Cool cats claim the alleys
September 14, 2002
The Alley People party at the feet of the city's buildings. They're outdoors in the Melbourne CBD among the rubbish bins and windswept litter at Centre Place, hip-hop music blaring high into the night.
"This is the epicentre of it all," one of them says. The epicentre of what? "The street scene, Street culture. Call it what you like, here is where it really took off."
This is not traditional street culture - the grim, sleazy world of whores, heroin and the homeless. It is not a criminal scene and it is not a violent scene. It doesn't appear to be a drug scene.
"I'm not going to say that there isn't that stuff. There may be
pot, but it's not, central to the culture. A stubbie of VB is the drug of choice," a party-goer says.
The Alley People are not down-and-outs. They don't have much
money, but they get by. They're educated, 20, to 30-something, arty-looking types with fashionably rough diamond clothes and clean, white smiles.
Some are students. Others are artists who work part-time at call
centres, in bars and restaurants. This is not a huddle of the unemployed. These are the unsung heroes of the city’s revitalisation.
Ten years ago the CBD was Melbourne’s dead heart.
By day it was full of suited office workers and jostling shoppers. By night it was a ghost town.
But then the Alley People took over. They had begun to rent cheap space in old buildings in and around town through the 1980s. They made the streets hum with activity and the windows of near-derelict alleways glow with light.
Bars opened, tucked away and unadvertised, along the alleyways to cater for this new crowd.
By 1992 a group of them had moved into the dog-legged laneway called Centre Place. They made this part of Flinders Lane the place to be.
They had created a social focus for the increasing number of young
people inhabiting the beehive of old offices up and down the city's alleys and lanes.
"This area was a no-man's land," said Andrew Mac, 34-year-old alleyman and professional street culture organiser.
“I lived in Centre Place in 1992 and there were a lot of artist studios here because it was very cheap. You might pay $350 a month for a whole floor of a building.
“The place had a real Dickensian feel about it. You had all these Dickensian shops, haberdashers, an old shoe shop. There were shops that no-one was using.
“So in 1994 we asked the real estate agents if we could use the shop windows to show the artwork of the people living around here. That evolved into the Citylights project!"
CITYLIGHTS is a talisman for alley culture. It is an art show. But not your everyday art show involving oil paint and picture frames.
Alley People dismiss that kind of stuff as "historic art" or, less politely, "interior design for the rich".
Citylights art is lightbox art where images are mounted in TV-like screens on the sides of alleyway buildings. Beneath these images graffiti covers the walls. This graffiti is not strictly part of the show, it gets added over time by street culture devotees.
Graffiti is usually despised by the authorities, but here it is tolerated, viewed as a credible method of expression where exponents "answer" each other by "tagging" wall space with calligraphy in texta or spray-paint, or using stencils and posters to relay a message.
Rather than the mindless, territorial graffiti that disfigures parts of Melbourne, it is more of the traditional graffiti of the 1960s, which at least carries a literate message.
"I'll plant the seed of liberation," wrote someone called Palm Tree. One poster is a long quote from Irish Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett.
Said Mac: "Some of the grafftti is purely whimsical. Other stuff is very political." John Howard is described as Australia's “misleader" in one statement.
"Those using graffiti here are artists. The gallery system where you are speaking to a small, privileged group of people is not for them," Mac said.
"These people are disaffected with government policy, but proactive in doing something about it, using this form of expression to make a statement. It takes away their sense of powerlessness."
According to Melbourne City Council cultural spokesperson, Kate Redwood, no one complains about the Centre Place graffiti. "We have a policy of getting graffiti off the walls. But there's a need for sensitivity around a culture that people enjoy."
The council helps fund the Citylights project, which also has a site in Hosier Lane near Federation Square.
MAURICE Manno, a Centre Place cafe manager, said Citylights and the graffiti was good for business. "It's fantastic. It attracts the sub-culture and interesting characters."
New images are placed in the lightboxes every six to eight weeks. To celebrate the occasion there is a party. The alley people love a party.
"It gives a focus to local people," said Marcos Davidson, a
veteran alleyman and jeweller by trade. "People meet in the laneways at Citylights openings. It's a celebration of the city. The artists were the first to do that."
Before Citylights was created, Davidson used to organise his own alley parties. "We used to gather in alleys at night and put a sound system there. Nobody else was living there to stop us," he recalled.
"We would have marching parties where we marched around exploring the city. Culture is not jazz in the park and
jugglers. That's not culture, that's a manufactured thing. This alley culture happened by osmosis."
Back in the '80s, before the official push by governments to encourage CBD living, fire regulations forbade dwelling in many city buildings. Not that regulations stopped the Alley People.
"There was a whole collection who would live in a clandestine situation in buildings when they were only allowed to be working there," Davidson said.
“They would have inspections by agents and authorities. You'd tell them that you were a writer and were working late, and that your hammock was only for resting during the day."
How times have changed. The city is no longer a no-man's land. It's a bourgeois boomtown with rows of cafes and restaurants.
Flowers spill from windowboxes where developers have converted dead buildings into expensive apartment homes. The well-heeled have moved from the suburbs and want the Alley People to leave so that lanes and alleys are quiet at night.
Centre Place has become a hive of chic eateries. The buildings there are now too expensive for the Alley People. Many have moved on to colonise other parts of town where cheaper rent is still available.
That's what happens to artist garrets, said RMIT urban planning expert, Associate Professor Michael Buxton. The moneyed middle-class gentrify the areas discovered first by artists.
"It happened in Soho in London. It happened in New York with Greenwich Village. Artists moved in and rented whole floors. They completely changed the character of the area. Now it's incredibly gentrifled."
Andrew Mac has moved to Little Bourke St to a place where the rent is three times what he used to pay, and the space a fraction of what he occupied in the mid 1990s.
But his Citylights legacy remains. He stands on the comer of Centre Place and Flinders Lane and says with a sweep of the hand: "There are still about 200 artists in these blocks. Citylights is the big official thing, but it drew so many people in.”
Writer: Craig Sherbourne