Carlton’s lesser known street art histories

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 10:20:06 +0000

A walking tour that follows the cobblestone pathways of Carlton, a suburb on Melbourne’s city fringe, to find street galleries and remnant political markings from the 1970s to the present.

The tour runs for 19 minutes and has 7 stops.

Listen now or download for later

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.

If these scrawls could talk: Tour guide Tom Sevil in The Age

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 03:56:53 +0000

Tom Sevil, Tour Guide of 2009 Fringe Festival walking tour Carlton’s lesser known street art histories, gave Age journalist Andrew Stephens a preview tour of Carlton’s remnant and more recent street art and talked about the nature of street art, especially political street art, Melbourne’s changing street art sites and “official” graffiti…

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.