From zero to hero: how street art got a makeover

From the Spring issue of Kanebridge Quarterly magazine, on sale now. Order your copy here.

When Zoe Wilson and her husband moved into their two bedroom terrace on Newtown’s Dickson Street in December 2020, one of the first things on their agenda was a paint job: not the inside or the front of the house, but the side wall, facing onto a graffiti-covered laneway. It was big and white — and heavily tagged. The couple called the council — who cleaned it off — but before long, the wall had been tagged again. And so began a seemingly endless cycle of tagging and clean-up — the same cycle plaguing councils across Australia, and costing more than $2 billion annually to remove.

In Wilson’s case, there was a circuit breaker: she applied to the Inner West Council’s Perfect Match street art program, which pairs residents, businesses and property owners with artists to create murals on public walls. She and her husband were matched with David Cragg, an artist of Irish, Scottish, Bundjalung and Biripai ancestry who had grown up in the area. The resulting landscape mural, which now covers the house’s laneway wall, pays tribute to the site’s history as a tributary feeding into the Gumbramorra wetlands and Goolay’yari (Cooks River) and features native flora and fauna, including a giant kookaburra.

“My daughter is three, and when she talks about what to do if she ever gets lost, she’s like, ‘I’ll just say I live in the kookaburra house!’ It’s sort of known now around here,” says Wilson. “I’ll be inside or out the front and see people stop and take photos — and it’s just a really nice chance to have a chat and meet more people in the community.”

It seems to have solved the tagging problem, too: the wall has been tagged just once in roughly 18 months since the mural was unveiled in 2023, and its waterproof coating is designed to make graffiti removal quick and easy in the event it happens again.

No wonder, then, that Perfect Match has proved a hit. Since the program started in 2014, applications by residents have increased a whopping 926 percent, and now outstrip the council’s funding pool. What started as a graffiti removal initiative has turned into a bona fide public art program, with council paying artists ­— many of whom started out in illegal graffiti — to create more than 170 works on walls. Similar inner city programs, such as StreetWORKS in Melbourne’s Maribyrnong LGA, have also proved popular.

These initiatives are emblematic of a diversification of government policies over the last three decades, as the criminalised subculture of graffiti, once seen as a the scourge of inner city neighbourhoods, evolved into a broader, more palatable genre called “street art” — and thence from the margins to the mainstream. At this point, street art has been collected and exhibited by museums, co-opted by luxury brands and advertising agencies, and embraced by high end hotels such as the Hilton, which commissioned pioneering Melbourne street art collective Juddy Roller to paint the facade exterior of its Little Queen Street outpost.

In Victoria, state and local governments have shifted from the “zero tolerance” and “rapid removal” policies of the 80s, 90s and 00s to embrace graffiti as a fundamental part of their identity. Hosier Lane, once a grungy testing ground for young graffiti artists, is now a major tourist attraction, drawing 1.4 million visitors annually. The Wimmera Mallee region is attracting visitors from overseas and interstate — and particularly grey nomads — with its silo art trail, which Visit Victoria spruiks as “the country’s biggest outdoor gallery”.

For street artist Helen Proctor, who cut her teeth in the illegal graffiti scene but now paints commissioned street art murals in Sydney’s Inner West, the silo art movement represents a tipping point. “Every time I speak to someone over 70, they ask ‘Have you painted a silo?’ Getting that demographic interested in street art is amazing — they were the ones yelling at us (when we were teenagers) to put down the spray can! But they have an appreciation (for the silo murals) because of the size and the technique that goes into it, and it’s a subject matter that they can relate to.”

The slippery politics of taste is at the heart of graffiti culture in Australia: what is art to some people is vandalism to others, and treated accordingly. The government-led graffiti wars have not ended — they’ve simply shifted territory and tactics, in line with changing demographics and community taste, and with the rise of the “creative cities” theory, which ascribes economic value to creative culture. Painting or spraying anything on the walls of a building you don’t own without permission remains illegal in every state, punishable by prison. But councils, who are on the frontline of maintaining the “clean community”, take a more nuanced view.

In the past year, the City of Melbourne has removed roughly 112,000 square metres (equivalent to five MCGs) of graffiti, focusing on tags, but they leave street art strongholds such as Hosier Lane alone. “They’re places of cultural significance and heritage,” says City of Melbourne Councillor Jamal Hakim. “There’s a social licence [(or artists to paint there illegally).” Even when councils are removing graffiti elsewhere, they can see it’s not working.

“We can’t do that forever, it doesn’t actually solve the problem,” says Cr Hakim. “It’s a never-ending cycle.”

Shannan Whitney, who has seen the shift in attitudes over the last three decades as an inner city Sydney resident, real estate agent and co-founder of BresicWhitney, says that although homebuyers don’t necessarily see graffiti or street art as a value add yet, they — like councils — recognise it as a part of the cultural tapestry of certain suburbs.

“(Today in Newtown) I was in a $10 million building that was covered in (illegal) graffiti…it was allowed because the people who own it see that as being suitable for the environment they live in, and they like it.”