Maud Lane, Marrickville on Sunday, 8 March 2020
On my way to Maud Lane, I passed by Maude Street which isn't on any map. It runs alongside the Braddock Playground, with only grass and bushes and a sandstone arch leading into it. Someone is meditating under the arch.
The street turns around a corner and becomes Maud Lane. It runs along the railway track. The first view around the bend is a section with rubbish bins, a container with pallets piled on top, and a truck in front of a low white building. Squashed cardboard boxes, a battered suitcase and an abandoned shopping trolley are sitting right under a bent sign that tells everyone not to dump rubbish there. Is this ignorance, vandalism or civil disobedience?
The lane has workshops, garages and warehouses on both sides. Number 25 insists that the lane’s name is Maude with an ‘e’, defying the street directories’ spelling. It is empty and silent. Good to come on a Sunday.
Funny how I get excited by the sight of a rather ugly street. The feeling comes from something unexplainable, a vague memory of industrial streets in my home town Hamburg. But also from the fact that this place, like so many in Marrickville, is yet untouched by new apartment block developments. A couple of people are working. One is behind half-closed roller doors, and the other is driving a forklift from one end of the lane to the other. Apart from them, I am all alone. After heavy rain, the sun has come out and it’s warm.
While editing the photos I enjoy looking at all the details on the walls. Not so much the big elaborate graffiti, but the small scribbles, messages, colours, and objects leaning against them. In one section a few pieces of broken timber are leaning against a black wall. They look like words from an ancient language, like runes. Now, in August, five months later, they look to me like the “writing on the wall”, an ominous warning.
