Thresholds: Gawler Place

I briefly explored in and around  Gawler Place  in the  hour or so that I had between meetings in Adelaide's CBD  on Wednesday (18th May).  This  exploration  focused less  on the empty shops or offices themselves,  and more on the urban  space of the street that included the empty offices.

More specifically,  it was the interface  space between the inside of the building and the street outside the building along with its various reflections in the glass windows of the buildings. What could be called thresholds. 

Post Office Lane

Recently I  wandered through some of my film archives  for the Adelaide part of the  Bowden Archives and Other Marginalia project. I  was using it as a way to take a break from the grind of substantially reworking  the text for this Adelaide/Port Adelaide part of the book.  I am finding the reworking of the text  for each section  hard going,  as the early drafts of the  texts  have little coherence by way  of an argument.  It is a humbling experience.   

Whilst exploring the archives  I came across some b+w photos that I made for the Walking Adelaide project. I had completely  forgotten about these photos. These street views were usually photographed in colour and I'd forgotten  that  on occasions I was also photographing them in b + w at the same time. 

An  example is  this picture of Post Office Lane,  which  runs between Franklin and Waymouth Streets. I was standing in  Post Office Lane and the photo would have been made early in the morning. 

At the time the photo was made  I was photographing the  empty streets in the CBD.  My conception of Adelaide then  was that its street life was pretty minimal. The time period is roughly a decade ago when I was living in the CBD. 

South Road: An experiment 1

I have often thought about walking along Adelaide's South Rd in the late afternoon taking photos of this urban stretch. I drive along this road  every time I go to and from Adelaide to Encounter Bay.   It looks interesting with all the different signs, architecture and colours. It's all mixed up, chaotic  jumble. 

However, South Rd is Adelaide's  main north south corridor and at peak hour it is  jammed with cars in the late afternoon. It is noisey and full of fumes,  and so I have  backed off walking along it. Breathing all those fumes  would not be  good for one's health.  Still, I find photographing South Rd in the late afternoon winter light intriguing.  

I  tried an experiment recently: --taking photos through  a car window. The opportunity arose  when we were returning from Blinman after being on a camel trek from Blinman to Lake Frome, as I was  sitting  in the back seat  and Suzanne was driving towards the Southern Expressway.   


I wound the  back window on the left  side of the car down. The basic concept was simple: to take a photo when the car stopped in traffic. It is unlike the Conceptual artists of the 1960s. They preconceived a conceptual project that they  then carries out with photographs. However,  photography was only useful or interesting to them insofar as it was instrumental in conveying or recording their ideas. These artists describe the photographs themselves as either brute information or uninflected documentation. The  1960s conceptual tradition  held photography as a specific medium  with its  rich history and formal conventions  at arm’s length. 

windows onto

This photo comes from when wandered  in   Rundle Mall in September,  2011.This was a time when I was still living in the CBD and so it easy for me to walk the city in Adelaide learning how we perceive the city,  how we imagine it, how we experience it.  The photos of  shop windows below are very different to the drone's aerial view of Rundle Mall; an aerial view  which has become pervasive in documentaries filmed outdoors.   

I was being a flaneur wandering from shop window to shop window, drifting  amongst the shoppers and office workers who were  going about their business in a very determined and focused  manner.  I was just drifting through the shopping precinct looking for something to photograph; drifting not hunting. The photo is different from Google's Street view which unfolds on the screen under our fingers. 

street art

During the last few days I have been going through the archives looking for material for the forthcoming online Walking/Photography exhibition at Encounters Gallery. Whilst doing so I  came across some  photos of street art in Adelaide, South Australia that I had made around  2011 whilst I was walking  the city. 

I was living in the city at the time and my daily walks with the poodles would be around the CBD and the parklands. These walks would be meanderings--to do with exploration, a way of accommodating myself, of feeling at home. It was a way I got to know the city. Walking  into dead ends,  or  reluctantly retracing  my  steps,  didn't matter to me  because this was part of  the process of  exploration.  

Adelaide: an urban heat island

The skyline of 1970s modernist Adelaide from the top floor of the  Wakefield St  car park. We are  looking west towards Victoria Square.

Little has changed in this part of Adelaide since I  left living in  Sturt St in 2014 to move to Encounter Bay on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula.  The only change is the  hotel  on Whitmore Square-- the dark building in  the left  background. 

