BRUNSWICK: A TRAVEL GUIDE

YOUR LOCAL ARTIST-RUN TRAVEL SERVICE

Agents of Proximity is Amy Spiers and Victoria Stead

www.agentsofproximity.org

Acknowledgements
Collaborative art projects involve the work of many people, particularly
those that involve community participation. This is one of those projects,
and so we have a lot of people to thank. First up, a big thankyou must go
out to our designer Marc Martin of Small & Quiet, as well as Alice Swing
of Swing Machine who designed and made our delightful outfits, and
Nicolas Low of Dislocated who created the Agents of Proximity website.
Much gratitude is extended to everyone at the Next Wave Festival office,
particularly Jeff, Tai, Fiona, Ulanda and Paul. Thanks also to the other
artists who were part of Next Wave’s Kickstart Program, who have been
an inspiring and supportive bunch of people to be around. The Kickstart
Program provided the initial seed funding for this project. Subsequent
funding has come from the Australia Council Literature Board,
Arts Victoria and Moreland City Council, and we are grateful to all
of these bodies.
Within Brunswick, thanks go out to Susie and the rest of the crew at the
Brunswick Bound bookstore, as well as the folks at the Digital Imaging
Centre on Sydney Road who have graciously rushed through so many
urgent print jobs over the last eighteen months.
Supported by the Next Wave Kickstart Program
BrunswicK:
Andy at the Brunswick Coin Laundry has generously allowed us to convert
his Laundry into an exhibition space and travel agency during the period
of the Next Wave Festival, for which we are endlessly grateful.
There have been many people who have been involved in the project but
A Travel Guide
have not wound up photographed and plastered on the fronts of postcards:
Tony Birch, Sarah Tutton and her family, Dominica, Mitz, Luisa, Cath and
Antony, Pip O’Brien, Piers, Rahima, Sal and Phil, Patrick, Anita, Leon the
lovely hardware man, Reech, Bec Saltmarsh and Phoebe Smith.
Finally, the biggest thanks is reserved for all the people who participated
in this project and are included over the following pages: Heather, Sheri,
Jessica, Ellie, Alex, John, Aviva, Mem, Liz, Beth, Jan, Mitch, Freya, Eric and
Tolga. You all gave up your time to be involved, and your excitement about
what we were trying to do made it all the more enjoyable for us. Thank you.
Agents of Proximity is Amy Spiers and Victoria Stead
www.agentsofproximity.org
Photography: Amy Spiers
Design: Marc Martin, www.smallandquiet.com
Outfits: Alice Swing, Swing Machine
Web design: Nic Low, www.dislocated.org
Foreword
Welcome to the Agents of Proximity’s Travel Guide to
Brunswick. More accurately, perhaps, this should have
been called a Guide to Travel in Brunswick, because
it’s not a travel guide in the sense that we normally
know them. Where conventional guides tend to provide
uninspired lists of places to eat, sleep and shop,
this travel guide offers suggestions on how to explore
suburban space through the stories and experiences
of the people who share it.
Over a period of a few months, Agents of Proximity has
been operating as a local artist-run travel service, taking
people on tours within their own suburb. In this case,
the suburb was Brunswick, the place where we both live,
and a place of which we are particularly fond. Located in
Melbourne’s inner north, Brunswick is densely populated,
with over 20,000 people living within 5.157 square
kilometres. This book contains the documentation of a
series of small journeys which were initiated through the
travel service, involving fifteen of these 20,000 residents.
The Agents of Proximity started around eighteen
months ago, when the two us were living together in
a rambling old house on Stewart St, just off Sydney Rd.
This house—which had been a sharehouse for
more than 30 years and had hundreds of people living
in it over that time—had a kitchen window that opened
directly onto the street, out of which you could dangle
your feet above the pavement while sitting there with
coffee in hand. The window was just wide enough to
fit the both of us, and it was out of the many hours we
spent sitting there—talking and watching the constant
stream of people moving back and forth in front of
us—that the idea for this project emerged.
Our starting point was our curiosity for the area, and
a desire to explore it in ways that moved outside the
normal social circles and circuits of bars and cafes
where we spent our time. Despite coming from quite
different backgrounds—one in fine arts and the other
in politics and history—we had a shared interest in
experimenting with ways of engaging community
and creating connections with the people around
us. Agents of Proximity was created as a way to try
and unearth some of the latent stories, histories and
passions within the suburb; to engage with people and
places who were not normally part of our Brunswick
experience, and give agency to others to do the same.
