FROM THE CULTURE

Written Into the City

Field Guide

Before Melbourne’s painted walls appeared on tourism maps, another map of the city was already being drawn.

It followed railway lines rather than laneways. Names appeared beside tracks, across retaining walls, around stations and industrial spaces, and on trains that carried them through the suburbs. Writers saw what other writers were doing. Crews formed. Styles developed. Photographs were taken before pieces disappeared.

  • Long before Melbourne began selling itself as a street-art city, people were already writing themselves into it.

The culture taking shape through Melbourne in the 1980s wasn’t simply an early version of the street art that would later make the city’s laneways famous. It was graffiti writing: tags, pieces, names, crews, style and reputation, developing alongside the spread of hip-hop culture and the influence of graffiti coming out of New York.

Those influences mattered. But imitation only gets you so far. Once the names were on Melbourne walls and trains, they entered a different city: different suburbs, different railway lines, different crews and a different geography. Writers began building something local around what they had seen.

Before there was a Melbourne street-art brand, there was a Melbourne graffiti culture.

THE FIRST GENERATIONS

Names Before Destinations

"Supreme Artists" - Bayswater, 2002 Era - MelbourneGraffiti

Trying to reconstruct those first years means working with a history that was never designed to sit neatly in an archive.

A wall could disappear beneath another piece. A train could be cleaned. A photograph might sit in somebody’s collection for decades. Writers generally used names rather than legal identities, crews overlapped, and memories of who was where — and when — don’t always line up perfectly. That is part of the story rather than a problem to edit out of it.

One of the major records of the period is Kings Way: The Beginnings of Australian Graffiti — Melbourne 1983–93, assembled by Duro Cubrilo, Martin Harvey and Karl Stamer from the photographs and history of the scene itself.

Alongside collections like Kings Way, MelbourneGraffiti’s archive of interviews and photographs preserves recollections from people who were there. Names including Oucher and Dee appear within that early history, alongside crews remembered through initials such as TFA, DMA, PBA and C2F. The initials are important, but treating them like fixed corporate logos misses something about how graffiti culture remembers itself.

A crew name could carry more than one expansion. Meanings could shift between periods or be remembered differently by different writers. Membership and associations could change. The same three letters might therefore produce more than one legitimate answer depending on who is telling the story. That looseness feels appropriate for a culture built around aliases in the first place.

  • What mattered was recognition.

A name seen once might mean nothing. A name that kept appearing became familiar. Repeat it across enough surfaces, develop a recognisable handstyle or piece, connect it to a crew, and the city started carrying that identity for you.

Graffiti gave writers a way of becoming known without necessarily being known at all.

RAILWAY GEOGRAPHY

Follow the Line

Map of active crews around the mid 90's - The Herald Sun "Gangs Riding The Rails" 12/12/96

To understand how that recognition travelled, forget the tourist map for a moment and look at Melbourne’s railway map.

  • The lines created their own geography.

A writer didn’t need to live in your suburb for their name to become familiar. Trackside walls, stations and railway infrastructure put work in front of the same commuters again and again. Paint a train and the equation changed again: the surface itself moved through the network. Melbourne’s enormous suburban spread suddenly mattered.

  • The city could be read line by line.

The Frankston corridor and Melbourne’s southeast form part of that history, just as other lines developed their own concentrations of writers, crews, pieces and stories. Names and crew initials became associated with particular parts of the network, while others travelled well beyond any single territory. That makes the railway system more than scenery in Melbourne graffiti history.

It was a communications network. A wall beside the tracks had an audience built into it. A piece could announce that somebody had been there. Another writer could answer somewhere further down the line. Repetition turned unfamiliar names into landmarks.

The official railway map told you how to get from one suburb to another. Graffiti laid another map over the top: who was active, what crews were appearing, whose style was changing, what had gone up and what had already disappeared.

For people inside the culture, Melbourne could be read differently from the carriage window.

THE ARCHIVE

The Paint Disappears. The Photos Don’t.

Character by "Deb" - South Melbourne, 2006 era - MelbourneGraffiti

There is an obvious problem with writing the history of graffiti. Most of the evidence has disappeared.

Trains get cleaned. Walls get buffed. Buildings come down. Railway infrastructure changes. New work covers old work. Something that took hours to paint might survive for weeks, days or considerably less. But disappearing wasn’t the same as being forgotten.

