Play & Playgrounds

As I sat in the swing at Cambridge Park in Collingwood, making notes for a previous blog post, I never would have imagined it would be controversial. I sat in the swing because it was lunchtime, and there was nowhere else to sit in the small inner city park. It was also pleasant to swing gently back and forth; like a rocking chair or cradle, it is suitable for all ages. This post is about playgrounds, play, and relaxation and who is entitled to enjoy them. It is about playing in the urban environment; how is play designed for, and who is excluded?

The original swing at Cambridge Park

Public playgrounds, like public seating, are adjacent to public sculptures, as public sculptures are frequently used for one or both. Skateboard riders use Petrus Spronk’s Architectural Fragment. When I was a child, I climbed to the top of Peter Corlett’s Tarax Play Sculpture (for health and safety reasons, children aren’t allowed to do that now). Recently, I saw and climbed on Mike Hewson’s dangerous-looking sculpture/playground in Southbank.

Hewson’s playground, with its improvised and scattered appearance, looks like so many contemporary art exhibitions. It was also the least prescriptive of playgrounds; you have to work out if you want to use it rather than follow the dictates of a path. It was also less dangerous than it appeared; what looked like Southbank’s typical granite pavers were actually soft and rubbery. (Read Sanné Mestrom, Senior Lecturer, DECRA Fellow, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, on “This new ‘risky’ playground is a work of art – and a place for kids to escape their mollycoddling parents”)

Mike Hewson’s playground in Southbank

The Cambridge Park controversy was that the swing wasn’t a playground for just for little children. Now, the council is holding public consultations about options for adding traditional children’s playground equipment. I would have been unlikely to have sat in the swing if it was next to a four-way rocker or other children’s play equipment, for in our culture, children’s playgrounds exclude older single males and females.

“Will no one think of the children?!”

The online discourse about Cambridge Park exposes many prejudices, including those about who is allowed to play, what children need to play, and who can safely associate with children. These prejudices also affect the politics of public space. Considering demographic equality of access and declining birthrates, is the large amount of space dedicated to children’s playgrounds, particularly in small inner-city parks, currently justified?

There are anti-fun ideas in our culture that only permit children to play as part of a developmental aid to be cut off at a certain age. Should play be restricted to age? Why are they not given room to disport themselves? Should older children and adults only be allowed to exercise and play organised sports and games?

Thinking about the playgrounds in my area, little kids use public gym equipment as frequently as adults do. Next to the Coburg Senior Citizens Centre, there is exercise equipment for seniors, but it looks like a playground, only safer. I have previously written a blog post about the Wilson Avenue Urban Bouldering and noted how little kids found their own use for this adult play equipment.

They might be safe, controlled, and tested, but do playgrounds help kids’ culture, and are they more fun than a cardboard box or a ball?

Public exercise equipment for seniors in Coburg

Geelong Gaol Museum

Geelong Gaol Museum is now the National Crime & Justice Museum and it tells the history of prisons in Australia from within a historic location, the old Geelong Gaol. Australia needs a national prison museum because of the foundational role of prisons in Australian history. It also has a remarkable collection of prison art.

The Geelong Gaol Museum is becoming everything that Pentridge should have been. It tells the story of the state’s prisons from the prison hulks to the present day. Significantly, it has all four suits of the Kelly gang’s armour. There are displays of prison uniforms, collections of shivs, infamous prisoners, and more.

Its displays do things that have been neglected or ignored at Pentridge. What has happened to the original hanging beams in the state — recognition that gaols, especially Victorias, are not a solution but an expensive part of the problem — recognition of Indigenous prisoners.

Geelong Gaol is a cross-shaped, three-storey stone building with stripped-down neo-classical details, including the arched tops of windows on the ground floor and rectangular on the upper floors. All the floors and most cells and other rooms are accessible to visitors, including the old prison hospital. 

I wrote earlier in the year in a post about touring Pentridge Prison’s D Division about finding little enjoyment in carceral tourism, so I should explain why I’m doing it again. I am writing a book about prisoners who are also artists; it is a logical move for an arts writer who is now also a true crime writer. I had chapters about a couple of prison artists I was working on for my book,The Picasso Ransom. I didn’t include them because they didn’t fit with the other stories of art thefts, forgeries, vandalism, censorship and other criminal charges.

Geelong Gaol Museum has a lot to offer for prison art. There is a collection of prints by celebrity and stand-over man Mark “Chopper” Read. It also has several murals painted by Indigenous prisoners, including a 12-metre-long mural in the recreation room. It was the first painting with the TAFE program (developed at Kagan TAFE). An American and a Japanese prisoner also participated, hence the mix of styles. There is a kangaroo/crocodile to represent one prisoner’s Arnhem Land heritage. The rabbit is shown in the talons of an eagle, the creator deity Bunjil, for colonising rabbits were first introduced to Australia in Geelong and have been a feral pest ever since.