We wanted it to combine forms of cross-disciplinary
artistic collaboration with strategies for community
participation; to be at once socially-engaged, curious,
critical and aesthetically-driven.
Participants came to the project through a number
of ways, beginning with people we already knew and
spreading out through word of mouth, through posters
and flyers, and sometimes through dumb luck. To begin
with, we sat down with each person and interviewed
them about their experiences of living in Brunswick.
We had large maps of the suburb, blank except for the
street names, and asked people to draw and write onto
them the streets they walked down, the places they
knew, the things that were significant to them. Some
of the stories and maps which were gathered during
this process are included over the next few pages.
The next step involved moving from what they knew
to what was unfamiliar to them. We organised tours,
usually involving two participants at a time, where one
person would take the other to one of the sites they
had identified on their map. In doing so we wanted
to create new encounters between people and place,
as well as between people. These tours, or journeys,
were documented through the creation of a series of
postcards. Photographs of the encounters were used
to create the front of each postcard, and the person who
was taken on each tour was asked to write on the back,
as they would if they were writing home while travelling.
These postcards, and other documentation from the
journeys, form the basis of the material which is now
being presented here as our Travel Guide to Brunswick.
This Guide will not tell you where to go and what to
do, although you may well want to go on your own
adventures to the places identified within it. Mostly,
though, we have intended it to be used as a starting
point for thinking about how we move in the spaces
where we feel at home, and how we could use the
mindsets and rituals associated with travel to explore
the diversity and plurality of these spaces. While this
project has been based in Brunswick, the ideas and
practices we have tried to create are by no means tied
to this place. They can be the basis for exploration
within any shared space, and we hope they will be
taken as such.
Amy Spiers and Victoria Stead
April 2008
Small
encounters
in suburbia
Long before Robin Boyd famously riled against what he
called “the Australian ugliness”, suburbs were being
derided for their blandness, uniformity and monotony.
But in truth, suburbs have always been complex,
diverse, heterogenous. Shared space always is—filled
and written through with the stories and the histories,
the memories and the associations of those who move
in it. It’s messy, layered with meaning and experience,
traversed, read and encountered in a myriad of ways.
One person moves through a suburb and sees the
streets they played on as a child, the supermarket
where they stop late at night on their way home from
work, the car park where they broke up with their lover
only to make up again half an hour later after tears and
tantrums. Another person moves through the same
suburb and sees the fruit trees that remind them of
home, the cafes filled with noisy crowds chattering in an
incomprehensible language, places that will never feel
familiar. One person sees the Great Australian Dream
with the detached house on the quarter-acre bloc.
Another sees stifling domesticity. One person sees the
bus stop where they wait every Monday afternoon for
the 3:47 bus which is never on time. Another sees the
intersection where they collided with the late-running
3:47 bus and did $600 worth of damage to the duco on
their Holden Barina. And all these stories, histories
and associations mesh together in complicated,
intricate, contradictory relationships of connection,
and create the spaces we sometimes call home.
Sometimes, even, we call them communities. But
what does it mean to talk about community when the
people with whom we share these suburban spaces
are, for the most part, strangers? The idea of local
community in contemporary suburban Australia is,
in many ways, a strange and strained thing. Suburbs
are, after all, just the spaces in between lines drawn
on maps, administrative units which facilitate the timely
collection of household garbage and the pruning
of trees on nature strips; and the people who live
within these spaces need have nothing more in
common within one another than their postcode.
The promise of globalisation has been the overcoming
of the barriers of space and time which separate people
from each other. But the barriers to human connection
are not only found in the borders of nation-states or the
lack of communication and transportation technologies;
they are often deeply rooted in the local. They are
cultural, social, linguistic, emotional, aesthetic. Some of
them are imposed; others are created and maintained
through choice. In a globalising world replete with
discount airlines, email, Skype and Facebook, it can be
easier to cultivate a relationship with someone 50,000
kilometres away than with your next door neighbour.
None of this means, however, that the local is
irrelevant, or that it cannot be a site for meaningful
community. People rarely have only one community,
and in spite of the innumerable forms of social
relationships which extend beyond the confines of
shared geographical proximity, the desire for locally-
rooted connection still stands. Nostalgia for the days
when kids played hop-scotch on the pavements and
you could buy your milk each morning from the family-
run milkbar down the road may well be nostalgia for
a myth, but it’s a myth that signifies a genuine desire
for connection. The people who live within suburbs,
however bureaucratically defined they may be, can,
and often do, act to make them sites of social,
emotional, and cultural identification. And so the
t-shirt shop on Sydney Rd sells t-shirts printed with
“London, Paris, Brunswick, New York”, and people
sit around in pubs debating the merits of the “New
Brunswick”, or recounting the reasons why people in
Prahran are such pretentious snobs.
