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ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/10/01–2160-02 © 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13604810903529159

Scenes & Sounds

Learning the city

Tom Civil

Taylor and Francis

CCIT_A_453379.sgm

10.1080/13604810903529159

City

1360-4813 (print)/1470-3629 (online)

Original Article

2010

Taylor & Francis

14

1

000000

February 2010

TomCivil

[e-mail]

came to graffiti unexpectedly. I moved
to the city when I was 10 years old. I’d
spent my years before that, first as a

baby on two different farms, then moved to
the small country town of Uralla in NSW,
after a short stint in apparently a squatted
place just on the edge of town in the neigh-
bouring town of Armidale. After moving to
Sydney I spent my time at school with my
Mum, while I spent all my holidays up with
my Dad in the bush. My brother Ned and
I spent our time divided between the city and
the bush. This theme later carried on into
both our art practices in ways we both
probably didn’t expect. We loved finding
wild spaces within the city to play in. Proba-
bly from having the freedom and space as
kids to build our own cubby houses as we’d
call them, places to hide away from the world
we could call our own. We made a tinned
roofed rough cabin that was cut into the side
of the dam with a wood fire and a chimney.
One winter in the cold and snow we
constructed a labyrinth of tunnels and rooms
through the hay-bales Dad had bought in
bulk to later sell from his place for people’s
veggie patches and to feed horses and cattle.

Ned got into graffiti as a teenager. He and

his mates used to paint pieces in the back shed
at our place near the beach in Sydney. A beau-
tiful part of the city where the ocean meets the
CBD. After school finished I moved to
Newcastle for four years and studied environ-
mental science and geography at the home of
Australia’s largest coal port. The city has an
amazing history of convicts, bikies, surfers
and steel. I then moved to Melbourne in 2001,
after attending the World Economic Forum
protests, or S11 the year before. I pretty much

straight away got into independent media
projects and started working for The Paper, a
fortnightly free political newspaper. I got into
zines, stencils and street art more generally.
Graffiti just felt a part of the free uncontrolled
media movement. As well as Reclaim the
Streets and Critical Mass at the time, there was
a movement building to reclaim public space
for the public. Skyscrapers, cheap student
accommodation, advertising and increased
surveillance are all part of the ever growing
city landscape around us. Graffiti—posters,
tags, pieces, slogans, re-advertising, street
sculptures, paintbombing—is a hands-on
reclaiming of the architecture of the city.

Things came together when I discovered

the joy of painting in abandoned places. Old
silos, a forgotten Velura factory, a function
centre, drains, a boarded up pub at the docks.

We kinda started organizing to get people

together to paint a place up then make a time
for people to meet and all walk, ride and roll
to the secret location. Shows like this under
the title ‘The Empty Show’ happened in
Melbourne, Newcastle, Sydney, Brisbane and
Canberra as well as other places. Different
people worked together in different places.
Music was made, rooms were transformed,
the buildings would become alive full of
people exploring and staring in happiness.

My brother Ned was exploring aban-

doned, forgotten, places in the city too in
Sydney. He built a magical walkway through
a roofless little house that will never be
forgotten. The billboard jams the crew were
doing up in Sydney at the time were huge,
unlike anything I’d seen before.

The city has taught me that people will

always find a way to make places they can

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call their own. And that in this simple desire
lies a positive and creative future for what we
now call cities.

I have learned that our use of resources in

cities is vast and the impact that this has on
the natural environment beyond cities is
devastating. And for people to have the
education to understand a worldview beyond
the city, communication is vital. The limited

ways to communicate with those around us
must always be protected. In a largely urban
population, we have to not lose sight of the
role ‘graffiti’ plays in this.

Tom Civil, Email: [e-mail]
Websites: www.breakdownpress.org
www.flickr.com/photos/tomcivil

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