the politics of turf. Back in the days of the Parramatta Girls Home, the girls who scraped their messages into the woodwork would have understood that theirs were assertive acts of defiance, but they could not possibly have imagined that years later their marks would be regarded as significant documents that offer an interpretation of the site that is as important as official archival material. Nor would they have imagined that their marks would be deliberately copied as a way of reclaiming territory on their behalf.

No parking

23 June 2014

Enmore, 2014.

This is a story about the struggle between the green and the grey, between leaves and asphalt, between street trees and street parking, between what ought to be and what is. In inner city suburbs like Enmore and Stanmore,Â Marrickville Council is caught in this struggle.

One of the most stressful aspects of urban living is the shortage of parking. Suburbs that sprang up in the Victorian era, when there was no such thing as a motor car, are now undergoing gentrification; households often have more than one car but few houses have off-street parking.

Given the convenience of public transport in area, why do these people need cars? Partly it’s snobbery. Does your solicitor join the plebs on a bus to work? Would your doctor be seen dead in a train? Partly it’s necessity. With both parents working, try juggling work hours, childcare drop-offs and pick-ups, and Saturday sport all over the city. However much people might agree in principle with the environmental benefits of public transport and bicycle riding, often these are just not viable options.

Stanmore, 2014.

Shortage of street parking spaces is made worse by visitors to the area. Now that Enmore has become a ‘vibrant entertainment precinct’ hundreds of customers come in the evenings to attend performances or enjoy the many new restaurants, bars and cafes. And they don’t necessarily want to travel across the city in public transport at night to get home. So they infiltrate ever-deeper into residential territory to find parking for their cars. Residents jealously guard driveways (if they have them) and fume when they have to park blocks away from their homes. Marrickville Council knows all this and is trying to address the problem with committee meetings, surveys, community consultation, plans and projects.

Enmore, 2014. Enmore Theatre is in the background.

So why is Council intent on reducing the amount of parking in contested areas, rather than finding extra spaces? It’s because they are also committed to an Urban Forest Strategy that ‘recognizes the urban forest as an essential, living infrastructure asset and resource that provides a wide range of social, environmental and economic benefits’.

And this is what has prompted the demonstration project in Cavendish Street, Enmore, where large Lilli Pilli trees have been planted in structured soil in the roadway. I wrote about this project in my earlier post ‘What lies beneath’. And even though ‘permeable paving’ means that the space taken up by tree-planting ‘blisters’ is smaller than would normally be needed to keep trees healthy, there is no question that parking spaces have been lost. Residents of the street are supposed to have agreed to this arrangement, but they probably would have agreed to any scheme that saw the former huge, inappropriate and destructive fig trees removed from their footpaths.

Enmore, 2014. One tree gained, two parking spaces lost.

Meanwhile parking pressure on nearby streets has been increased just that bit extra. What’s more, Marrickville’s draft Master Street Plan has Lilli Pilli (Waterhousia floribunda) or similarly large trees slated for some of these same streets. Given the narrowness of the verges, this must mean more in-road planting and more parking lost. Residents of these streets are not going to be too happy about this.

A 2013 survey of residents in the Marrickville Local Government Area found that most people like having greenery in their suburbs. Of course. But what the survey doesn’t mention is that householders also like to park close to their homes and businesses don’t want customers put off by lack of parking. Until a whole lot of things in the world change, this reliance on cars and the need for parking isn’t going to go away. In-road planting is an impractical component of the urban forest strategy and would have measurable social and economic costs. An ideological commitment to such a component would have a detrimental, not a beneficial, effect on the local area. Small trees, please.

Enmore, 2014.

Walking on clouds

29 May 2014

The public artwork by Jason Wing in Chinatown is so appealing that night-time shots of it â€“ like images of the Opera House â€“ are frequently used in promotional material to illustrate just how artistic/ vibrant/ innovative/ cultural/ multicultural Sydney really is. Commissioned by the City of Sydney in 2011, Between Two Worlds incorporates ‘themes of heaven and earth, the elements, and respect for ancestors past and present ‘.

‘Between Two Worlds’ by Jason Wing in Kimber Lane, Sydney (photographs by meganix 2014)

At night the glowing blue spirit figures suspended over the dingy service lane are visually dominant, but in the daytime it is the ‘auspicious clouds’ on the roadway and walls that first catch the eye.

Naturally I am interested in an installation that includes ‘floor murals’ (as the City of Sydney calls them), and last week I paid a visit to see how these were faring after three years of wear and tear. After all, the vulnerability of artistic mediums (whether paint, plumbing or electronics) means that public artworks do not always survive interaction with the public.

It turns out that the pavement clouds are going well. The etchings on the granite pavers at the corners of the laneway are proving resilient and most of the paint on the concrete roadway has lasted. It must be a blue version of the kind of tough paint used for traffic marks. It’s all looking very grubby, and in places there are gaps in the clouds where the concrete has been patched or worn away by leaking water, but to me this is fitting for the element of an artwork that seems to be reflecting (or asking us to reflect on) the tribulations of our earthly existence. Life wasn’t meant to be easy.

The walls are still looking good too and I could only find one place where the clouds have been overprinted with graffiti. But again, this seems appropriate, especially given Jason Wing’s background as a graffiti artist.