The suburbs we live in, then, are simultaneously
both known and unknown. Or to think of it another way,
contemporary suburban spaces consist of an indefinite
number of local worlds, a plurality of experiences
and subjectivities—both individual and collective—
which are layered up one atop the other. We may
know one or several of these worlds, but be oblivious
to, or disconnected from the others. What would it
take to move between them? What if, instead of flying
thousands of kilometres across oceans and continents
to experience something “new” and “different”, we left
the passports at home and went travelling within our
own suburbs? What if we particularly went looking for
those worlds which are normally sidelined, silenced,
pushed to the edges?
Agents of Proximity set out to facilitate encounters and
border-crossings which might achieve this, and in doing
so find the points of intersection within this
multiplicity of worlds. The title of “artist” grants a
certain license to challenge social norms, interfere,
and unsettle the familiar. We wanted to use this
privilege to create experiences and moments
of interaction which might otherwise have gone
unrealised. Our own bias is our personal fascination
with face-to-face encounters; with the simplicity and
profundity of the moment where two human beings
encounter each other for the first time, and are
suddenly no longer strangers.
It’s uncertain to what extent we succeeded in what
we set out to do. In trying to traverse the myriad
subjective experiences of this place where we live,
the experiment we initiated was an ambitious one,
perhaps more so than we realised when we began.
After months of tramping through our suburb
searching for participants, we have not succeeded
in moving as far beyond our own worlds as we had
hoped to do. Negotiating points of disconnect, though,
is an unavoidable part of navigating the plurality of
shared space. Tensions and disjunctures are always
present within such spaces, essential even, and this
Travel Guide is as much about the journeys that didn’t
happen as it is about the ones that did.
One night many months ago we got talking to two
men at the RSL on Sydney Rd. We were putting up
fliers on the lamp post near the balcony where they
were standing with their beers. They wanted to know
what we were doing and we started trying to explain.
They were bemused, mildly intrigued, but ultimately
had no interest in participating in our “wanky art shit”.
They did, however, talk to us at length about their
experiences of Brunswick over the span of several
decades. They were both building industry workers,
and gave us an elaborate history of the changing
architecture and planning within the suburb­­—from
the replica Edwardian detailing still visible on some
of the older shop roofs, through to the industrial
designs of the factories which dotted the area in the
1980s. While articulating the sense of ownership they
felt over this space where they had lived for so long,
their sense of loss in the face of change was palpable.
As one of the men put it, referring to the demolition
work which goes hand in hand with construction,
“every day now I’m tearing down another little bit of
Brunswick”. We would have loved to have initiated
a tour led by those men, through the Brunswick they
knew. But ultimately they had better things to do than
indulge us in our artistic meanderings, and we couldn’t
really blame them. If nothing else, the fact they didn’t
participate is testament to the limitations of our own
experience; our own capacity to connect beyond that
which we know.
The encounters which have been created over the last
few months, though—between people, and between
people and place—have been genuinely beautiful.
Strange, awkward at times, touched with idiosyncrasy,
these small journeys momentarily and without
pretension opened up possibilities for individual
people to re-view and recreate the spaces in which
they move. These fleeting moments of face-to-face
encounters are the artistic acts; what follows in
the rest of this book is the documentation of these
journeys, the fragments left over. Ever so slightly
they signify something of the quality of contemporary
suburban spaces, and of the persistent desire for
local connectedness, in all its messiness, and in spite
of everything Facebook has to offer. And while these
fragments of words and images can only serve as
partial representations of the encounters themselves,
the creation of such moments of possibility can be
endlessly replicated.
Victoria Stead
SOME SMALL
ADVENTURES
John & Aviva
get lost
John, a librarian who likes getting lost in the back
streets and alleyways of Brunswick, takes Aviva, a
clarinet player in a Balkan gypsy band, on a tour to
the west side of the train tracks. They set off from
Anstey station at 10.30 on a sunny Sunday morning,
to discover a suburban wonderland filled with secret
cobble-stoned hideaways, giant cacti, abandoned
houses and heavily-laden fruit trees breaking free
of the confines of private fences.
