Epilogue

Roslyn Street, Kings Cross, 7 June 2021

In the final month before my exhibition, I realised that I cannot visit all of Sydney’s streets with female names. I would have liked to go to Sandy Glen, Nadine Close, Kerry Avenue or Kim Street because I know women with these names who might possibly visit the exhibition and should find a photo with their name. But this would have meant to do many more trips to far-away suburbs. Looking at some of them on Google maps also told me that these streets are mostly residential and very similar to each other. I took some screenshots from the map, but that was not the original idea. So the most logical moment to stop was with the exhibition Random Discoveries in April 2021.

There were also a few streets in my vicinity that I had missed. One of them was Roslyn Street in Kings Cross. This street has a lot of memories for me as I lived nearby in Macleay Street when I had come to Sydney in 1997. It marks the beginning of my life in this city. That’s why I want to include it here at the end of this journal.

In those days the street was busy by day and night. There was the Café Amsterdam at the corner to a small lane. Smoking was still allowed in cafés and bars then. In the ‘Amsterdam’ people often smoked other stuff than just cigarettes. Next door was the Baron’s, a bar to chill out late at night. On the other side of the street was the Piccolo Bar, an iconic café since 1952. The owner Vittorio himself was always present, making cups of coffee and chatting with customers.

My visit today is not the first one since the heady days of the late 1990s. I’ve been here many times and know that the ‘Amsterdam’ and ‘Barons’ are long gone. Instead, there is a commercial building by the Architects Durbach Block which won the Harry Seidler Award. It is impressive but somehow cold and impersonal. At least on my last visits, Vittorio was still there, sitting outside of his café and talking to his friends.

This time, after lock-outs and lockdowns the street looks sad. The Piccolo Bar is closed, and newspapers boarding up the windows. I heard that Vittorio has retired and wants to sell it.

It is the beginning of June 2021 and I don’t know yet that the longest lockdown is still to come.

Know my name

March and April 2021

By March I was mainly hunting for street names. My exhibition was going to open on 17th April at Articulate project space in Leichhardt. Over the months of working on the project, I became more and more aware that the accumulation of female street names is a powerful statement as such. This had to manifest itself visually in the exhibition. I had mostly taken photos of the things I encountered in the streets and the signs just occasionally. It was only a few weeks ago that I realised I needed many more of those. I visited Penrith and Fairfield, Chester Hill, and Greenacre to name a few because there are clusters of female names in these suburbs. I think they were just taken out of the hat to name the many new streets in the sprawling residential developments over the last 30 years or so.

Streets named in the 19th century mostly refer to Colonial interests. Elizabeth Street which goes from the CBD to Zetland is named after the first wife of Governor Macquarie. Many of the countless Victoria roads and streets in Sydney would have been named after Queen Victoria, among them the one in Marrickville. There was a push from the Inner West Council last year to rename such streets with Aboriginal names.

But apart from Victoria and a few princesses, the naming of the older streets took place on a more domestic level. From what I could find in the online history archives, they were named after relatives of early property developers. One of them was Joshua Josephson, the son of a convict, who became a musician, a solicitor and the Mayor of Sydney at some stage. In Newtown, many streets were named after his daughters, his stepsister and his brother’s wife.

I found only one street with a first and a surname: Lilian Fowler Place in Marrickville. She was Australia’s first female mayor, serving as the mayor of Newton from 1937 to 1939. It seemed to show that Sydney doesn’t acknowledge the achievement of women in their naming of places. A historian pointed out later that some women may be mentioned only by their surname. But this is a half-hearted homage. Who would know that Lawson Avenue in Marrickville is named after Louisa Lawson? A poet, writer and feminist and the mother of Henry Lawson. But this is an entirely different area of research. Instead, I took the liberty to claim some of the street names as female, when they might have been someone’s surname, a flower or a place.

For the exhibition, I installed rows of photos with street signs running along the gallery walls like roads. Another part was to put a second set of photos into alphabetically labelled boxes. Visitors were encouraged to look for their name or for any woman’s name who has a meaning to them and take the photo home.

Art lives in small streets

Mary Place, Paddington on Friday, 21 Feb 2020

I went to visit some of the galleries for my Saturday gallery tour. One of them is in Mary Place, so I took the opportunity to explore this street. It’s narrow and divided into two parts. The gallery used to be called Mary Place Gallery, now the name is Defiance, a branch of the Newtown gallery of the same name. At the moment there is an exhibition upstairs with drawings by Kevin Connor. He is 88 years old and according to what I’ve read about him, he could be called a flâneur without necessarily using this term himself. He observes and draws the everyday activities of people in the city. One of the drawings was probably done at the Tropicana in Victoria Street which I mentioned in my last post.

Kevin Connor, drawing. Photo taken from exhibition at Deviance Gallery, Mary Place

Around 1958 the Barry Stern Gallery operated here in Mary Place. This was in the days when Paddington was grungy and a no-go zone for ‘respectable’ people. Today most parts of the street look affluent and well-kept. From the odd mix of buildings, you can still recognise the former working-class environment. One young, smart-casually dressed woman walks along, smoking a cigarette and talking on her phone. Another stands at the corner of a shop, also smoking a cigarette. Across is the other property Barry Stern had bought in the 1950s. He converted it into a gallery by joining three terrace houses. His name and founding date are imprinted on the pavement.

Graffiti in May Lane

May Street and May Lane, St Peters on Sunday, 23 Feb 2020

I often drive through May Street when I go to Marrickville, and I took photos in the area for other projects in the past. Tugi and Dianna have their framing workshop Graphic Art Mount in May Lane where at least half of Sydney’s artists get their exhibition framing done, including me. May Lane is known for its graffiti. Tugi made the best out of this fact and invited street artists a few years back to do graffiti on the walls officially, like a proper exhibition with opening nights. There is still graffiti everywhere.

Today the shop is closed because it’s Sunday. A fair amount of people pass through the lane. Some are doing a phone video with a young woman in yellow. Some walk their dog, and some come from St Peters train station. 

May Street has a large lawn with some trees, a small playground, and a football oval. There is another green strip named “May Street Playground”. It’s a tiny bit of grass with a couple of trees and two benches. Someone left a French novel, torn jeans, and a towel.

There are artists’ studios in a red brick building and still a lot of old workshops and traders. Sadly, at a closer look, many of them have a ‘For Lease’ sign displayed. At the Country and Town Hotel end of May Street, they are just finishing the WestConnex road works of this section. 

Olive…

…and Welcome

Update on 19 June: When I edited my photos from this day, I looked up some names of the graffiti writers. One of them is called ‘Land Writer(s)’ which is an Aboriginal street art duo, making art about indigenous concerns. Most entries I’ve found were from around 2016. There was a Sydney Morning Herald article featuring a piece they did in Brisbane about black death in custody.