During the last war I spent some time at Latrobe University and observed and eventually became involved in, an interesting departure in civic debate. It all stemmed from a nagging feeling I’d had for some time that I
wasn’t being heard; that despite angry letters to John Howard, protest marches and even (and I don’t blame anyone for this one) drunken rants in bars, that when the bombs did fall down on Baghdad I was powerless. I remember quite clearly switching on the news on the day that hostility commenced and wanting to smash the TV I didn’t – it wasn’t mine.
No, what happened at Latrobe was this. The toilets, walls, doors and desks came alive with discordant opinion. The building started to speak. An unremarkable, grey university complex became a sounding board for unelected but not uninformed voices. I waded in with some snippets of my own.
I started off in biro but after a while brought in a black texta pen especially. Some days, when locking a toilet cubicle door I looked round at a gleaming white canvas, I let out a delighted chuckle. Invariably on my return a few days later there would appear scrawled answers to my loaded political questions. What surprised me was the standard, the real debate was not on the letters page of The Age or the Herald Sun, but scribbled on tables by students, lecturers and canteen workers.
The problem of graffiti is nothing new for the residents of Melbourne. Victorian opposition leader Robert Doyle feels it “eroded community confidence by making local neighbourhoods look derelict and run down”. The streets have been a publishing house for the disaffected for years of course.
Spray can rhetoric has moved in along side logos and chalkboard menus in most neighbourhoods, perhaps as a result of space being disproportionately divided and autonomously decorated. Le Cor busier once unleashed plans to turn Paris into a city of concrete tenements. Cities are constantly at the mercy of vogue-ish architectural designs. The Melbourne suburb of Reservoir, for example, yanks at the soul and leaves one gasping for air.
Fitzroy’s brick is a typical Melbourne patchwork of urban graffiti. The side of one house in Westgarth Street veers from the surreal, ‘Run Cyril!! Ratmandu! Ooh, it pinches’; to the banal, ‘freedom is a state of mind’; to the inspired, ‘Even dishwashers get the blues.’ On neighbouring Gore Street there’s an ongoing dialogue on the heavy rock band Kiss, with the faded date 7/1/81 indicating that this particular subject has crossed generations. The conclusion seems to be that ‘No Criss, no Kiss.’
There is the classic, ‘Howard kills babies’, late of Lygon Street, now half painted over. The branch of Kentucky Fried Chicken on Smith Street displays these choice nuggets; ‘Tumour/ chicken/maggot/combo – he inserted it slowly’. Around the corner, on Johnston Street, the question, ‘Whose land are you on?’ has received the recent answer, ‘George Bush’s!’
The spelling is generally excellent, and the words are mostly steered away from the language of hate, a dialect pointedly used by those elected for political capital.
The emphasis seems to be on rhetorical questions; ‘Who are the real prisoners?’ earnest potted philosophies; ‘the more you watch the less you live’ and strident mini essays from Cultural Studies 101; ‘Bomb the patriarchy, not Iraq’. It comes as a relief to see the continuing alien debate off Argyle Street; ‘the Martians are coming’ and ‘Watch the skies’ providing a telling counterpoint to this eternal problem.
Any train journey demonstrates the ubiquity of day-glo tagging. I must admit to finding this irritating in the same way I find skateboarding irritating and hooded tops tacky. If tagging is threatening to people it is probably its association with street culture – explored in magazines and web sites. I’m not a fan of these sub-cultural logos on the grounds of personal taste. Too many are mediocre and tagging seems to this reviewer based on a status system I’m probably too old to subscribe to.
However, the moral high ground these doodles afford local politicians is laughable. I’ve yet to see a derelict industrial site look any more run down for being coloured in. Local governments selling off public services being the only dereliction.
The state opposition pledged $22 million at the last election to clean up Melbourne’s streets, Mr Doyle analysing the problem as “nothing more than a contempt for public and private property.” Monash Council alone spends $180,000 a year erasing graffiti. Rail operator Connex has invested $13 million since 1999. Their spokesman Arthur Bruce explains away train delays by saying “Graffiti causes headaches to us because we have to take trains out of service to clean them.”
My new hobby has been more rewarding than my previous contribution to democracy – a lonely X on a ballot paper. But a word of warning: the penalty for this type of behaviour in Victoria is an on the spot fine of $100 or $2000 for crossing train tracks.
Add to this the Liberal Party election promise of a ban from driving of up to 2 years for repeat offenders (no, I can’t see the connection either), that’s a pretty hefty deterrent against getting out the crayons. That is until you compare it to China, where culprits are stripped naked and flogged.