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.  

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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.   

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