I had been misinformed by an over-excited media writing about a restored Revel Cooper (Noongar) mural at the Geelong Gaol. Cooper’s cell was also painted, but it has been repainted. His waterfall scene in the prison library is all that remains. Cooper’s mural hasn’t been restored, but it urgently needs it. Brush-tip stippling leaves onto painted trees at the top of a waterfall.

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I’ve only seen a few photos of Cooper’s paintings, but I know his importance in the Noongar Art Movement (aka Carrolup School) and urban Indigenous art history. In the 1970s, Cooper painted several murals in Fremantle Prison, Sacred Heart Church in Mount Barker and the Aboriginal Medical Service in Redfern. I don’t know if any have survived.

The museum has more prison art that is not on display. It’s curator, Rob Wynne, showed me more of their collection. Two prisoners, both artists and both Indigenous, Mark Hammersley and Nick Kupetsky, were assigned to pack up the prison for decommissioning. Hammersley even recorded the empty prison in a sketch-like painting.

Wynne tells me of his plans to expand the recognition of Indigenous prisoners. The old Geelong Gaol has plenty of empty cells to expand its exhibitions.

Locked Up in Pentridge D Division

I went on the “Locked Up in Pentridge D Division” on Saturday. The tour is led by former Prison Officer Dennis Bear, with former bank robber and former prisoner Doug Morgan providing colourful anecdotes and humour. Doug Morgan and his identical twin brother Pete were known as “the After Dark Bandit” in the 1970s because the police hadn’t worked out there were two of them. Both men were familiar with D Division when it was a working prison. Dennis Bear gave a short history of Pentridge and executions there, but mainly, the guides concentrated on what they knew best: the day-to-day operation of the prison in the 70s and 80s.

Doug Morgan , Katrin Strohl, Dennis Bear

The 90-minute tour takes you into D Division, where there are condemned observation cells, more cells, still more cells, and an exercise yard. D Division is a three-storey granite (bluestone) building, a prison within a prison. It was used for remand, assessment, and high-risk prisoners. The architecture is a stripped-down neo-classical without the decorative elements. The building’s cross-design floor plan is like a cathedral with cells instead of pews. Seeing and feeling the physicality of the small cells, the heavy cell doors, the iron stairs and walkways, the solid stone of the buildings and the small concrete exercise yard.

At the end of the tour, there was plenty of time to take photographs and talk further with the guides. I didn’t get any more photographs of prison art or even prison graffiti as D Division has been repainted, except for the exercise yards, which are in a partially demolished state. The building hasn’t been properly preserved, and it is set up principally for wine storage now, but the tour’s main attraction is the authenticity of its guides.

This was the second tour of Pentridge I’ve been on. The first was just after the prison was decommissioned and included several buildings that have since been demolished, including the notorious Jika Jika/K Division. There are several Pentridge tours: the Lantern Ghost tour of D Division, the National Trust tours of B Division, and the D Division Bluestone College of Knowledge tour. And it is best to check where your tour is leaving from, unlike what I did.

Incredibly, there were tours of Pentridge when it was a working prison in the 1900s, with a Melbourne guidebook promising “a courteous warder will show him the cells, the exercise yards, the solitary confinement rooms, the kitchens, workshops, and school-room; in short, the whole multifarious details of life in such a place be unfolded to him, and he will spend an afternoon full of interest, though somewhat marred to reminiscence by the haunting memory of an occasional face of revolting criminal type.” (Quoted in Denton Prout and Fred Feely 50 Years Hard – the story of Pentridge Gaol from 1850 to 1900)

I’m not a fan of carceral tourism. I prefer to go to an art gallery, but as a near neighbour to Pentridge for decades and because I’m currently writing a book about prison art, I felt I should go on one of the tours. Also, full disclosure: the Bluestone College of Knowledge generously offered me a free ticket in return for a promise to write about the tour. The Bluestone College of Knowledge is run by Katrin Strohl and Dr Atalanti Dionysus.

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A year of art crimes in Australia

Notes and links about recent Australian art crimes in the last year. Since the release of my book, The Picasso Ransom, there have been more stolen and forged art. I am not considering writing another book because I’d need more scoops than an ice cream parlour, more confessions than a Catholic Church and more leads than a rock band.

New information was revealed about two of the crimes I wrote chapters about. Following up on the stolen Nataraja, the NGA returned to India; more looted art purchased by NGA Director Ron Radford was returned, this time to Cambodia. Serious questions need to be asked about the idea of a national gallery where loot and plunder are routinely displayed and what can replace it. And there is more to come about corrupt gallery director Ronald Cole, money laundering for a bikie gang.

