Since the 1980s, the area surrounding the Sydney inner west suburb of Newtown, Australia, including the suburbs of Enmore, Erskineville, Camperdown, and St Peters, has been known for its wide range of prominent graffiti and street art on walls. The public visual art in the Newtown area consists of a variety of styles and methods of execution, including large-scale painted murals, hand-painted (or sprayed) political slogans, hand-painted figurative designs, spray painted semi-abstract designs (including large-scale and elaborate semi-pictorial) "tags"), and other stylistic developments such as stencil art and street poster art (also known as "wheatpasting"), "Yarn bombing", and sculptural items cast from plaster and other materials.
Locations Street art locations in the greater Newtown area include: Murals facing onto King Street and adjoining streets Stencil art around the photographic studio in Gladstone Street, near Newtown station Stencils, slogans and murals in and around the pedestrian tunnel under the railway line, linking Bella and Bedford streets Graffiti works in the area between Enmore Road and the Main Suburban railway line, including Gladstone Street, the Wilford Street industrial area, Wilford Lane, Phillip Lane and Thurnby Lane. Murals, stencils and graffiti slogans in and around Camperdown Memorial Rest Park Wall art in the vicinity of St Peters station and Applebee Street, near Sydney Park The multi-panel spraypaint mural on the rear wall of St Luke's Church, Enmore by Matthew Peet ( "Mistery")
Another example is two slogans painted on the wall of a house on Salisbury Road in Camperdown, at the Kingston Rd intersection. A large hand-painted slogan that displayed, "Madonna: The Devil Incarnate", was accompanied by a smaller slogan that read, "iConsume". Both slogans lasted approximately two weeks before being painted over.
Artists and attribution Although several major works are community or private commissions, or were carried out with permission, others are illegal. Artworks are therefore rarely attributed to their respective artists due to the need for anonymity. Another impediment to attribution is the abstract nature of the pieces and identifying "tags" of the creators.
Unmitigated Audacity Productions
Many of the biggest and best-known large-scale murals painted in Newtown in the early 1990s were created by a group of mural artists called "Unmitigated Audacity Productions (UAP)". This group included Sydney mural artists, Matthew Peet (a.k.a. "Mistery" and member of hip-hop group, Brethren), Juilee Pryor, and New Zealand-born artist, Andrew Aiken.
Among the past and present murals that can be attributed to UAP are: The "Martin Luther King" mural on King Street, painted by Andrew Aiken and Juilee Pryor (with Tony Spanos), now heritage listed. The "Mona" mural by Andrew Aiken, on Erskineville Road opposite Newtown Post Office; as of 2011, still in existence, but now in a poor state of preservation. The "South of the Border" mural on King Street South, near the Union Hotel. The Newtown Police Citizens Youth Club (PCYC) murals, by Matthew Peet and Andrew Aiken; the PCYC was demolished in 2015 and a new apartment complex is currently under construction. The now-erased Miles Davis/John Coltrane mural on Erskineville Road ("On The Wings of a Song"), painted by Aiken and Peet. The now-erased "Per Ardua ad Astra" mural, painted on the wall of the house opposite the "On The Wings of a Song" mural; the piece is clearly visible from Newtown Railway station. The "Pieta" mural, by Andrew Aiken, painted on the side of a (currently abandoned) house on Erskineville Road, opposite the BP service station. The now-erased "Idiot Box" mural at 64 Erskineville Rd, opposite the Imperial Hotel was created by Andrew Aiken. The large multi-panel mural on the rear wall of St Luke's Church in Stanmore Road, Enmore, was painted by a team led by Matthew Peet As of early 2016, this has largely been defaced or erased and only a few sections remain. "Deja Vu 1" (1992), was painted on a wall on the corner of Erskineville Road and Linthorpe Street. According to Pryor, it was painted by Aiken "...in an explosion of rage about the war in Bosnia. The theme is remembrance and the futility of war. On the base of the wall can be seen the words 'Have we already forgotten?'". This mural is no longer extant and the building on which it was painted was subsequently demolished and replaced by an apartment complex.
Juilee Pryor photographed much of the group's mural work and she has donated digital copies of these photos to the City of Sydney's photographic archive on the ArchivePix website
Andrew Aiken Andrew Aiken was the principal artist and major collaborator on several of the most prominent murals in the Newtown area in the early 1990s. His life was detailed in a 2003 Sydney Morning Herald article by Sean Nicholls. Using a donated cherry picker and a thousand dollars' worth of paint, Aiken and Juilee Pryor created the "I Have a Dream" mural on King Street over two nights in August 1991, describing it as a "humanist protest against the sterility of postmodern art".
