The tour runs for 19 minutes and has 7 stops.

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Download audio file (tom-civil-carlton-street-art-peoplestour.mp3)

Download Tom’s tour (file size: 17.5 MG)

About your tour guide Tom Sevil

Tom (AKA Civilian) is a d.i.y. artist and activist graphic designer who publishes posters, zines, stickers and newspapers. His stencil work has been featured in various media including Melbourne Stencil Graffiti Capital and the ABC TV series Not Quite Art and he was a feature artist in the Melbourne Stencil Festival 2004 and 2005. The National Gallery of Australia has acquired eighteen of his works. Tom has exhibited in community art spaces, empty shows and on the street, has run stencil making workshops in different communities and given various public talks about the political nature of street art.

Tom is one half of Breakdown Press, radical publishers of three Poster Series covering issues of Indigenous sovereignty in Australia, corporate-globalisation and the nuclear industry, and the book YOU: some letters from the first five years, an anthology of an ongoing anonymous letter writing project.

Breakdown Press’ latest book is How to Make Trouble and Influence People, which explores Australia’s radical past through tales of Indigenous resistance, convict revolts and escapes, picket line hi-jinks, student occupations, creative direct action, media pranks, urban interventions, squatting, blockades, banner drops, street theatre and billboard liberation. It includes stories and anecdotes, interviews with pranksters and troublemakers, and 300 spectacular photos documenting the vital history of creative resistance in Australia.

Getting there

• Take the 1 or 8 tram from the City and get off at Elgin Street/Lygon Street
• Use the Metlink Journey Planner for buses along Elgin-Johnston Street

This tour was recorded and edited by Jane Curtis, produced by Community Radio 3CR and funded by the Office of Public Records Local History grant program.

2009 Melbourne Fringe Festival event

We were proud to be part of Melbourne Fringe Festival. Check out the photos on Flickr of the Fringe Festival walking tour on Sunday 27 September.

TOM Sevil is up a laneway inspecting some 1970s graffiti. He likes these places. He’s a stencil artist, graffitist and graphic designer, but also something of an archaeologist, because the work at hand here is but a fragment, partly buried beneath rich layers of history.

In white house paint applied with a brush, not an aerosol, this graffito no longer makes sense. It says: Frazer is a bottled toad in a trust – and there it ends, forever to remain a mystery, its final words obscured by years of others’ graffiti.

This fragment, a bastardisation of a phrase from Shakespeare’s Richard III, is more poetic than most of the illegible tags scrawled about the laneway. It might once have had something insightful (but misspelt) to say about Malcolm Fraser, then prime minister of Australia. But in this world of laneways and rapid-fire guerilla action, the scrawls, tags, posters and stencils are all ultimately temporary.

For Sevil, quality and longevity aside, it is all about political action.

Read the full article.

She takes us on a tour of the Carlton Neighbourhood Centre.

This tour goes for six minutes and has three tour stops.

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Download audio file (maria-tour.mp3)

Download a tour of the Carlton Neighbourhood Centre by Maria Ibrahim
Windows: Right-click “Save target as” Mac: Ctrl-click “Save link as”

About your tour guide

Maria Ibrahim is a resident of the Carlton Estates. She came to Melbourne in 1992 from Ethiopia.

Maria is actively involved with the Hararian community across Melbourne. She has 3 boys aged 2 to 5 years or 4 if you include her husband!

Maria is studying English at the Carlton Neighborhood House and is the chairperson of the Horn of Africa Women’s Group at the Carlton Estates where she organises events and activities for the women of her community.  Maria wants to teach young people about Hararian culture and language, and hopes to do this as part of a community language program on 3CR community Radio Melbourne.

Sponsors

This project is part of the Carlton Flats Arts Project produced by the Community Cultural Development Program, City of Melbourne.

The walk-ups, and Joyce’s old home, will be demolished in 2010 to make way for the redevelopment of the estate.

The Carlton Flats Arts Project works with current and relocated tenants to document the redevelopment and to acknowledge the contribution made by the communities living on the estate to Carlton and to Melbourne generally.

This tour goes for seven minutes, and has four tour stops.

Photo at right by Angela Bailey.

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Download audio file (joyce-tour.mp3)
Download a tour of the Carlton Flats by Joyce Stewart Windows: Right-click “Save target as” Mac: Ctrl-click “Save link as”

About your tour guide

In 1974, Joyce Stewart moved with her four children to a Palmerston Street walk-up flat in the Carlton Public Housing Estate.

In 2006 she was relocated to a cottage in nearby Canning Street, and although she remains close to her old home, she misses the sense of community she enjoyed there.

Sponsors

This tour was created from a radio training course by Melbourne community radio station 3CR 855AM.

It is part of the Carlton Flats Arts Project produced by the Community Cultural Development Program City of Melbourne.