Indigenous Art continues to be exploited, stolen, destroyed and faked. At WA Art Gallery, there was a protest about the destruction of the ancient petroglyphs on the Burrup Penisula (read my blog post). ABC reports thousands of dollars worth of “Indigenous artworks stolen from outside Arlpwe Art and Culture Centre in Central Australia” and that an Echidna quill necklace made by Aunty Jeanette James was stolen from the “Difficult Terrain: Contemporary Tasmanian Jewellery” exhibition at Rosny Park. The Canberra Times reports that six watercolour paintings by Albert Namatjira were stolen from a private residence. And reporter Chris Griffith declares ‘Fake’ AI Indigenous Art Rampant. This last story is particularly concerning because there is nothing in existing legislation stopping AI systems from exploiting existing Indigenous images to create fakes.

Of course, the statue of Captain Cook was once again vandalised in the lead-up to Australia Day (aka Invasion Day) hours ahead of when the council’s hired guards watching over it. Unlike previous years when only paint was used, the bronze statue was ripped off its plinth at the ankles, a favourite tactic of copper thieves, but unlike the copper thieves, the statue was left where it fell. “The Colony Will Fall” was spray painted on the plinth.

$60K worth of art, including an Annette Bezor painting, was stolen, and a hotel room was trashed at Adelaide Lucent Art House in Stirling. Also, in Adelaide, a heartless thief walked out of the Lyell McEwin Hospital’s cardiology unit with Kelly Batsiokis’s Wally the Galah. Walking out with stolen art, even a 1m square painting, is the most common way thieves steal art. CCTV was no deterrent, and although the man had been arrested, the painting was not recovered.

I doubt this is an exhaustive list; there were probably more art thefts and vandalism of art in the last year that I haven’t heard about.

Ghosts of Architecture

Every building in Melbourne is haunted.

In the nineteenth century, with their earnest necromancy, the Victorians tried to commune with the dead. Architects were mediums for the spirits of the deceased, creating many architectural revivals: French Revival, Gothic Revival, Neo-classical, Neo-Babylonian, and Neo-Romanesque. All these new versions, like Hollywood histories, resemble more a contrived fantasy than reality.

All these styles and more revivals can all be found in the vast, once-one-of-the-grandest city in the world, Melbourne. Every building is haunted by ghosts, as solid, hungry and real as they ever will or can be. Ghosts of past tenants, ghost signs advertising previous businesses and the ghosts of unrealised futures, catering to yet-to-be-realised needs.

All these ghosts of past styles haunt all those who inhabit them. These ghosts determine how the building will be used and how to live, work, or rest. The more solid the building, the more desperate its occupants were to enforce the ghostly wishes.

What kind of future was imagined when they built this house? And did those dreams ever come to pass? What were they expecting to do on the balcony? The love scene from Romeo and Juliet or a Royal/Papal appearance? What did they expect from the birdbath with four leopard heads around its rim?

Some exorcisms have been attempted in the name of the absolute purity of the distilled spirit of high modernism — an antiseptic attempt to extinguish previous ghosts. Decorations became a euphemism for the blasphemies of occult symbolism. Now, we have sought to replace ghosts with something less frightening, to protect and isolate them with quotation marks, parody and sarcasm.

And we are still haunted by the architectural ghosts of the Roman Empire.

Still, there are more than enough ghosts in Melbourne, and we, its inhabitants, are the possessed. All the ghosts and legends of “Marvellous Melbourne” have been absorbed by the ever-growing onion city’s suburban streets. They shape our daily movements and determine the limits of our imagination.

Even into the 1970s and 80s, Melbourne had the ghost town potential of a former mining boom.

“What ghosts?” You are asking yourself.

2. The Possessed

Have you ever seen a ghost? “No, not I, but my grandmother.” Now, you see, it’s just so with me too. I haven’t seen any, but my grandmother had her running between her feet all sorts of ways, and out of confidence in our grandmother’s honesty, we believe in the existence of ghosts.

But had we no grandfather then, and did they not shrug their shoulders every time our grandmothers told us about their ghosts?

Max Stirner The Ego and Its Own

Max Stirner calls the ideas haunting minds, spirits, spooks or ghosts. Hoping to exorcise these ghosts, the radical Hegelian philosopher argues there is a psychological relationship with the idea of the state, God, humanity, all ideals, etc. It is a relationship of possession and rejection for Stirner rebels against the alien identity imposed.

As if there weren’t enough ghosts on the land stolen by Batman and Fawkner. I am writing this blog on Wurundjeri country, a land once marked by scar trees.

These ghosts still stand and won’t lie down easily.

