Don’t you miss the days when graffiti had something to say?

During and since the Covid lockdowns, much of Melbourne has been covered in graffiti. Most of it is indecipherable tags, where the only message is comprehensible to the purported artists and like minded morons of their subculture. [I make no apologies for my views on these vandals.]

As a result, given that our Premier is too busy pork barrelling and breaking his word, and local councils are too busy being useless, there has been no effort to clean up this graffiti and it makes our metropolis look like something out of a post apocalyptic film.

But there are some instances where someone has something to say. Recently, some person with very strange ideas spray painted the slogan ‘The Goddess Artemis is a Whore’ in at least two locations in Footscray. I found this extremely intriguing.

Then today, when walking near Fairfield Station after having a vegetarian burger smothered in smashed avo (Fairfield is definitely where to go for such things), I saw the above slogan painted on the floor of an underpass. ‘Selfish Cyclists’ is just the sort of message I would paint if I were not such a rigorously law abiding chap as I am.

Which makes me a tad nostalgic for the days when graffiti artists actually had something to say, whether it was political or just obscurely self indulgent.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, we still had graffiti primarily used as a tool of political protest. I recall, when I was in primary school, the slogan ‘Thompson Shears Education’ was painted on a brick factory wall over the street from the back of my school. It was painted, as I later discovered, elsewhere around the inner western suburbs, and related to Dr Shears, the unpopular director-general of education, and Lindsay Thompson, the Minister for Education (and an all round decent fellow if you really want to talk about him). Witty and to the point.

And there were so many brick and concrete walls which served as blank canvases for when lefties wanted to advertise a protest march for a time and place (I support the right to protest, even where I do not agree with the protesters). They had something to say, and their use of the walls was almost legitimate. I respect it.

Then you had the rather obscure. Ronald Reagan’s full name was Ronald Wilson Reagan, and some people in the potentially apocalyptic 1980s saw the six digits of each of his names as a sign of the Anti-Christ, 666. Hence, on the wall of the former Footscray Masonic Temple in Leeds Street, someone started to write:

“The Phoenix has risen from the ashes, Ronald Wilson Rea’…

Well, they were interrupted before they could finish. I hope they were able to get away.

On the retaining wall on the city bound side of North Melbourne railway station from at least 1984 onward, there was the slogan ‘USA The Whore Is Doomed – Rev 17’ which fitted in very much with the potentially apocalyptic times that were the 1980s.

My favourite from that era was on the wall of the Burnley railway station: ‘Blinky Bill Shall Rise’.

And I hope that their words come true.