Tuesday morning 8:30am and half-way up the spray paint encrusted Hosier Lane, amid a cluster of cameras, Mayor Robert Doyle is talking with street artist, Adnate about his almost completed mural. Adnate and Mayor Doyle are obviously enjoying their conversation and I can hear snatches of it amid the sound of the cameras.
“I love paint, I paint 7 days a week, 365 days a year…” Adnate explains to the Mayor. “You don’t want to become too attached to your work because then you don’t progress… Aerosol spray paint, the background is acrylic…dodgy paint roller… texture…”
It is the media preview of the still unfinished multi-story mural commissioned by Hosier Inc. and paid for through an arts grant from the City of Melbourne. The mural is the face of a a local aboriginal boy from Melbourne’s northern suburbs gazing towards Birrarung Marr.
Adnate has been up on a scaffold painting for three days and will be working up there again today. (See my post PaintUp!) Five years ago Adnate was just another graffiti painter doing pieces with the AWOL crew along the Upfield line. Then he started painting faces, not the unusual graffiti characters, not stars but the faces of children of indigenous peoples. Adnate is now represented by Metro Gallery.
Five years ago conservative politician and former State Opposition Leader Robert Doyle had just started his first term as Lord Mayor; he was elected on the 30 November 2008. He had come to the position with a conservative attitude to graffiti but Melbourne’s street art started to change his mind.
This is not just a story about a new mural in Melbourne but about people changing their minds and then changing the world around them. Part of it started in 2012 when the Melbourne City Council proposed CCTV cameras in Hosier Lane to reduce crime in the area. This proposal was successfully resisted by the street art community (see my posts To CCTV or Not CCTV 1 and 2). The City of Melbourne has since revised its policy on graffiti management and Hosier Inc. was formed. Hosier Inc is a community organisation of interested people formed not to manage the anarchic lane way but to provide a hub for communication about the lane. It hasn’t been the perfect solution, there are still problems in the lane, but has improved the lane and its street art.
Mayor Doyle and Adnate spoke to the media and the trio of television cameras. Mayor Doyle described the mural as an “important and large work, more permanent, not a forever work, but more permanent than the other art in the lane.” Change is constant in Hosier Lane; it was once part of the garment district, from 1936 to 1939 Melbourne’s Communist Party Headquarters was at 3 Hosier Lane. Now the lane is street art destination and tourist attraction.
Mayor Doyle departs, Adnate poses for a few more photographs and then gets back on the scaffolding to start another day painting.
Black Mark 