Banksy and the Stolen Girl

Banksy and the Stolen Girl is the story of the theft of Banksy’s stencil called “The Sad Girl”. The stencil was on the exit door of the Bataclan Theatre in Paris, the door through which many concertgoers escaped the massacre by terrorists in 2015 when 90 people were killed and 413 were injured — a stencil that quickly became as famous and as unsalable as Oscar Wilde’s tomb … so, you’ve stolen Wilde’s tomb and are fencing it out of the back of a truck, “want to buy some artistic marble?” But, I digress…

It is a well-told, thought-provoking story of an art theft. A transnational police investigation with many twists turns, and surprises to keep you thinking and talking about it long after it is finished. It is backed up with good footage and interviews: police, street art experts and some criminals.

The documentary does leave things out, reducing the number of criminals involved to five. BBC News reports that eight men have been sentenced for the 2019 theft, a few more than were mentioned in the documentary. Three men involved in transporting the door to Italy were left out to keep the story tight.

It is more important to hear from one of the thieves, their fence, and the ex-partner of another thief, even if some of the interviewees are not to be trusted. They show the planning and how there was no organised crime mastermind behind the theft.

The quartet of thieves and fence could move stolen cars and motorcycles, but the most famous Banksy in France was a giant step up. However, the thieves were too stupid to realise how out of their league their ambitions were. Their audacity is matched by their stupidity and machismo, both of which prove their undoing.

Stealing art ignores how difficult it is to sell any art. Stealing famous art, like Banksy’s “The Sad Girl” on the exit door of the Bataclan Theatre, is easy, but selling it is impossible. Who would want it? A wealthy criminal who could afford to buy a real Banksy that he could show off to his friends, who are so trustworthy they would never betray him? Get real.

The stupidity of many art thieves cannot be underestimated; consider the trio of stupid thieves who robbed the New Norica Mission in WA, the thief in Queensland who stole what he thought was a Cezanne or the number of art thieves who return the stolen art within a week of having stolen it.

Banksy and the Stolen Girl, 2023, Italian, 53m, a documentary by Edoardo Anselmi (on SBS).

BAD Sydney Crime Writers Festival

The BAD Sydney Crime Writers Festival at the NSW State Library feels like an odd event for Black Mark – Melbourne Art and Culture Critic, to have a blog post about. But apart from the panel I was on about “Art crimes in life and fiction”, there was also a panel about “The Arts behind bars”. It was also another excuse to promote my book, The Picasso Ransom and other stories about art and crime in Australia.

“Art crimes in life and fiction” was facilitated by Dr Pamela James, an art historian at the Western Sydney University researching art crimes. Dr James appears in The Mission, a documentary (currently on SBS) about the art heist at New Norcia in WA, and her expressive eyes punctuate Marc Fennel’s commentary. There were two fiction writers on the panel: John M Green, who wrote Framed, a thriller about stolen art and Alexandra Joel, who wrote The Artist’s Secret, a mystery romance set in the NYC art world of the 1980s. They were both from Sydney and wearing blue; as I’m from Melbourne, so head to foot, I’m dressed in black.

The big question is, why are art crimes currently popular in crime writing and documentaries? I thought they were always popular, but maybe that was just me. There is also the post-colonial realisation that the victims are not just the very wealthy but some of the poorest people in the world, who are having their culture, even their gods, stolen from them or devalued through forgeries. Art crime is also low on violence, gore, and copaganda.

“The arts behind bars” presented an excellent overview of arts programs in NSW prisons. Aunty Barbara Nicholson, a Wadi Wadi Elder from the Illawarra, talked about her creative writing program, Murray Cook spoke about his music program (he also has a drama program) and Damian Moss about visual arts and Boom Gate Gallery at Long Bay Gaol. Murray Cook has been a music teacher at Long Bay Gaol for 21 years, serving more time than most of his students, except for corrupt cop Roger “the Dodger” Rogerson.

Having long followed and written about The Torch program for Indigenous prisoners in Victoria, I was interested in the difference between the states. Unlike Victoria, all prisoners in NSW can keep whatever they earn from the art they make in prison. At the Boom Gate Gallery, the artists get 75% of the sale price directly into the inmate’s account, so they can immediately spend the money or send it to their family.

The sad fact is that although it is well-known what programs work to reduce recidivism, Australian politics is too populist to tolerate treating prisoners decently. Too often, funding for programs will be for one-off programs with no roll-over funding, regardless of their results. The result is a terrible recidivation rate and consistently more expensive prisons, but Australians don’t care, in part because most are Indigenous. 

I also went to a few other sessions. “Pentridge Australia’s most infamous jail” with Ron Isherwood and John Killick, two former crims who have both written books. “Melbourne Crime vs Sydney Crime” featured two crime reporters, Mark Morri (Sydney) and John Silvester (Melbourne). They agreed that the main difference between Melbourne and Sydney is that in Melbourne, the police shoot people and actively conceal corruption. In contrast, in Sydney, the police are corrupt and actively conceal honesty. 

Michael Duffy (middle) facilitating discussion between John Silvester (left) and Mark Morri (right)