Melbourne Street Art January 2024

Like a nurse checking on a patient, I feel obliged to check in on Hosier Lane. The prognosis is gloomy for Melbourne’s famous street art lane, although the crowds of tourists are still visiting for a photo opportunity. They don’t care if pieces are tagged over; the grittier, the better. (If they want to keep the quality, the City of Melbourne and Culture Kings should pay Movida to serve tapas and drinks to a select list of artists to paint whenever and whatever they want to paint the lane.)

Hosier Lane hasn’t improved in years, but this Monday, I was surprised as the lane was full of fans, mostly young women, cueing up right around the block to the Forum for the Gracie Abrams concert. I’ve never seen anything like it, a line of people seated on one side of the lane.

I’m looking around at the other side of the lane, and a woman asks me: “Where is the Banksy?” I have to tell her that the Banksy is no longer. It was removed by council workers back in 2010, and unfortunately, there are no more Banksys in Melbourne.

I recommended that she see AC/DC Lane/Duckboard Place, where there also used to be a Banksy. AC/DC Lane/Duckboard Place is a horseshoe access lane generally blocked with bollards. It is a few laneways up from Hosier Lane, and there is still some quality street art in Melbourne. Some of these pieces in AC/DC lane are over a decade old, older than recent additions of windows to the building where the Cherry Bar used to be. Others are as fresh as milk.

Drasko, Untitled, 2024

On the tarmac of Duckboard Place, some spectacular Drasko stencils appear to rise from the surface. Drasko also has some classical-influenced low-relief sculptures cut into foam on the wall around Makatron’s figure of Bon Scott.

Rick Doyer, Untitled

Other recent sculptural additions to the lane were pieces by Rick Doyer; these colourful, three-dimensional, funky creations are high up on the walls. They look similar to the work he exhibited at Rubicon ARI in 2022, but I can’t be sure as I didn’t see his exhibition.

I was amused to see what appeared to be some paste-ups by primary school students from some school’s year six camp. Of course, their art has just as much right to up in the lane as Vale’s stencil.

Vale, Aboriginal Lives Matter

So if you want to see some of the best of Melbourne’s street art, murals, and paste-ups (no, not your letter-form graffiti, you will have to go further out of the city for that, nor your social media angel wings), then walk a few metres uphill to AC/DC Lane.

I was at AC/DC lane to meet architectural historian and urban scholar Sabina Andron, whose book has just been published by Routledge: Urban Surfaces, Graffiti and the Right to the City – Space, Materiality and the Normative (2023). Also, see her blog, especially her manifesto: “The right to the surface is the right to the city“. One doesn’t see many manifestos or blogs around now.