Twelve months earlier, Aiken had fled the UK after murdering a man he had lived with in a London squat and burying the body of the 40-year-old busker in the squat's cellar. In 1997, after converting to Christianity, Aiken was convinced to give himself up by the leader of the religious group he had joined, the Twelve Tribes community in Picton, New South Wales. He returned to England, where he was tried and convicted of murder. He served 8 years in prison and, on his release in 2005, joined another Twelve Tribes community in Chilliwack, British Columbia.
Big City Freaks The "Big City Freaks" street art collective, founded in 1998, includes the artists DMOTE, PUDL, SNARL, SKULL McMURPHY (Troy Edwards), SET and ZEN (a.k.a. SKOTE STYLES). The group has executed several large-format murals and other works in the distinctive "blended" style, combining highly stylized tags and striking graphic elements such as monsters, aliens, robots, skulls and designs sourced from Japanese art. Probably the most popular and currently the longest-surviving example of their collective work is the "Great Wave" mural. The group has its own website, where images of many of the group's works can be seen. One of BCF's most recent works is a large-format mural, created in late October 2009 on the rear wall of the Ausscrap Building, facing Wilford Street, Enmore.
The mural is featured on the CD back cover photograph of the album, Size of the Ocean, by Sydney, Australia band, Big Heavy Stuff.
Other artists The murals on the Abbey on King backpacker hostel, and the portraits of George Harrison and Jimi Hendrix on the Bella Street house are by Jason Moses
Preservation Several of the largest and most prominent Newtown area murals, dating from the early 1990s, are no longer extant.
The Council of the City of Sydney administers much of the north Newtown area. In Paragraph 8 of its Aerosol Art and Graffiti Policy the Council ostensibly recognizes that these existing large murals are public-domain works worthy of conservation and maintenance, although in practice it has done nothing to prevent murals such as "Idiot Box" from being removed. Moreover, a Council media spokesperson recently stated that its general approach is "... to remove graffiti quickly and consistently to help maintain the appearance of our city while discouraging repeat incidents".
Because many larger painted murals and other works have been installed covertly and without permission as "guerilla" art works, individual property owners have often stripped and/or painted over a number of the area's most prominent works of street art in recent years. Many others have been obscured by adjacent construction or destroyed by the demolition of the buildings on which they are painted, as in the case of the wall along Wilford Lane, Enmore, which formed the rear part of the former Blockbuster video store site, which was redeveloped into a large apartment complex. The extensive martial arts-themed murals along the rear of the former Murray's Martial Arts centre on Kingston Rd were destroyed when the old building was demolished in 2016 for a new apartment development but the developers have commissioned new custom wall art for the site, which is already in place.
Many other works are gradually covered over with more recent work by other graffiti artists after a period of weeks or months.
In recent years, the former Marrickville Council (subsequently force-amalgamated into the Inner West Council) introduced a new policy on street art by establishing the "Perfect Match" program, in which the Council brought together local property owners and street artists, who were commissioned to create custom art works for fences and walls. These works are officially sanctioned by the Council and are signposted with a special plaque that includes information on the artwork and the artist.
Murals and wall art of the Newtown area King Street north and environs
The first mural that visitors will encounter when traveling south along King Street from the city is the "Herald" mural in northern King Street. This large mural is an enlarged reproduction of the above the fold of the front page of the 10 July 1992 edition of the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, as can be clearly seen in the accompanying image. The image below the SMH says 'No Time'. At the bottom right hand corner used to be the words 'like the present'. This little section was removed during the creation of a driveway for the business that set up next door (around the mid-2000s).
The "I Have a Dream" (Martin Luther King) mural, painted over two nights in August 1991, is the largest, most prominent, and the longest-surviving of the many large format murals created around Newtown by the team known as Unmitigated Audacity Productions, the core members of which were New Zealand-born Canadian artist Andrew Aiken and his colleague Juilee Pryor. They were assisted in this mural by Tony Spanos, who provided a cherry-picker to allow the upper part of the mural to be painted. It commemorates American civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King Jr. One of the last surviving large-format murals in the area, it displays a large portrait of Dr King, next to a large painted depiction of the Apollo 8 photograph of the Earth from space, and quotes Dr King's 1963 "I Have a Dream" in large Gothic lettering, near which is the quotation from Genesis 37:19: "Behold the dreamer cometh; Come now therefore and let us slay him, and we shall see what will become of his dreams".