empty office, Pultney St

As there is  now a walking Adelaide website with its own blog  this  old blog has become superfluous. It  served its purpose to kickstart the website and, as a result,  it hasn't been updated in 2 years. 

However, I thought  that I could revive it to include the odd photo that doesn't make it to the official website. Toss away photos, odd balls, or rejects if you like,  that stand  outside the website and are an accessory to  (the parergon) the main work (the  ergon). This blog would   that exists on the margins. 

These throwaways would be supplements to  the walking Adelaide website. A supplement is something that, allegedly secondarily, comes to serve as an aid to something ‘original’. The website is the original.  The logic of the supplement in Derrida's Of Grammatology  is both 'to add onto' (supplémenter) and to 'supplement' (suppléer). It both completes another thing and something that may replace it. 

urbanscapes

I took advantage of a recent dental appointment in Adelaide's  CBD   to walk the city  and to try and make some photographic  urbanscapes. I started out from my base in the Adelaide Central Market where I'd  had my  morning coffee and went nto the Pitt Street carpark to check out Franklin St:   

I thought that I'd  return to some of my  old locations in the various  car parks  that I'd visited and explored when  I  lived in the city prior to 2015 and this was a good a way as any to gain a quick perspective on  how the CBD had changed, if at all, between 2015 and 2022. 

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-Covid Adelaide

The recent brute force attacks and hacks to two of my Wordpress blogs --Thoughtfactory and Mallee Routes --- have caused  me  to start to  look at Square Space for re-building the Walking Adelaide project. Rebuilding because this project  has basically outgrown Posthaven's  simple  blog format.  It  needs galleries, blog and text and  so rather than building another Wordpress site I am considering Square Space. There is more on this at the Thoughtfactory blog.

The galleries, blog and text would be designed to give the project more depth. 

Post-Covid Adelaide is different to the one that I lived and photographed in  during the second decade of the 21st century. As noted in earlier posts  there are fewer people on the streets of the CBD. Whilst walking around the northern part of the CBD  last Tuesday (26th April)  I noticed that  the only section of the city that had lots of people moving around was the north-west end of the CBD,  and these were students at the Uni of SA

lunchtime in Adelaide

I still find it a depressing experience walking Adelaide's CBD post-Covid. Many of the lunch time cafe's and coffee shops continue to remain closed.  Will they ever open again? Will the pandemic shape Adelaide's future? What  might urban life look like on the other side of the Covid-19 pandemic?  How long before the CBD starts to be full of people? 

Judging from the lack of people in the city it appears that  many of the office  workers are still working from home. The density of the people in the city is certainly much less than in pre-Covid times and about half those walking the streets are wearing masks.  It was such a marked difference to Melbourne where hardly anyone wore face masks on the street. 

Covid-19: a public mood

I spent Wednesday in the week before Xmas walking the city and  taking photo  for several hours. I had parked the car near the Adelaide parklands and walked to the Adelaide Central Market.   After  a coffee in the  Central Market  I spent the next 4-5 hours  walking around  the north western side of the CBD,  starting at the nearby  Post Office Lane.  


Then I wandered and photographed along  "Westpac Lane", which runs off Topham Mall, returning to old haunts to get my bearings. Some people were wearing masks on the street, most were using the QR codes on their phones and many  were keeping a safe distance. Though South Australia's closed borders had  meant that it was a zero Covid state, people were going about their business without the twinkle, shimmer and buzz of the approaching festive season.  


South Australia had just opened its state borders, the  Omicron variant was starting to circulate through Adelaide,   and the number of daily infections were starting to rapidly rise. The  public mood was sombre and wary.  Grim even.  This is such a contrast to this time in  2020, when  looked as if the near future would be one of hope: we had survived 2020, vaccinations were just around the corner and with that, the promise of no more lockdowns and a return to open borders.  Fortress Australia would be history.  In late December 2021 the Omicron variant of the virus is  everywhere, the federal government continues to be  missing in action, and the capacity of the  health system is being eroded with staff stand downs and resignations, ambulance ramping  and a blowout in waiting lists.     

old and new

I finally had some time to spend a few hours wandering around,  and photographing in,  the CBD last week. The CBD is rapidly changing from when I used  to live there.   