  • Writers photographed work.

The photograph — the flick — gave a temporary piece another life. Albums accumulated. Pictures circulated. Writers kept records of their own work and photographed other people’s. A piece could vanish from the city while surviving in somebody’s collection. Decades later, those photographs became something else as well: an accidental historical archive.

That is why so much of Melbourne’s graffiti history survives outside conventional institutions. It sits in personal collections, books, interviews, scans, old photographs and community-built archives. It survives because people inside the culture thought the work was worth recording when few other people did.

The archive also changes what can be remembered. A photograph can settle the question of whether a piece existed, what it looked like and sometimes where it was. What it cannot always settle is everything surrounding it — who was there, what a crew name meant that year, why something happened or how one writer remembers another.

The image survives. The story around it remains human. By the turn of the millennium, another kind of record was becoming possible. Instead of freezing a piece in a photograph, filmmakers could follow the people moving through the culture around it.

One of those cameras ended up pointed at Jisoe.

ONE WRITER, ONE MELBOURNE

Jisoe

Jisoe, directed by Eddie Martin and completed in 2004, follows Melbourne writer Justin “Jisoe” Hughes through a turbulent period of his life.

Eddie Martin’s Jisoe doesn’t try to make one writer stand in for an entire culture.

That is exactly why it remains such a valuable record of it. Completed in 2004, the 56-minute observational documentary follows Melbourne graffiti writer Justin “Jisoe” Hughes through a turbulent period of his life. Graffiti is central, but the camera doesn’t stop when the paint does.

It follows fatherhood, relationships, arrest and court appearances alongside the world of writing that gives the film its title. The result is something far more intimate than a survey of Melbourne graffiti. It is one person’s life caught at close range, with writing embedded inside everything else happening around him. That distinction matters.

There is no single writer who can explain Melbourne graffiti. There is no single crew, line or documentary that can do it either. Jisoe is useful precisely because it doesn’t need to.

What it preserves is the trains, the suburbs, the conversations, the photographs and the obsession with getting a name up and the strange second life of seeing that work move through the city.

It also captures something that can disappear from institutional histories of graffiti: the fact that subcultures are lived by actual people. They have partners, children, friendships, arguments, court dates and ordinary suburban lives. The mythology of the name exists alongside the person carrying it.

By the time Jisoe was completed, however, graffiti writing was no longer the only unsanctioned visual culture attracting attention on Melbourne’s streets. Look away from the trains and towards the walls and another story was becoming impossible to miss.

THE WALLS CHANGE

Something Else Was Happening

Melbourne’s laneways have long been layered with graffiti, posters, stickers and whatever came before — a constantly changing record of the city’s street culture.

Graffiti hadn’t disappeared. Something else was developing alongside it.

By the early 2000s, Melbourne’s walls were carrying an increasingly visible mix of stencils, paste-ups, stickers and other interventions. Names including Ha-Ha, Meek, Reka, Vexta, Sync and Civil became associated with this expanding street-art landscape; artists including Rone and Meggs would also become prominent within Melbourne’s broader street-art story.

The distinction matters because “graffiti” and “street art” are often collapsed into one convenient history after the fact.

  • They overlap, but they are not synonyms.

Graffiti writing had its own traditions built around names, lettering, pieces, crews, reputation and getting up. The street-art culture becoming increasingly visible around Melbourne could use aerosol too, but it also brought different imagery, methods and intentions onto the same surfaces. Some people moved between worlds. Some didn’t. The wall didn’t care.

That coexistence is more interesting than the cleaner story in which graffiti somehow matures into street art. Melbourne graffiti continued. Train writing continued. Tags continued. At the same time, stencil artists and other street artists were developing another visual language across the city.

  • The result was not succession. It was accumulation.

Different cultures, techniques and ideas were beginning to occupy the same Melbourne.

And once again, somebody was filming.

JISOE / RASH

Two Cameras, One City

Nicholas Hansen’s RASH, completed in 2005, documented a broad group of artists working across Melbourne’s unsanctioned street-art culture.

Nicholas Hansen’s RASH was completed in 2005, almost perfectly positioning it beside Jisoe. But point the two films at each other and they show remarkably different Melbournes. Where Jisoe closes in on one writer, RASH opens the frame onto a broader culture of unsanctioned work appearing across the city.

