Newtownophilia

So much to say, and none of it interesting! So here are some photos instead from our trip over east, which make me nostalgic and a bit sad because I don't live in the Inner-West of Sydney anymore.

Some Newtown Graff. Who doesn't love a bit of graff? Why, people who own the edifices upon which the graff is painted, of course, but the rest of us can enjoy the mixed media collage effect of this particular bit of wall in Camperdown park. My other favourite spot for graff is a wall on the end of Liberty street in Enmore, just before it hits Stanmore road.

I like the colour of this flaky paint. This shade of blue would be unbearable in a flat, solid colour, but faded and chipped like this it lends the slender terrace it was painted upon a cheerily quasi-Cuban air.

As an aside, the frustrating thing about my current camera is that when I open the lens out to the widest angle, it gets this really bad barrel distortion. The point of this story is that when I am rich enough to buy a D200 or D80 I will also be rich enough to buy some good-quality glass which will not subject me to nasty barrel distortion.

Mirror in Pentimento on King St, Newtown. I love Pentimento. If I were to own a shop, it would be like Pentimento, except it would also have yarn and knitting paraphenalia I also like taking this sort of photo, in lieu of having a fisheye lens of my own.

JW took this shot of his feet and moderately hairy shins and I artied it up. Enjoy. (Yes, he's wearing both THONGS and SHORTS. The fashion police arrested him not long after this photo was taken, and tortured him until he agreed to dress like Bill Granger.)

The side of Le Kiliminjaro restaurant, which is, obvs. a map of Africa. Graff is NOT appreciated on this fabulous mural, okay kids? But a stylishly placed scooter is.

Le window of Le Kiliminjaro. The first year I lived in Sydney I used to catch a bus down King Street every night and for a very long time I thought Le Kiliminjaro actually was a Fast African Restaurant, and not an East African Restaurant. Anyway, Le Kiliminjaro is a wonderful place, not least because the service is truly eccentric (as one waiter asked me on a notorious evening there: excuse me Madam, can you leave now?) and the delicious food is served in these cute little wooden bowls. I can personally recommend the dish called Sap-Sap, as it is yum yum.

After I took these pictures I was booted out of Maple (politely). When I asked the saleshipster why, she indicated that for all she knew, I could be from a rival store, and stealing their mechandising ideas (which basically consisted of having jeans hanging about the place).

I was flabbergasted about this -- if I really wanted to steal their merchandising ideas I wouldn't need to take a photo, I could use this amazing tool I have called my BRAIN, which enables me to remember such difficult and subtle things as 'display your jeans by hanging them in the window'.

At this point we realised we were late for an appoinment and rushed off, so I didn't get any more shots, but if I lived nearer to Newtown I'd be down there every weekend pissing off sales staff with my insistent photography.

Comments

[coz]

I love Penimento too...many a pressie had been bought there.
Kilimenajo rocks, the first time I ever had eggplant, and now I'm an addict, ohh and their spinach w dressing *drool* . The mural has changed in the last few years, it used to be much more detailed and coloured...still beautiful.
I walk thru Newtown and it feels like home (it was my old stomping ground when I first came to Sydney), more than the suburb I live now.

[Liam]

Newtown's changed since you've been away, Kate. Changed.
Seems you can't walk down King Street these days without having your toes run over by a branded-clothed yuppie with an enormous stroller and a fat gurgling overentitled piece of pinkish-white heterosexual uterus-produce, ready to consume discretionary spending money (aka baby). The private schools of Sydney need have no fear for their future profitability; the burghers of New Newtown are off the pill, gettin' all fertility-militant and they're breeding their way to ultimate victory in the War Of Real Estate. Jeez, even I want to move out past Parramatta just to get away from them---and I'm as Inner-West a snob as they come.
What happened to the Newtown of my semi-demi-boho mid-1990s memory, with the dried gutter-blood, broken car window glass, white wannabe-rastas smoking public dodgy-leaf joints and black junkies shaking through the heroin weekend-off? Which outatown doof party swallowed all of the hippies? What happened to the 10am schooners of Old? (no... wait) When did the enormous shitty Valiants and second-hand Commodores get replaced by black Mercedes cut-price four-wheel-drives? Into which enormous closet have all of the old out 'n' proud, rubfuck-in-public, paid-up-financial-member, walking-the-walk, talking-the-talk, wearing-the-t-shirt Newtown queers gone?
"Class War". That's right, there's one going on, and Newtown's fallen.

[Liam]

Oh, and thongs with anything *else* but shorts is a crime against ordinary people who feel the heat.

[TimT]

Newtown's all right, but it doesn't have a song like New York:

* Newtown, Newtown,
It's a wonderful ... town.
The University is up,
And the community centre, train station, and assorted alcoholics, deros, and drug addicts are down ...*

[elsewhere]

Oh that's bad news, Liam. Sounds like the N-town's turning into Balmain.

[Kate]

Coz, yeah, even though I never actually lived in Newtown (I lived in a shitty block of flats right at the junction of St Peters/Erskineville and Alexandria when we first moved to Sydney, then we moved to Annandale and then to Leichhardt) it still feels like home.

Liam, unfortunately I'm probably one of the white middle-class so-and-sos who sucked Newtown of all its actual bohemian squatter hippy quuers. And yeah, it has changed in the seven years since we lived in that shitty flat opposite Sydney Park, and some of those changes have been bad and some have been good. Definitely becoming Balmainafied, Eslewhere, which I agree is not a great thing.

The thing I always liked about the Inner-West was that it was a cool place to be, but it wasn't homogenously yuppy like the Eastern Suburbs (or the beautiful whitebread mercedesful subburb I live in here in Perth).

TimT, do any Australian cities or urban locales have songs which do them justice?

[ThirdCat]

Well, Adelaide has a couple of songs - Redgum in particular 'it's one more boring Thursday night in Adelaide, and it looks like everybody must have died'...is that the kind of thing you mean?

[TimT]

Hmmm, good question. The only one I can think of is 'The Star Hotel' memorialised in a Cold Chisel song.

[susozs]

Newtown yuppified?
Hahahahahahaha.

Signed, a resident of the eastern suburbs

[Kate]

Oh never mind me I'm just jealous that we don't get to live in Paddington...

[harry]

Nice rant, Haiku.
I recall that horrible day last year when the Marly girls were told to tone down the jewellery and hair. and then (shudder) came the announcement of the marlborough hotel uniform.
HAH! Talk about a punch to the guts. Talking to some of the few locals who've been frequenting the Marly for 35years+ they had memories of when it was a 'milling' pub and the blood used to be hosed out of the place.
Mind you there was a time when they wouldn't hire anyone with tattoos(!)

[harry]

Oh yeah, the graffiti on the wall round St Stephen's cemetery ie the first picture at the top. A friend has a graff book from 1975. You can still spot some of them. the white outline of the opera house has been there for many years and was updated with 'No War' on the second sale at the appropriate time. That is when graffiti becomes cultural, yes? Tthe ammendment still makes me smile.

[Inversiones en petroleo]

I would like to read more about this interesting topic.