Angel

Angel Street, Newtown on Friday, 5 March 2021

This street has a lot of variety, considering that it’s only small. Here is the old, derelict factory which you can see from the platform of Newtown Station. It must be one of the last abandoned industrial sites in Sydney still standing untouched. Further down is a community garden before the street turns into a footpath with a village feel to it. I imagine the two empty shops at a corner to have been the butcher and the baker in days long ago. The news agency was in the next street. I recognise it from the peeling ‘Daily Telegraph’ sign.

The fence at the end of the world

Emma Street, Leichhardt on Sunday, 14 February 2021

I have noticed Emma Street a while ago. At the upper end, it feels to me like stepping into a surreal film setting. The world seemingly ends here at a wooden fence, just as the German folk saying went when I was a child. This part of Leichhardt is on a hill before the land slopes down into a valley, so that from a certain angle you only see blue sky above the fence. The deserted colonial house with its verandah on stilts contributes to the bizarre scene.

Succulents and Pomegranates

Alexandra Road, Glebe on Monday, 1 February 2021

Alexandra goes down to Jubilee Park at the bay. People grow their hobby plants in the front gardens. It’s a hot day. A chubby young man in pink shorts and a fancy hat is walking on the footpath and singing very loudly to himself. He has earphones on and he’s singing along with a song, completely out of tune.

Is this Emily?

Emily Street, Leichhardt on Saturday, 30 January 2021

Emily is small and quiet. It runs off Catherine Street near Parramatta Road. People have used the nature strip on the footpath to grow plants. A small sunflower has lost all its petals and some seeds and looks like a sad little girl in a green dress. Maybe it’s Emily?

Down the "Olive"

Caroline Street, Balmain on Thursday, 21 January 2021

Caroline Street has a deserted-looking 60s block of flats. But if I took a photo, somebody would have watched me from inside through the dusty windows and broken blinds. And while I am thinking this, someone actually does come bursting out through the front door. Instead of asking the expected suspicious questions, he greets me very friendly like an old mate and rushes away. There is another almost derelict house where a down-at-heel-looking woman just enters. Otherwise, most places look neat.

Caroline Lane leads down to the former Colgate Palmolive factory at the waterfront. It has been converted into luxury apartments. The factory was established at this location in 1923. Local residents made up most of the staff. According to interviews with former employees ‘everyone had a cousin down the “Olive”’.

Ref: Lackey and Vardabasso, Down the ‘Olive: A memory of Colgate-Palmolive in Balmain, New South Wales, 1994.

Time Capsule 2003

Amelia Street, Waterloo on Monday, 30 March 2020

Yellow Night in Amelia Street from the series Night Cruise, 2003

Amelia Street in 2003

This is one of the streets I went to in 2003 when I first had the idea to record streets with female names. I didn’t continue then. Recently, I found some of the photos I took at the time. One of them was from my project Night Cruise.

Amelia Street is in the middle of the new apartment complex in Waterloo where an enormous factory ground used to be, spanning several blocks. When I came to Sydney in 1997 it was deserted, still remaining like this for years. In 2003 there was the first apartment block on Lachlan Street at the end of Amelia. It must have been just about to be finished. A banner on the building fence read “Now Leasing”. Apart from this, the skyline was empty.

At the dead end of this short street was a scrap metal yard. In its place and beyond, is now the vast complex of a residential area with new streets and shops. The former office building, 24 Amelia Street, is still standing.

Three dingy little terraces are lingering on. Maybe abandoned by now. There are a lot of discarded household goods on the porches. A small lot next to them is empty, protected by a wooden fence with barbed wire on the top. At the corner is a luxury car dealer named ‘Prestige Connex’, which has been there for 28 years. Opposite were small white factory buildings and a take-away shop in 2003. Now apartment buildings have replaced them.

I observe all this from the car. It just doesn’t feel right anymore to loiter in the streets and take photos.

Metal Merchant in 2003

End of Amelia Street in 2020

2020

Ann Street, Surry Hills

2003

After that, I drive to Ann Street. This is the other one from which I’ve found a photo from 2003. It’s divided by Riley Street, leaving only a short dead-end bit at the highest end. The other longer part winds steeply downhill to Commonwealth Street. This is the neighbourhood of Ruth Park’s novel The Harp of the South. 

I have to come back here sometime in the future because today I am not getting out of the car. I park at the upper end from where I can see the crossing to Riley Street. It is 5 pm, business traffic hour, but there are almost no cars. Eery and silent. I recognise the corner where I took the photo in 2003 by the yellow railing along the footpath. It’s still yellow. The side of the building, a small terrace, is now painted a dark grey. Then it was a lighter colour and had the street sign screwed to the wall. In 2003 a few things were happening on that wall. There was a patch of white which presumably was supposed to cover some tagging. But maybe they forgot their ladder and couldn’t get high enough, as some red tagging still sneaked out at the top of that white patch. The council used to cover tags and graffiti with whatever colour. It never matched the walls. The white rectangle in Ann Street proved to be a suitable background for some more stencils, tags and writings.

I don’t think I can do this project any longer, as we are not supposed to leave our homes except for clearly defined purposes. Roaming streets, even by car, may not be part of this.

Maybe I can still do my own suburb Redfern on the way to the grocery and chemist shops?

Light my heart

Margaret Street and Lane, Newtown on Monday, 16 March 2020

I came here in a dampened mood, as on a Monday everything is worse about the Corona crisis than the week before. It’s now declared to be a pandemic. The day is grey and rainy. Margaret Street in Newtown is hidden in between a labyrinth of small streets, one-ways, dead-ends. It has some wall paintings and the most peculiar-looking apartment building, brick, maybe 50s with a gabled roof. Very narrow, wedged between a fence and an older house.

