This is the walk for those with the legs for poetry. First, take two stone monuments off their plinths for a well-deserved drink. Shake your fist at the Windsor Hotel developers, throw a handful of invisible confetti at a wedding and – if the building is still there – check out the shop once that turned its back to the world. Then, wrap it all up with the ephemeral monuments to the could-have-been legends of Melbourne’s rock scene. This is Melbourne’s long back story: black turtlenecks, grandeur, new money illusions – the tombs of history, glory and disappointment.

The Long Story

Start on a side street and come and acknowledge the statue-less writers who live in dreams. Come edit your identity like generations before you, play with your hyphens in public. Swan about a seedy street corner where no one’s going to try and sell you anything illicit. Anymore. Nor will they call you to let you know when the war ends. After all, you two already broke up.

Writings on the Wall

This is one for those who are old enough to stay up late. If you can get past the bouncers, you might just get into the coolest club that used to be. Of course, then you might just get kicked out of the coolest club that never was and miss your tram. Kill time in the late hours, contemplating if you should give your tram fare to the world’s worst busker. Find somewhere open all hours and go out onto the roof and remember just how glamorous you used to think this place was going to be. As soon as you grew up.

Nighthawking

Surrounded by the chaos of the marketplace, look for teenagers with infected ear piercings.  You might not find them, but at least you’ll have a hot jam donut. Maybe they’re waiting for you, sunbaking on the lawns and checking their phones. Either that, or they’re shopping their little hearts out for the Queen’s Jubilee. We could be completely wrong, maybe they’ve just taken their red capes to escape the rain. Who knows. How do you remember it?

The Stately Strut

I will not be lectured about misogyny by that man

This is the walk for those with the legs for poetry. First, take two stone monuments off their plinths for a well-deserved drink. Shake your fist at the Windsor Hotel developers, throw a handful of invisible confetti at a wedding and – if they’ll let you – check out the shop that turned its back to the world. Then, wrap it all up with the ephemeral monuments to the could-have-been legends of Melbourne’s rock scene. This is Melbourne’s long back story: black turtlenecks, grandeur, new money illusions – the tombs of history, glory and disappointment.

1. Spring St, from Robert Burns to Lindsay Gordon statues (John McKelvie)
2. Windsor Hotel, 100 – 150 Spring St (Ezra Bix)
3. Parliament House steps, 110-160 Spring St (Luis Serrano Gonzalez)
4. The former Job Warehouse, 56 – 58 Bourke St (Anna Fern)
5. Lees Place, between Russell and Exhibition Sts (Alicia Sometimes)

Melbourne Poetry Map: Audio Graffiti (Walk 1 - Red Map)

05 Lees Place, Melbourne, 1967

04 Job Warehouse, 56-58 Bourke St

03 No Rice or Confetti

02 The Duchess of Spring St

01 If poets live on while their songs are sung

Start on a side street and come and acknowledge the statue-less writers who live in dreams. Come edit your identity like generations before you, play with your hyphens in public. Swan about a seedy street corner where no one’s going to try and sell you anything illicit. Anymore. Nor will they call you to let you know when the war ends. After all, you two already broke up.

1. Wheeler Centre, 176 Little Lonsdale St (Steve Smart)
2. Chinese Museum, 22 Cohen Place (Lia Incognita)
3. Corner of Bourke and Russell Sts (James Jackson)
4. Former City West Telephone Exchange, 434 – 436 Little Bourke St (Bella Li)
5. Corner of Bourke and Elizabeth Sts (Anthony O’Sullivan)

Melbourne Poetry Map: Audio Graffiti (Walk 4 - Blue Map)

05 Perched on the Purse at Bourke St

04 City West Telephone Exchange

03 Dusk at the Golden Elbow

02 Typography

01 Wheeler Centre

This is one for those who are old enough to stay up late. If you can get past the bouncers, you might just get into the coolest club that used to be. Of course, then you might just get kicked out of the coolest club that never was and miss your tram. Kill time in the late hours, contemplating if you should give your tram fare to the world’s worst busker. Find somewhere open all hours and go out onto the roof and remember just how glamorous you used to think this place was going to be. As soon as you grew up.

1. Former Honkytonks, Duckboard Pl, off Flinders Lane (Santo Cazzati)
2. Outside the Purple Emerald Lounge Bar, 191 Flinders Lane (Ezra Bix)
3. Corner of Little Bourke and Swanston Sts (James Jackson)
4. Rooftop Bar and Cinema, Level 6, 252 Swanston St (Josephine Rowe)

Melbourne Poetry Map: Audio Graffiti (Walk 5 - Yellow Map)

04 Red Lights

03 Swanston St 10.58

02 Drunk Tram Sways Away from Melba

01 Honkytonks

Surrounded by the chaos of the marketplace, look for teenagers with infected ear piercings.  You might not find them, but at least you’ll have a hot jam donut. Maybe they’re waiting for you, sunbaking on the lawns and checking their phones. Either that, or they’re shopping their little hearts out for the Queen’s Jubilee. We could be completely wrong, maybe they’ve just taken their red capes to escape the rain. Who knows. How do you remember it?