Its credited participants include Civil, Dest, Fers, Fliq, Ha-Ha, James Dodd, Kab 101, Lister, Meek, Prism, Psalm, Reka, Sixten, Sync and Vexta, among others. The materials multiply with the people: aerosol, stencils, stickers, posters and paste-ups. That makes the two documentaries useful together.

One camera follows a Melbourne graffiti writer through a world closely connected to trains. Another moves through a city where a broader street-art culture is becoming increasingly visible.

  • Neither cancels the other out.

They show different parts of Melbourne occupying the same historical moment. That is a much better way to understand what happened here than drawing a straight evolutionary line from graffiti to street art.

The old culture didn’t have to disappear for another one to emerge. Melbourne simply became visually more complicated.

INSIDE / OUTSIDE

When the Wall Entered the Gallery

Streetworks, 2004. Civil, Rone, HA HA, 629W, Meek, D-Lux, Meggs, Vexta and Sync. City of Melbourne Art and Heritage Collection.

While cameras were documenting what was happening outside, another boundary was already shifting.

In 2004, Flinders Lane Gallery hosted Streetworks. A collaborative work from the exhibition now sits in the City of Melbourne Art and Heritage Collection: eight panels credited to Civil, Rone, HA HA, 629W, Meek, D-Lux, Meggs, Vexta and Sync.

  • The object itself tells part of the story. The setting tells the rest.

In remarks reproduced by the City of Melbourne, Andrew Gaynor described Streetworks, to his knowledge, as the first Melbourne street-art exhibition held in a purely commercial gallery rather than a club, artist-run space or temporarily occupied building.

That qualifier matters. Melbourne already had people showing and organising work in other kinds of spaces. What changed here was the context.

  • The wall was entering another system.

An artist could put work into the street and also exhibit indoors. Something temporary could be photographed, reproduced or collected. Work associated with unsanctioned public space could sit inside a commercial gallery and eventually an institutional collection.

Those movements didn’t make the street irrelevant. They made the boundaries harder to draw. Street and studio. Legal and illegal. Temporary and collectible. Graffiti and street art. Subculture and institution.

Melbourne’s walls had become part of a conversation much larger than the surfaces themselves.Soon the city would begin folding that conversation into its own public identity.

THE CITY LOOKS BACK

And Then Came the Laneways

Hosier Lane, Melbourne, Victoria, 3000 - Visit Victoria

This is where the familiar Melbourne story usually begins, the laneways,the cameras, the murals and the visitors.

  • But beginning there reverses the history.

By the time painted inner-city walls became part of Melbourne’s international image, people had already spent decades writing, painting, photographing, filming, removing, defending and arguing over marks made across the city.

  • The destination came after the culture. Before the visitor map was the railway map.

Before street-art tours were writers watching names pass through stations. Before institutions collected work associated with the street, writers and photographers had built their own archives. Before Melbourne could present painted walls as part of its cultural personality, those walls were already contested territory.

  • They still are.

Unauthorised graffiti remains illegal, and the embrace of street art has never meant that every mark is welcomed by councils, property owners, police or even other artists and writers. That tension is not an awkward footnote to Melbourne’s story. It is part of it.

A city can celebrate one painted wall while removing another. It can collect work associated with street culture while prosecuting unauthorised painting elsewhere. A surface can be art to one person, vandalism to another, evidence to somebody else and simply the place where a writer sees a name.

The old question — is it art or vandalism? — was probably never large enough to contain what was happening.

The more interesting question is how a culture built around marks that could disappear overnight became so deeply embedded in the way Melbourne sees itself.

  • Maybe the answer was there from the beginning, in the names.

Paint disappears remarkably easily. Trains get cleaned. Walls get buffed. Buildings come down. A favourite piece survives only as a photograph. A railway view changes. A laneway becomes famous. Work once made outside eventually sits behind glass, but the names keep travelling.

They survive in photographs and films, in books and old albums, in writers remembering other writers. Someone remembers what three letters meant to their crew. Somebody from another part of Melbourne remembers them differently.

There isn’t one perfectly clean Melbourne graffiti story underneath all of those versions. There are writers’ versions. Photographers’ versions. Newspaper versions. Police and council versions. Gallery versions. Film versions. And eventually there is the polished version printed on the tourist map. The Melbourne people photograph today sits on top of all of them.

Its walls didn’t become interesting when the rest of the world started looking. People had been writing themselves into the city for decades.