Timmah Ball
A flight of bright birds arise from the concrete

If you drive along the Esplanade or Jacka Boulevard they are almost invisible, easy enough to pass. It is only the painted, wood-panelled door with two padlocks that suggests another world existed here. Slow down, wind your window or better still find parking along the Boulevard and look closer.

A row of identically shaped arches is all that remains of the St Kilda foreshore vaults, which quietly blend into the infrastructure like they were never there. The vaults housed a group of 10 shops built in the 1890s, frequented by both tourists and locals who flocked to the foreshore at the time. After the shops’ removal in the 1950s, the area was bricked over in the 1970s to facilitate road widening, which took precedence. In some ways, their disappearance reflects how the desire for something ‘new’ or the need to go ‘faster’ will always eclipse pre-existing uses in the settler-cities’ logic.

But their vacancy also offers time to think and space to park your car along the widened road. There is no need to rush. There is something else to see.

There is a group of rainbow lorikeets emerging from the disused vaults. Their presence unravels even more layers of the built environment, revealing much more than the quaint seaside shops that were once here – if we look and listen closely. The lorikeets transform from black and white to full colour as they dance against the grain, unlimited by the city’s imprint. They embody the resilience, agility and survivance of First Nation peoples, flora and fauna which adapted and thrived. Unlike the shops that disappeared behind the disused vaults, bricked over and painted a bluish grey, the lorikeets remained. They hid amongst city streets or in plain sight in the city’s sky even as so many other western architectures vanished, in the settler cities’ short history. Because what was always here is never lost even as environments shift. See beyond the built form that you live in. Look closer, watch the birds fly over you as you walk back to your car. Follow their direction instead of the widened road.

Stop; observe the past and see the future

Open the door to find another view; someone else lived here before you.

Listen to the songbirds and parrots that originated here 53 million years ago. They still remain even as another luxury apartment building materialises and alters the settler city again.

Unvanished – Federation Square

“We are here, we have always been here, but too often we and our stories are unseen and unknown. We have not vanished.” – Kent Morris.

https://fedsquare.com/events/unvanished

Peel Street Projection Park

Waa and Wattle will be exhibited after dark in Peel Street Park from Tuesday 15 March to Thursday 28 April, 2022.

https://arts.yarracity.vic.gov.au/whats-on/2022/03/15/waa-and-wattle-by-kent-morris

Wilam Biik

Tarrawarra Museum of Art

Tree Story

Never Alone