But it is the host of airborne spirits that appears to have suffered the most. A building next to Kimber Lane has been demolished and with it a wall that supported several of these ‘little dudes’ (as comedian and art commentator Hannah Gadsby calls them). Four of them have vanished. Perhaps they are waiting in some kind of limbo until a shiny new apartment block is built. And then they will be reinstated to their watchful heavenly posting above the clouds. But that might take a while, because at the moment it looks as though the empty site is being made into a parking lot.

Your typical pedestrian

7 April 2014

My WordPress avatar is a pedestrian traversing the asphalt. Despite a continuous battering by passing traffic, you can see that my pedestrian still has a burning heart, thanks to an implant by the 90s band Junglepunks.

Pedestrian and Junglepunks stencils, Broadway (Sydney), 1999

Pedestrian and Junglepunks, Broadway (Sydney), 1999

I have met many such pavement people since I began my graffiti project way back in 1999, but I seem to have only mentioned them once on this blog site. A desire to revisit them has been prompted by some of the photographs in a new little book by Phil Smith, Enchanted things, where he writes:

‘The pedestrian figures here were all intended by some designer as generic representations; yet to the glad eye they display their eccentricities, amputations, stretch marks, wrinkles, prostheses and rearrangements. They serves as memento mutabis (“remember you will change”), a reminder of your body as unfinished business, inscribed into its path and subject to all that passes along it, a history made on the hoof.’

In this photo-essay Phil, an ambulant academic at Plymouth University, UK, urges us to undertake an ‘experimental pilgrimage without destinations’ where disfigured pedestrian figures are just a small sample of the absurd, ironic and accidental artworks in the urban landscape that, if we take the trouble to notice them, will rearrange our attitude to the world.

My Sydney pavement pedestrians serve to confirm that walking in the builtscape is no simple matter.Â They don’t need Phil to tell them they should LOOK, LOOK RIGHT, LOOK LEFT. But even if they have an opinion about what they see, they are made to shut up. It is sometimes permissible for them to manifest their gender or age status, but more often than not they are stripped to their naked genderlessness, a mere shadow of their supposed selves.

Although exposed to assault from all sides, they can hardly complain they weren’t warned. Even so, when cautioned to THINK BEFORE YOU CROSS and STEP SAFELY they generally decide to make a dash for it. Some do so with a defiant display of insouciance but others are so terrified by the traffic they jump right out of their shoes.

Pedestrian whose comments have been censored, Summer Hill, 2010

Wise walkers, Stanmore, 2000

Unwise street crosser, Newtown, 1999

Left and right shoes left behind, Newtown, 2000

The more purposeful striders who stick to the footpath find they are obliged to share their way with cyclists and sometimes even elephants. Hidden trenches and falling manhole covers are additional hazards.

Casualties are high and many pavements are haunted by the remains of hapless pedestrians, last seen in healthy condition maybe twenty years ago, now reduced to making ghostly appearances from between the cracks in the asphalt.

Pathway parade, College and Liverpool Streets, Sydney, 2011

Pedestrian in trench, Newtown, 1999

Pedestrian under manhole cover, Chatswood, 2007

Traces of a pedestrian, Berry, NSW, 2007

Like my flat mates, I find it hard to keep up with Phil’s ambulant ruminations. Nevertheless, the next item on my reading list is another recent book by him, larger in size and no doubt equally challenging. Â It’s called On walking … and stalking Sebald and its cover features an array of pedestrian figures. How could I resist?

Smith, Phil, 2014, Enchanted things: signposts to a new nomadism, Axminster: Triarchy Press.

Smith, Phil, 2014, On walking … and stalking Sebald: a guide to going beyond wandering around looking at stuff, Axminster: Triarchy Press.

It’s all over

3 February 2014

InÂ February and we are supposed to be back at work. Holiday time is all over. I didn’t go away for the holidays, but we’ve been lucky enough to have beautiful weather in Sydney and there’s plenty to do here â€“ beaches, parks, entertainment venues. I had a good time.

For instance, one evening I went to a children’s ballet concert at the Seymour Centre in Chippendale.

Forecourt of the Seymour Centre performing arts theatre

On another day I visited a corner of Sydney Olympic Park and did some bird-watching round the mangroves and water bird refuge.

Bridge over Haslams Creek in Sydney Olympic Park

And on a blazingly sunny day I drove to the Manly headland and looked out over the Cabbage Tree Bay Marine Reserve.

Parking area overlooking the ocean and Cabbage Tree Bay Marine Reserve at Manly

That crime scene body outline. It’s all over the place. I can’t get over the pervasiveness of this simple graphic â€“ as if its invention satisfiedÂ some yawning gap in our visual vocabulary. I’ve written about it before on this blogsite here, here and here.

I also devoted a section of my thesis to the body outline. And that’s another thing that’s all over. During the past twelve months I finished the thesis, it was examined, and I have received notification that I have ‘satisfied the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Macquarie University’. I am only a graduation ceremony away from becoming the real thing.

The project was called Pavement graffiti: an exploration of roads and footways in words and pictures. With that done I am looking ahead to the next thing. So the blogsite Pavement graffiti might be all over, too. I’m thinking this could be one of my last posts before I start a new blog.

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