Alice Street and Alice Ave, Newtown on Friday, 24 April 2020
At the corner of Alice Street and Edgeware Road is “The Wolf and Honeybee” café. It still has the old writing in blue on white from its former life, ‘Milk Bar Fruit & Veg”. The colour at the last bit of the g has disappeared. The café is closed.
I feel I see more people in sports gear than ever before. Australia - since I know it - has always been remarkable for people wearing jogging pants, gym tights, tiny training shorts and singlets in urban streets. Now it seems to have become the general street gear.
A short walk from the street corner is Alice Avenue. There is a small truck with a big tin barrel, flat at the bottom, a door at the back, and a window at the front. A bit like a gypsy caravan. Both walls on each side of this little street have paintings, one is graffiti, the other a circus scene with skilful patches of graffiti in between. It’s unclear if they belong to the painting or have been inserted afterwards.
I vaguely remember from my early days in Sydney to have visited a factory or warehouse in Newtown, which was converted into artists’ studios. A friend had a studio there in the early 2000s. I have a dim memory that they were in Alice Street at the King Street end. I even think to recognise the spot. Only it is now a huge apartment block with the name ‘Industri’. That would make sense, meaning that they pulled the old premises down to build this one.
Now that I have become quite familiar with Sydney, the places visited in the first months or even years appear in my memory like dreamscapes without being able to locate them properly.
When I look for former factories in Alice Street on the internet, I find ‘The Automatic Totalisators Ltd.’ They produced ticket issuing machines, mainly for race courses. There is a group photo of the workers with the buildings behind from 1921. I am sure for a moment that I’ve found my factory, but then I see the address and an aerial map from 1949 of the complex. It was at the other end of the street and had gone a long time before I came to Sydney.
Alice Street and Alice Lane on Sunday, 26 April 2020
Two days later, I am back in Alice Street. My friend has told me in the meantime that her studio was somewhere else. But I am still obsessed with that factory. So I’ve continued to search and found a record with a photo of the PMU Food Products Ltd, established around 1934. (PMU stands for ‘Pick Me Up’). It looks familiar to me.
I also found a record of the Bradford Cotton Mills, applying to the Newtown Council for the construction of a factory in Alice Street in 1933 which was approved.
I wish I could ask the residents of the older houses in the neighbourhood what was there before the new apartments. But in these times of anxiety and distancing, it seems weird to stop strangers in the street and even more so to ring doorbells.
I move on to Alice Lane. Here a back gate is painted and decorated as if it is the stage of a circus with a red curtain and decorated pillars. Apparently belonging to the same property, a whacky house with an asymmetric design and bright primary colours is looking over the wall.
On another wall, I read 'Aqui Te Espero', ‘I wait for you here’. It makes me feel sad. Everything takes on another meaning during this Pandemic. I read later that it is an official mural by the street artist Nadia Hernandez. It hasn’t been created for this situation.
A bit further along, where Alice Lane turns right, a flat cardboard cat is propped up on a fence. Two Chinese workers are having a smoko break at the backside of a shop. It must be an 'essential' business, or they’re just cleaning up.
The lane continues, crossing another street. The chimneys at Sydney Park are visible in the distance. The quietness around me is not one of the 21st Century on a sunny Sunday in a busy neighbourhood. I feel to have stepped out of time, not quite into the past but somewhere ‘sideways’.
Mural by Hugues Sineux
Aqui Te Espero by Nadia Hernandez