Summer in the CBD is  very hot due to the way surfaces like asphalt trap heat even as cars and buildings exude it. When a city is markedly warmer than  its surrounding rural areas, it is called an urban heat island.   Adelaide is one of the worst in Australia and it can be stressful, if not dangerous, to be outside  during a heatwave with 40+ degrees temperatures.  With  climate heating, the impact of higher temperatures will become more evident in the CBD. 

Adelaide modern

Prior to mid twenthieth century  modernism Adelaide was a planned city of red brick and sandstone within a self-contained rectilinear grid   encircled by parks and green space, never to be built upon,  with its discrete zoning of dwelling, work, transportation and recreation.   It was  Colin Hassell and John Morphett  who  rejected the established classical/gothic revival architectural order in early 20th century Adelaide. 

The modernist ethos was to make a modern world, to sweep away the old and, out of chaos, build stability. Concrete was the  stuff of dreams of a progressive, dynamic cosmopolitanism.  Adelaide did not experience the modernist  Brutalist style of building  deployed to satisfy the urgent demand for cost-effective post-war housing on a mass scale that was  frequently associated with socialist utopian ideals, and dreams of collective living. 

One of the themes that I explored off and on when I was living in Adelaide's CBD was the modernist architecture from the 1960s and 1970s. These pictures are of the backs of those  overlooked "form follows function" buildings along  Pirie St which  survived the mindless razing of so much of Adelaide's built heritage from the 1960s to 1980s: 

 Many of the modernist  buildings that are gathered together in the Victoria Square precinct are of the 1970s butalist  genre, such as the Department for Education's headquarters on Flinders Street and  Wakefield House opposite St Francis Xavier's Cathedral. Whilst photographing these kind of buildings I realised the  importance of light to architecture and how it can transform a building completely, both inside and out. This is especially the case with the roughly textured béton brut  buildings.

Austral Stores building

Slowly, ever so slowly, I am returning to working on the Adelaide book project after couple of years.  We  left  living in Adelaide's CBD about   3 years or so ago, and shifted to living on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula coast. Most of my daily photography on the poodlewalks  now happens along  the coast, whereas when we lived in Adelaide,  the daily photography emerged from walking the CBD with the poodles.   

Adelaide's  CBD has changed since 2016.   What is noticeable to me as a visitor about the  new development in the CBD  is the increase in both the high rise apartments and the coffee shops/cafes.  Adelaide is becoming post-industrial. 

Occasional day trips to Adelaide are all that I can  do these days, and this particular trip  was designed to  pick up the photography from where I had left off 3 years ago.  This photo was made on a day trip to Adelaide when  I was able to spend some time wandering around the  CBD as a flaneur.  The above picture was taken from a car park  behind the back of The Austral Stores building in Hindley St.

empty shops

The empty retail shops in the CBD of Adelaide are quite noticeable when  I walk around  the city on my visits from Encounter Bay these days.  I interpret them as one  of the signs of the difficult economic times associated with Adelaide's  slow transition  from being an industrial to a post-industrial city.  This is still a city undergoing de-industrialization,  with a stagnant population,  high poverty and unemployment rates and increased homelessness.  

I accept that I cannot  now photograph the CBD as I used to when I lived in the city and I walked the standard poodles  in the early morning and late afternoon.   As the low key commute  involves an hours drive to Adelaide  from Encounter Bay on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula coast,  so I have to accept whatever light there is  when  I walk and photograph the city during the day. 

renewing Adelaide

Most of the  new development in Adelaide's CBD  since the recession caused by the 2007-8 global financial crisis has been apartment towers. All Australia’s state capitals have seen versions of this  phenomenon,  but the pace and scale of change in Adelaide is  much less than it has been in Melbourne's Docklands or in the inner west of Sydney. 

The exception to the apartment boom are the new buildings along the  western side of North Terrace--that is the expansion of the Convention Centre and the new health and biomedical precinct around and down from the Morphett Street Bridge . The latter consists of the new Royal Adelaide Hospital, the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute, (SAHMRI), the Health Innovation Building (University of South Australia), and the Adelaide Medical and Nursing Schools (University of Adelaide).  

The CBD has been rapidly changing since we left living in the CBD in 2015. We just saw the start of the redevelopment  prior to leaving to living on the coast. We had a sense of Adelaide being between its  decaying industrial past  with its rust-belt imagery (eg. of Whyalla) and a high tech driven future. The promise was one of revitalisation of a moribund urban life with its underperforming public school system,  chronic public-sector management woes and pockets of intense outer suburban  poverty.