The street curves and where it does three bikes are parked side by side, a big one, a middle-sized and a tiny children’s bike. Reminds me of the three Bears from ‘Goldilocks’.

It is quiet. There aren’t many cars driving through, maybe because they don’t find it, as happened to me first. But some people are emerging from somewhere to go somewhere. A man is rummaging in the rubbish bins of the peculiar apartment block for glass bottles. The houses here have their own character: creative, environmentalist, neat, neglected or entirely absent.

Margaret Lane shows the backside of such places. There’s rubbish including chairs. Discarded chairs seem to become an accidental theme in these discoveries. 

Not quite "The Truman Show"

Myrtle Street, Marrickville on Sunday, 8 March 2020

This street has a row of residential houses on one side and small factory buildings on the other. Many family homes here are neatly renovated, especially the one at the corner coming from Victoria Road. In the sunlight breaking through clouds, it reminds me of the movie “The Truman Show”. Almost too perfect to be true.

I guess the neat houses belong to Europeans, maybe Portuguese or Greek. An old man is pottering around in front of his house, picking up some stray twigs. In the middle of the street is a stormwater canal, coming out from under the footpath on both sides. It has a sign that warns of sewage overflow. There are symbols to tell us: do not swim, do not sit here with a fishing line, and do not let a dog go here. I don’t think anyone would be tempted. A stale smell is wafting from the trickle of water.

One of the factories is a yoghurt manufacturer. Next, a mysterious old house with a rusty corrugated iron roof hides behind a wall and trees.

At the other end of Myrtle Street, I look over to a patch of green hedges and shrubs, a factory chimney and an old, tall house, a bit grander than the ones nearby. That’s where the pedestrian railway crossing is. It looks from far like a remnant from a bygone era. Another sign tells me that the street is subject to flooding.

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.

An unexpected history lesson

Victoria Street, Kings Cross and Darlinghurst on Thursday, 5 March 2020 

The photography class I am teaching at WEA was scheduled for the Kings Cross field excursion. We meet at the Victoria Street exit of Kings X station in spite of heavy rain. I suggest we could stay a while at the Tropicana Caffe and take photos through foggy windows with raindrops, like the American photographer Saul Leiter. Passing Kings Cross Hotel, there is an especially heavy downpour. We stop outside under an awning for shelter. While there, I try to get some specific colour fields into my photos. That was one of the assignments I gave the students: Follow a colour. We go on to the Tropicana in the Darlinghurst part of Victoria Street. This was the place where the international short film festival Tropfest started in 1993. By the time I had moved from Melbourne to Sydney in 1997 the festival had already spilled out into the street. Rows of chairs and a screen were put into Victoria Street next to the café. Later it moved to Centennial Park and then to Parramatta. The Tropicana Caffe dates back to the 1980s and was, some say it still is, a place where local artists were hanging out to chat with friends and develop creative ideas. Or sit by themselves and draw. I remember it from the late 1990s when it still had its original style. Later it was renovated and lost, in my view, some of its flair. Today the creatives present are the students of my photography class. But sadly, no foggy glass panes.

Later we arrive at the Kings Cross part of Victoria Street near Orwell Street. The rain hadn’t stopped all day. By 4 pm it's dark like on a winter’s day. The lit shop windows, the fading light, the yellowing leaves on the plane trees give the street a slightly European autumnal mood. A slim, young man stands in the middle of the street next to a rubbish bin. It looks "compromised", marked with black and yellow security tape. It accidentally matches the man’s runners. He is guiding the traffic around the bin. After a while, he abandons his mission and tells us some of the histories of the immediate environment.

Here are the Butler Stairs, built in 1869 to create access between the higher and wealthier Potts Point and the lower and poorer neighbourhood of Woolloomooloo. That’s where the servants and maids lived who worked for the rich people up on the ridge, climbing up the 103 steps possibly several times a day. I’m disappointed to learn that the stairs are not named after the servants, but after an Irish draper called James Butler. He was an alderman on the Sydney Council and instrumental in the building of the stairs.

Then our new tour guide tells us about Juanita Nielsen who had lived nearby at 202 Victoria Street. She was a journalist and activist in the 1970s, fighting against demolition, redevelopment plans, and the forceful eviction of residents in Kings Cross. She disappeared in 1975. This mystery has never been solved, but it is assumed that she was kidnapped and murdered.

Another local resident of Victoria Street was the Green Ban activist Mick Fowler who was fighting for the same cause as Juanita. He has a plaque in his memory at the side of the stairs.

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.

Sketchy notes about streets named Mabel

Sunday, 2 February 2020

Today is the first day of my project Random Discoveries. The plan is to visit randomly chosen streets of Sydney and find out what they can tell me.

But how would I make my choices?

There is a worldwide community of urban investigators. Some drift aimlessly through the city. Others follow an algorithm to find places they otherwise wouldn’t go to.

I’m going to visit streets with female names in honour of the female street explorers past and present.

I start with the letter M.

Mabel Street, Hurstville

Hot Sunday, a sleepy street with old trees. Not many people around. Two kids are running into their house. A young man is driving into a carport. Two people are talking on the footpath, and someone is working in front of his garage. Otherwise quiet, and not many cars. But the ones coming through are fast and very impatient. 

Mabel Street, Kingsgrove

It’s a very deserted street, no old trees. Some houses might date back to the 1930s, while others are new. Some are just about to be finished. Almost nobody around. One property with tall white garden gnomes attracts my attention. There is a man working in his garage, drilling. He couldn’t have heard me over the noise. Nevertheless, after I have taken a photo, he comes to his fence and looks suspiciously around. I get into my car and leave.