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.

One lonely balloon

Elizabeth Lane, Redfern on Saturday, 11 April 2020

It’s Easter Saturday. Restrictions are reinforced over this long weekend. No travel too far from your own suburb. Not sure what too far is, but definitely nowhere outside of Sydney. They have roadblocks. You are only allowed to go out shopping, exercise, and whatever else the ‘absolutely necessary’ activities may be. Yesterday afternoon I drove to Pyrmont with Dimitri to walk at the waterfront. I imagined there would be random checks at the side of the road to ask where we were going. There were none. Even though I was behind a police car at a traffic light which then stopped at the side of the road around the corner as they do when they want to wave you down. But nothing happened. Otherwise I haven’t seen any police patrolling these inner suburbs. 

Apart from a few exceptions, I was so far going through the letter M. Out of necessity in these times, I have changed my system a bit and now try to find any street with a female name in my neighbourhood as it would be unwise to travel to a faraway suburb to take photos.

Today I went to ‘Breadfern’, the local organic bakery, to buy hot cross buns and a loaf of bread. Elizabeth Lane is nearby. It’s only a small stretch at the backside of Elizabeth Street, bordered by Redfern Lane and James Street. 

It’s a sparkling, sunny day, it almost feels happy. When I turn around the corner from Redfern Lane, I hear music coming from an open garage door. It sounds familiar. I know the song well from listening to ‘Triple J’ some years ago. They played it often, so I am able to decipher the words “I’ve got a strange disease”. How appropriate. I couldn’t remember who it was by. When I looked it up later, I realised that I never took notice of the name. It was a Canadian pop music duo named Prozzäk. 

Inside the small courtyard from where the music comes, I see a young couple. He is doing sit-ups. Otherwise, there is nobody in this lane. The wind plays with a yellow balloon on the ground, blowing it back and forth. 

At the other end of Elizabeth Lane is the backside of the warehouse where Damien Minton lives and where he occasionally holds his Sunday arvo art salons. He just recently posted on Instagram of his little adventures in the back lane, observed in isolation from his window. The old, broken piano, he had posted a photo of, is still there. I think he made the comment that art is a victim of the Coronavirus. There is more music coming from inside another place. 

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.