My Year with Bluestone: On the Street Where You Live

Poor old bluestone project has had to take a back seat for a bit, while I taught this semester, and wrote and delivered papers on other projects.

Today I walked home through Carlton, keeping an eye out for initials carved in the long bluestone edges to the pavement. We had walked this area a few weeks ago, but I wasn't feeling so well that day and had no energy to stop and take photos. Today I was already laden with a heavy backpack, and also stopped to buy bread and apples on the way, but I was determined to photograph these initials. I walked along Canning St in Carlton, and all along, from around Princes St and all the way up to Richardson, where I headed east across to St Georges Rd, there are many many carved initials and arrows. There is one, I realise, about fifty metres from my front door.

The arrows are signs of convict work; and the stones themselves were probably dug out of the bluestone quarry under what is now the park in Rathdowne St near the Kent Hotel, and the stones were probably dug by the prisoners in the "Collingwood Stockade" where the Lee St primary school currently sits.

The most common initial is a big square letter T. It's amazing to me that after a while I began to be able to distinguish T's signature cutting from other Ts made less securely and less squarely. Was T a prisoner boss who had his minions working on his team and cutting his letter? There were a few Vs. And a few E.s, perhaps. Some of the stones have both a big T and the arrow.

These long rectangular stones are expertly cut, for the most part. They are much flatter than the smaller and rounded cobblestones that fill up the gutters or the lanes: these are firm edges to the street. I had to step carefully, sometimes, between folks sipping coffee in little cafes, or parked cars, or the bikes whizzing home along the long north-south stretch of Canning St.

After twenty or so minutes, I was feeling a bit dizzy from walking along looking down, but was getting a bit mesmerised by the contrast between the straight lines of arrows, Ts and Vs, and the long lines of air bubbles in the stones, the wear and tear of the occasional smashed edge, the cuts and patches where driveways have been cut in to the path, the metal rings to hold shades and chains on shopfronts, and the leaves and dust and stones scattered across the street. Towards the end of my walk it began to rain, so the last few images are also speckled with rain.  (There may be a way to process my images a bit better than this video: but for now I just wanted to capture the sense of how many initials there are.)

So, about 150 years ago, a man with the initial T had to cut long rectangular pieces of bluestone into sharp-edged flat planes. But he took the extra time to make two more neat cuts on lots of his blocks. I wonder if anyone knows anything about T. He is all over Carlton and Fitzroy, it seems. Keep an eye out for him, you locals, and let me know if you see him, or V, or anyone, anywhere else. 

My Year with Bluestone: My Friends' House

The weekend before I was supposed to go to Sydney to give my TEDx talk, I spent the afternoon at my friends' house two suburbs away. I remember feeling a bit queasy, and the next day I ended up in hospital with a fever and badly dehydrated.

Because of all that drama I had forgotten about these photos I took of the approach to their house. They bought it as a little cottage on a very long and skinny block, and turned it around, so the house facing the street became the studio, and the sheds at the back, looking on the bluestone lane, became the living quarters. So to enter the house you go down a long laneway that is rather elegantly framed with these cyprus trees marking the point where two laneways converge.

As I have noted elsewhere, the laneways sometimes get dug up and replaced, and are quite expensive to maintain. 

Here is the classic view, familiar from so many kilometres of back laneways in our suburbs. It lookas as if there has been a bit of a landgrab on the right, here, making for an unusually asymmetric laneway.

 And here is my friends' front door. When they built, some careful work had to be done to meet council expectations for the bluestones at the front, though the resulting pattern with the slope upward is quite unusual.

On this occasion, I had gone to watch a DVD of Simeon Ten Holt's Canto Ostinato: here you may view it on youtube: settle in...

My Year with Bluestone: Smoothing Things Out

In which ten thousand bluestone pitchers in Melbourne's city laneways are being dug up, smoothed out, and re-laid so that people don't trip up on them. 

http://www.theage.com.au/national/-gh1j6q.html

I can see that the re-laid paths are smoother, but it's easy to think sentimentally about the rough and cobbled original laneways. In contrast, the new lanes look rather bland to me. Also, I never wear tall pointy heels so walking isn't really a problem for me....

My Year with Bluestone: Little Gulley

After a rather dry few weeks, it is bucketing down heavily in Melbourne this afternoon. I'm at home on the last day of our Easter break, trying to lock up a paper I'm giving next week, so some shorter bluestone posts over the next little while, I think, as I work on one of my other more medieval projects. I have several loads of washing drying in front of the heater; two cats making a cubby under the sheets; and am still digesting a rare toasty cheesy lunch. On a day like this, water will be rushing down all the bluestone laneways in the city and suburbs and especially down this unusually narrow and deep bluestone waterway between two houses, just down my street.  