1. Queen Victoria Market, corner Elizabeth and Victoria Sts (Steve Smart)
2. State Library Lawns, corner Swanston and LaTrobe Sts (Nathan Curnow)
3. Queen Victoria Women’s Trust Centre, 21o Lonsdale St (Eleanor J Jackson)
4. Chinatown, Little Bourke St, between Russell and Exhibition Sts (Josephine Rowe)

Melbourne Poetry Map: Audio Graffiti (Walk 6 - Aqua Map)

04 Chinatown

03 QV Building

02 State Library Lawns

01 Queen Victoria Market

In a city this teeming with stories, don’t be surprised if you find them creeping up from the  drains, lurking in subways and peeping through the cracks in the concrete and bitumen. Find out what those critters with the lamps on their heads are doing after the commuters go home and then find out just what you’re looking at. Take yourself off to the wrong side of the tracks to see the dirty river holding up a blue fish. Find the real Melbourne beneath fruitshop smiles. This walk feels good late at night. If you’re brave enough.

Melbourne Poetry Map: Audio Graffiti (Walk 3 - Purple Map)

01 At night in the Degraves St Subway

Concepts of ‘voice’ have long been connected to the practice, politics and theories of feminism. After all, how can we find agency without ‘a voice’? But there’s no singular, feminist voice. It matters, who speaks for whom and about what, whose voices are valorised and whose are silenced. Even within feminism, it has been difficult to find a place for all voices equally.

This journey gives voice to some ideas that have been frequently silenced, to people traditionally considered voiceless, but it also leaves pauses and gaps – unresolved quiet that nevertheless communicates. Our futures are not predetermined, nor is our past static, and these artists tease out that ambiguity, its promise and its failings.

Izzy Roberts-Orr starts us with a formal but contemporary litany, recounting of the Women’s Liberation Switchboard, reasons to “Call me” for the collective wisdom and purpose to continue our “unfinished business”. Just a few hundred metres away, Terri Ann Quan Sing eschews formalism for a more abstracted, kaleidoscopic view of the ancient future in her work, “Anchors Against”. It may look like a drinking fountain, but the surface can hide much more. Claire G. Coleman, with her work, “Truganini” invites us to sit, reflect and mobilise as “rebel queens” whose fight is still very much alive. To conclude, Aseel Tayah‘s work, “One, Two, Three”, brings us to the Old Melbourne Gaol, looking outward from Australia and inward as a human to ask for a humanity that can do better than imprison its own.

This walk was made possible by Queen Victoria Women’s Centre in collaboration with Peril Magazine.

04 One Two Three

03 Truganini

02 Anchors Against

01 Litany For The Women's Liberation Switchboard Call Me

Space has always mattered to feminism. And it will continue to matter in the future, however that it manifests. Taking space, taking up space, sharing space, ceding space and finding space are all central concerns to this feminist journey which begins and ends at former Salvation Army hall locations.

Where once wayward women and “poor children” had their souls saved, a commercial venue now provides musician, Emily Soon, with inspiration to contemplate the notion of ‘shelter’ and our future generations. Then, Sista Zai Zanda casts her gaze backwards to the controversial Madame Brussels, preserved now in the naming of a bar and laneway, but previously a fraught symbol of the tangled politics of economics, respectability and the feminine. Kochava Lilit unravels the Monster Petition sculpture, which commemorates women’s suffrage, to question how we celebrate, offering a more subtle form of recognition: atonement. From the ‘mighty’ and ‘monster’, Quinn Eades takes us back to the humble public toilet, using it as a platform to ask for more than a place to tend to our bodily needs, instead asking for a complete reappraisal of this place and time and the bodies we allow or do not allow to take up space within it. Finally, Darlene Silva Soberano haunts us with the tenderness of love, its once ubiquitous and quotidian expressions: touch and closeness. With so much space between us now, how can we hold on to what has made us human in the uncertain future?

This walk was made possible by Queen Victoria Women’s Centre in collaboration with Peril Magazine.

05 Dessert Story

04 First Women's Public Toilet

03 The Anniversary

02 Mme Brussels

01 Shelter

Eleanor Jackson is a poet and performer, and producer of the Melbourne Poetry Map

Melbourne Poetry Map

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