The few hours of  photographic drifting was between  seeing the Marek brothers  exhibition --- Dušan and Voitre Marek: Surrealists at sea -- at the South Australian Art Gallery and  receiving the 1st AstraZeneca vaccination at my GP clinic.   The Morrison Federal Govt has been very slack in acquiring and  rolling out the vaccine,  and my GP clinic has only been receiving very  limited doses per week. Sadly, exaggerated claims, spin and outright lies have covered over  the stuff up re the vaccine supply and roll out.   

Back to the exhibition.  There was a deep resistance to the foreign, the European, and modernism in   postwar Adelaide and  the migrant artists in the European diaspora were consigned to obscurity. They represent by-ways, irrelevancies, alternative pathways – all leading to dead ends in the central narrative of Australian art history. For instance, Sasha Grishin's recent Australian Art: A History  does not mention the Marek brothers,  despite their influence on the early paintings of Jeffrey Smart. 

The Surrealist at Sea  exhibition finally  recovers, and recognizes,  some of the forgotten modernism in Adelaide after the 1945. An example of this forgetting is Patrick McCaughey's  recent Strange Country: Why Australia Painting Matters, which  ignores Surrealism in Australia,  and doesn't mention the Marek brothers. McCaughey's text is  both Melbourne-centric and ignores how some modernists, such as the Marek brothers  worked across several artistic mediums and not just in the medium of painting. In the Marek brothers case it was painting, sculpture, prints, film,  photography and jewellery. 

walking Bowden

I was able to walk around Bowden making some photos when I was  in Adelaide last week. I had several hours whilst I was waiting for Kayla to be clipped.  I quickly realised that  the  Bowden/Brompton that I lived in  during the 1980s has well and truely gone.  

 This old industrial /working class suburb is undergoing extensive urban renewal and redevelopment.  The factories and cottages have all gone--replaced by apartments in Bowden and townhouses in Brompton.  

I spend some time walking around the new redevelopment in Bowden--it is high density urban infill with a heritage precinct on the land of the old Brompton Gasworks. Bowden is envisioned as a vibrant, inner city destination. 

The empty land opposite where I used to live in Gibson Street is now Emu  Park whilst the Stobie poles have mosaics.  The boundary in Gibson St has gone, as has the house where I had a studio.   Conroys Small Goods is still there.  

Adelaide's empty shops

It could well  be the case that with the disappearance of the Holden  car plant at Elizabeth,  Adelaide is in danger of being  a distressed city with its unemployment, run-down buildings, an inequality with  its impoverishment  part of the population,  an underperforming public school system, declining living standards,  and a limited skill base due to young people leaving to find work in Sydney or Melbourne.  

This long and uneven process of de-industrialization has resulted in crisis management by the South Australian state government; one that   aims to prevent further  urban decline in the context of post-Fordist capitalism. However, Adelaide struggles compared to Melbourne or Sydney, as the latter  have weathered industrial decline far better than Adelaide, due to  these two larger cities having benefited  more from globalisation.  

It is true that a faltering Adelaide  has begun the process of  adapt and respond to economic change.in the form of   re-invention--of slowly  transforming  into becoming a post-industrial city. This is a transition  from producing and providing goods to one that mainly provides  services. In a post-industrial society, technology, information, and services are more important than manufacturing actual goods.  This, it is argued,  is the path to recovery. 

The subsidised casino, convention centre and sports stadium  are designed to encourage urban development, give Adelaide a competitive edge in the competition between Australia's cities,   and  a new image as an attractive city in contrast to the rusting industrial image.   Adelaide brands itself as a destination  that seeks to attract visitors and a creative class of new residents in the CBD.  

What I  do find  disturbing  is that there are still a large number of empty shops in the CBD. The above picture is of an  empty shop is in the western part of Hindley St, which is in the northwestern area of Adelaide's  CBD.