A lo fi visual diary
At long last.
With a new Lord Mayor–Stephen Yarwood — the Adelaide City Council has chosen six sites to be renewed with street art – the Hindley St public toilets, Morphett St bridge west wall and pylons, James Place public toilets, Rundle St UPark York St wall and Topham Mall by the southern entrance.
This is a detail of prisoners and guards at Topham Wall, Topham Mall carpark, Adelaide CBD. The fullscale work–a paste-up by Jason Fox— can be seen here.
I combined yesterday’s walk into the city to pick up the rubbish for the still life photoshoot with a few snaps. They were taken on the way into Hindley Street.
The initial part of my walk left me rather down. Adelaide is so boring and depressing. Nothing much happens here. Its dead. The streets are empty. The place feels asleep. There seems to be little potential for urban change. Culture here is about big festivals and keeping old buildings from falling down.
We returned to exploring Wirranender Park in the Adelaide Parklands on Sunday even though it was raining. I wanted to see some of the sculpture in this public spaces; a space that looks as if it is being designed as an urban forest with an environmental trail.
Scattered along the trail are a large number of rock sculptures by Silvio Apponyi and other sculptors, including this piece by Sally Weekes:
An interpretation taken with my 5×4 Linhof Technika IV. This Wirranendi area of the Adelaide Parklands was once covered by Eucalyptus porosa or Mallee Box Woodland. This consisted of widely spaced gums, many acacias, native apricots, quandongs, saltbushes, native herbs, peas and lilies and many types of grasses, providing habitat for many native animals and birds.
Yesterday we started to explore the west parklands in which the West Terrace Cemetery is situated. The part of the parklands that is next to West Terrace itself consists of soccer fields. Further west, adjacent to the northern side of the cemetery and running down to the railway line is a cultivated wilderness area with a wetlands known as Wirranendi Park.
Wirranendi is from the Kaurna aboriginal language and it means to become transformed into a green-forested area. The park is cultivated in the sense that it is being replanted with natives, and is a site for public sculptures that are far more intriguing than any art in public places in the CBD.
Adelaide, whose self-image is that it is an arts and festival city, has had an ironic shortage of contemporary public art, and what it does have is banal-eg., the brass pigs in Rundle Mall. Adelaide needs to reinvent itself.
The work above is a public space installation titled “Lie of the Land”, located in the Adelaide parklands on the “Western Gateway” to Adelaide City and was created by Victorian-based artists Aleks Danko and Jude Walton. The work consists of 25 stone domes stretched along either side of Sir Donald Bradman Drive east of the Hilton bridge. Each dome is made from local bluestone using the dry-walling technique.
“Lie of the Land”, with its closed forms and no opening, refers back to the way the early settlers sheltered in dome shaped structures they had copied from the Aborigines. The beehive shaped shelters were built by the early European settlers (immigrants) and that they used traditional aboriginal materials to construct them.
One of the more noticeable aspects of urban life in the inner city of Adelaide is the number people staggering around the streets after having too much to drink. I notice them more than usual because the poodles are very aware of them –the behaviour of drinks is unpredictable because they stagger.
The drunks are often the homeless older men, aborigines who spend the day in the parklands, and young men staggering around the streets after boozing all night in the nightclub strip. The latter are the most violent and are often aggressive. They are to be avoided because the poodles will attack them if they get too close.
One of the areas for poodle walks is Port Adelaide. The Port has fallen on hard times and has become a site of rustbelt. Despite the signs of urban renewal it has an industrial scruffy look, that is a long way from the sunbelt cities (eg., Brisbane) with their gleaming condo towers, bistros and boutiques that are so trendy because they signify vibrant urban environments full of young people.
The rustbelt has become chic. There is is certain fascination with places that have fallen on hard times–rust is chic as it were. Especially amongst photographers, who often see themselves in photographing urban decay in terms of exploring the edgelands in the Ballardian tradition.
Autumn arrived in Adelaide today.
Yesterday was a horror day. The temperature was around 35 degrees with a strong north wind blowing dust everywhere. It was the last day of the ten day or so spell of hot weather. During the night the rain started to fall lightly, and today we have had a steady, soaking rain all day.
There have only been odd moments when there was a break in the rain. I took advantage of one break around lunchtime to do some shopping at the Central Market, then we used another around 6 pm to do a poodle walk in Veale Gardens.
As I mentioned in the previous post I rarely work in the street photography tradition. I don’t have the skills and it is difficult to do this kind of photography whilst walking the poodles. On the rare occasions that I do so I generally hang out around Chinatown.
Chinatown is very small in Adelaide, but it has been given a new lease of life with the flow of international students into Adelaide. Suddenly, this area has come alive with people going about their daily business.
One of my great frustrations on the poodle walks is the lack of accessible locations that give a view of the limited urban skyline in Adelaide. With the roofs of the corporate and public buildings are closed off with security in the lobby. That pretty much leaves the car parks.
Though these are accessible most have fences around the edges to prevent people from jumping off them and committing suicide. Those with fences and with open rooftops are few and far between and of these, few have interesting urban views.
I’m not a street photographer working in the classical tradition—such as Sean O’Brien or Jonathan van Smit or Rui Palha on Flickr—as I just do not have those skills.
One of the oft visited weekend locations for our poodles walks when we are in Adelaide is the Young Street Car Park. There are more and more car parks being built in the CBD at a time when the state government’s public policy is aimed at allowing for greater use of public transport, more walking and cycling in the CBD.
However, they are not prepared to roll back the car. The car rules our cities. It chokes them–it’s what town planners called congestion. Inside the spaces designed to park cars in the CBD we find waste:
We visit the Young Street Car Park less now because it is being extended, and the upper story has been closed off by the builders. My reason for exploring the car park is because it opens a little door on the underside of the city that sees itself as the Athens of the South–an enlightened city.