START
Sheri &
Heather visit
former
lesbian bars
When Heather took Sheri on a historical tour of
Brunswick, their first stop was The Spot. Heather, who
has called Brunswick home for more than two decades
and remembers the days when Sydney Rd had two
cinemas, told Sheri of the times when The Spot was
known as the Candy Tavern. The Tavern’s lesbian nights
were amongst the first in Melbourne, and Heather
spoke fondly of the hours she spent there, and her
strange encounters with her gun-toting, taxi-driving,
transgender ex-lover. Two beers later and the tour
continued to what used to be another favored haunt,
now the Sporting Club. Memories of the monthly lesbian
nights held there were more sedate—drinking, dancing
and falling in and out of love.
START
Mitch &
Freya climb
through a
hole in a
fence
A circus performer leads an environmental philosopher
through a hole in a fence, to a world where abandoned
buildings are transformed into art galleries, the views
from train bridges are paid the attention they deserve,
and discarded flowers in supermarket dumpsters are
rescued with gentlemanly aplomb. No entry fees, big-
name locations, or show-bags filled with samples from
discount shopping outlets. Just unexpected moments of
delight found in dusty corners and peculiar encounters.
START
Mem & Liz
smoke apple
tobacco
Liz gets lost en route to her tour and has to ride her
bicycle up a very steep hill. Waiting for her at the
top is her tour-guide, Mem, a Kurdish musician and
film-maker. Leaving bicycles behind they venture out
together on a tram, for a lazy afternoon filled with
apple-flavoured tobacco smoked on leather couches,
cheap whisky drunk at tables with plastic table-cloths,
and strong Arabic coffee served in little cups with lots
of sugar. They play a game of pool which lasts for hours.
Mem wins, eventually.
START
Ellie & Alex
don’t get
coffee
Alex made her way to Afghan Kebab on the promise
of Brunswick’s best cardamom-flavoured coffee.
But even the best-laid plans fall through, and when
the coffee machine broke it looked like her tour was
over before it had begun. Alex’s feisty tour-guide Ellie
was momentarily stumped, but quickly devised an
alternate plan. And so the two intrepid travelers bid
goodbye to the fluorescent lights of the Afghan Kebab
and tramped down Sydney Rd in search of beer; past
the Laila Reception Centre where Ellie works as a
waitress, and right into Albert Street. Arrival at Noise
Bar yielded a room full of drunken boys playing pool,
but the day was saved by the five dollar schooners,
the beer garden, and a sighting of the toilet cubicle
where Ellie once had sex with a lovely French man.
START
Jessica,
an American
in Bahla’s
Jessica, an American exchange student and Brunswick
resident of a mere eighteen months, treks to the north
end of the suburb for a late-night snack. At Afghan
Kebab she tries super sweet jelebi, sugary orange
coils on sparkly silver foil, washed down with green
tea which the owner brings her for free. Then it’s on to
the legendary Bahla’s Pastry. The baklava is piled high,
and there’s rosewater ice-cream on display beneath
the giant chandelier, but Jessica opts instead for a
coffee-flavoured scoop, which comes in a little pink
plastic cup with a little pink plastic spoon. Later on,
she dares to try a mouthful of sweetened semolina
sprinkled with nuts.
START
Tolga & Eric
spend timE in
courtyards
Tolga, who owns the Blue Elephant carwash on Stewart
St, takes his neighbour Eric to some of the places
nearby where he spends his time when business is slow.
At Sahara Café, past the pizza ovens and the cabinets
filled with cakes, is a little courtyard with yellow brick
walls and old men playing backgammon and drinking
coffee. Further up the road the unassuming Beans ‘n’
Leaves café turns out to have it own little courtyard
tucked away at the rear, not to mention the best borek
in town—delicious Turkish pastries made by the owner’s
wife. Eric and Tolga drink gazoz uladag—Turkish
lemonade— while they eat and talk, and Eric learns a
thing or two about the Ottoman Empire.
START
Jan & Beth
explore
around the
corner
Jan takes Beth on a very local tour of her favourite
places in the two blocks around her house. La Paloma
café is one, and so is Vittorio’s Barber Shop next door.
Vittorio has gone on holiday to Hawaii, but ensconced
in jackets and scarves the two women peek through
the windows to see the football memorabilia and
newspaper cuttings which cover the walls. At the gallery
across the road they contemplate the art while debating
the difference between lithographs and etchings. And
then at a restaurant a few metres away they munch
on tasty beef treats wrapped in betel leaves. They talk
about many things, including acupuncture and living in
the desert. The sky gets dark because of the rain, and
lights outside are glossy.
START