Murals Around Redfern

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Murals Around Refern

"Yuri Chesnokov was in his favourite getaway on earth, a city of two hundred thousand thieves, swindlers, whores, hit men, gangsters, kidnappers, drug runners, drug addicts, extortionists, smugglers, counterfeiters, terrorists, and well-armed revolutionaries, some with causes, most without. It was the kind of place where you could get anything you wanted, any time of day, any day of the week. You might also get a few things you didn't want, things you wouldn't wish on anyone. It all depended on whats you were looking for. Or who was looking for you... Amazingly, people came in droves."
Beyond Suspicion, James Grippando.



In ways that could never have been imagined, drawn teeth, screeching hurt, pretty dawns, all these things were part of the rag tag scenes that characterised the area, the clusters of kids and adults dealing outside the train station, the fading murals on the brick walls, the drunken shouts drifting up from the Block at all hours. This was our inner-city, so different to other parts of town. Australia was a suburban country, the great romance of the Outback fiction in most people's lives. In the old days when the kids wanted to escape they'd get on the train and go to Bourke, the furthest place away they had ever heard of.

And if there was a warrant out the cops would be there waiting. It was an obvious choice. Back o' Bourke. Where the heat was beyond belief and the flies never left you alone, where the shop windows all had protective wire mesh and Dodge City, where the aboriginals lived, existed in sharp contrast to the "upmarket" part of town, the good hotel, the beautifully renovated old buildings from a hundred years ago. And here in the middle of the city those great expanses, that mystery of our origins, souls lost in the astonishing Australian landscape, it all played out on the city streets.

They came from Kempsey and Walgett and Ballina and Bourke, and they hung on the streets in this part of town as if it was their home; people from all over. They dealt and drank and squabbled and ripped off the whities, and every day offered a new build up of personnel. The police would cruise past, ineffectually. What was there to do? Not everyone was destined to live a middle class life. "Forty thousand years a long long time" says the mural opposite the station; referring to the estimated time the indigenous people have been here, eking out a living in this harshest, remotest place.

Only Sydney would not have seemed harsh for the Eora people, with its dense vegetation spilling down to the magnificent harbour. How much a different world it must have seemed. The first white men came, they waved their spears or hid. And soon enough small pox and other diseases wiped them out. They had no immunity whatsoever to European diseases. The common cold was devastating. Never large in number, they died in their hundreds. In official ceremonies the Gadegal or Eora people are acknowledged, that we are on their land. For land meant everything to these ancient people.

And now all we see are remnants and chaos. The tribes always fought fiercely; and now, artificially thrown together by history's brutal course, they still fight, the shouts drifting up to my window at all hours, two, three, four in the morning. What the fights are actually about I can only imagine. Who ripped who off, who stole what grog, who rooted who's partner. It was grimy and chaotic. And untouchable. If they were white the authorities would have cleaned them up long ago. But as a band of aboriginal street alcoholics they are largely left alone, bar the odd police sweep when they can be arrested, pointlessly it seems, a dozen at a time.

Time, a different sense of time, rolls casually by. One minute a kid next minute a teenager. Next middle aged. A woman protects her flock. The fire gets going. An old man sits laughing, confident they've got it right. Niranung stumbles drunkenly down the walkway. There's loud shouts, his voice unmistakable. They're all stoned or whacked out one way or another. There are flurries of barely furtive activity; they couldn't care less, why bother hiding from the white cunts. This is our country.

It would have been a good project. I've got all the details. The smells of unwashed bodies, dark handsome faces. Occasionally the stunning looker. We're pleased with your answers. We want to be divine, to tap into the universal spirit, surely that's the point of the exercise. His own pit stomach doubts would never provide a purpose for being. An observer doesn't have a heart. Isn't it all about becoming one with God, or the great earth spirit?

If only there was some other way through the darkness. The street scenes provided no comfort, not even for an aficionado. Scattering as the police drive by, the murals provide more of a sense of what can be than shadows disappearing into derelict houses. There is hope, there is the potential for triumph. There is a better way this can be done; as they gather around the fire at dawn, still drunk from the night before. I'm yours for the questioning. Nothing will change. Fatigue has set in. The aboriginal colours, yellow, red orange, black, fly on the walls, providing pride, or justification. The dawn comes, and with it plans for another bottle. The shops will be open soon, providing relief.


THE BIGGER STORY:

Email archive to immortalise Australian life

By Michael Turtle

We use them to arrange meetings, share news, complain and even flirt. Now, in an Australian first, the emails of ordinary people are going to be archived for prosperity.

The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney is asking people to send in emails they think are significant in their life.

It is hoped that the collection, which is on a range of topics, will reflect a snapshot of Australian life in 2008.

The museum's computing and mathematics curator, Matthew Connell, says the idea came about because people are not writing letters much these days and they are what historians often use for research.

"We're concerned about the fact that in the future, if people are using emails, we concerned there won't be that same legacy of primary source material for future generations to know about we were doing," he said.

In libraries around the country, there are hundreds of collections of letters by famous people.

However the idea of collecting correspondence from ordinary citizens about trivial events in this way is quite new.

Mr Connell hopes it will provide a goldmine of information for future historians.

"Quite often the details of daily life are more revealing than the thoughts of a famous person," he said.

"The incidental material can quite often be as interesting and more revealing about the culture that produced that material."




Murals Around Redfern