Sophia Street and Lane, Surry Hills on Saturday, 18 April 2020
This street runs parallel to Foveaux Street. It is long and narrow, going downhill towards the CBD. The upper bit is mainly residential with some terrace houses and small workshops. When I park the car two very young women leave one of the houses, chatting and laughing as if there is no concern in the world. Next door a small poodle is barking and sticking its head through a gap in the fence.
On the other side of the street is an empty lot, asphalted in the middle and weeds growing around it, enclosed by a rusty wire fence. Such places are odd these days when every patch of land is allocated for property development.
Sophia Lane forms a crescent off Sophia Street. One entry into this lane is pleasant. The corner house has a mural painting with a kookaburra and gum trees, almost repeating the gum tree in the street. But the other end looks dark and dingy, the type where you would dump a dead body in the movies. Even in bright daylight, I feel apprehensive walking into it. Absurdly, in the most unpleasant part of this dark lane, the Council deemed it necessary to paint a patch of grey over the wall to cover some pink tagging, thus ruining the original brick. As I have observed before with other patched-up graffiti, they’ve left a bit of it sticking out. Maybe this is because the ones doing these types of painting jobs used to be the people “working for the dole”. It could be a kind of civil sabotage.
Crossing Waterloo Street into the next part is like being transported back into the past, reinforced by the present situation that hardly anybody is around, hardly any cars. The street consists almost entirely of the backside of warehouses and factories. The midday sun brightens the street. I walk by myself, there is nobody else. Maybe it’s not like in the past but our new future? Two dumped chairs are facing each other in a silent conversation. There are several dead rats. The sight makes me think of the plague in Sydney about a hundred years ago. Do you get a disease from going past a dead rat covered with blowflies? I try not to look at them.
Against the wall
Later, when I study my photos more closely, I discover that Sophia Street is the one I photographed in 2001 for my work Windows at Night. I called it ‘Chirico’s Lane’ as it reminded me of Giorgio de Chirico’s Piazza d’Italia paintings. Recently, I thought about this photo and realised that I didn’t know where I had taken it. And here I am. Another random discovery.
Sophia near Terry Street, April 2020
Sophia Street aka Chirico’s Lane, from ‘Windows at Night’, 2001