I'm often amazed, after quickly snapping pictures like this on my phone, at the amazing patterns that cluster around bluestone. Vertical green corrugated iron: red bricks giving the depth of field here, the new wooden fence and the surprisingly tropical-looking disorder of that plant: is that a monstera deliciosa? (I grew them as a kid and a teenager: perhaps it's time to start with them again?)

My Year with Bluestone: The Real

Sometimes I flatter myself I can tell the difference between "real" bluestone, prised out of the earth, and the fake stuff used for public and private walls and walkways. Sometimes it's more difficult.

This time it's easy. This is a garage of a house not far from my home. The blocks here have the little margin you sometimes see on bluestone blocks...

... but if you were in any doubt about the originality of stone, a quick comparison with the "sandstone" (?) would make it clear: it's the uniformity of the pattern that confirms we are looking at some kind of concrete fabrication. Still, I respect the way the architect has gone for the bluestone at the back, overlooking the bluestone lane. Bluestone in its proper place, in the "service" area of the house!

My Year with Bluestone: Friday House Day (8)

I started Friday House day blogging in the back corner of garden, in the chook shed, and have gradually been moving forward towards the front of the house (though I have sometimes skipped the Friday blog).

But today we go even further backwards, to the bluestone laneway behind the house. It's a gorgeous Melbourne autumn day, and it's very quiet, even close to our main road, because it's Good Friday.  I went round to the laneway to take photos of Joel for an upcoming gig in June (first outing of his new piano trio: a big milestone for a jazz pianist). Like countless other bluestone lanes, this one is used more as a thoroughfare between streets than for access to back gardens. It also has blocks of flats at either end, one with the obligatory "tenants ears only" sign.

So here's the musician in the family, blessedly choosing a bluestone laneway for his promo stills...

My Year with Bluestone: Gleditsia Triacanthos

Perhaps there will be a chapter in my bluestone book that might be a little photo-essay about all the things that fall on or sit on top of bluestone: mostly plants, leaves, flowers, blossoms, but also sand, gravel, rubbish and sometimes rain and hail.

I took this photo today, walking home a different way. (I also fantasise about whether it would be possible to walk to work just walking on bluestone laneways.)

They are seed pods of gleditsia triacanthos. In autumn, lines of these trees light up the streets around here with luminous yellow leaves. It's a North American tree, introduced into Australia in the middle of the nineteenth century. The trees produce these long pods in the first few years of their lives. They are supposed to fall into water, but here they have fallen into a bluestone laneway, garnishes with yellow fragments. The asymmetry of nature and this lavish effusion of seed pods like giant caterpillars onto the beloved geometry of stones

My Year with Bluestone: multidisciplinarity and street art

Yesterday was just one of those great days in an academic life. I read a chapter of a colleague's book manuscript and delighted at the flourishing of her prose style and the maturation of her critical voice. I revised a press release for CHE on this bluestone project (and expect to be bombarded, I tell you, with requests for interviews..... Any minute now....). I chatted with another colleague about a possible collaboration between our Centre for the History of Emotions and a local gallery. I had a performance appraisal meeting with another colleague and marvelled at the amount of work she has done in the art community. I had a delicious hot okonomiyake under the gorgeous enormous plane tree in the courtyard of the old graduate school, and I heard a terrific paper in the evening about plague regulations and community in seventeenth-century Scotland. I also read part of a book on medieval art and the representation of faces. I rode my bike to work and back without feeling too nervous; and I watched 4 Corners while my son cooked dinner for three friends.

But the real bluestone highlight was coffee this morning with Chris and Joe (keeping my usual first-name only policy here). Joe's out here from the US working on street art with the wonderful Alison, and Chris is both a lecturer in chemical engineering here and co-teaching a second year breadth subject on Street Art.

Here they are both are:

We met near the hoarding outside Arts West (where CHE lived till last November); and where there is a cunning piece of street art advertising the subject. We had a good discussion about the ethics and ironies of using street art to "advertise" anything in the corporatised university -- and whether the billboard needed the subject code.

Chris and I enjoyed explaining the mysteries of Melbourne's bluestone to Joe. Chris was particularly interesting on the question of Melbourne's bluestone identity, reminding me that the city's famous laneways were necessary in the absence of an underground sewage system. The laneways were used for ease of access for the collectors of 'nightsoil', so the intersecting cobbled lanes that provide Melbourne's distinctive secondary network are a powerful side-product, and a reminder, of human waste. Chris also thought —and I'm hoping he'll read this and correct me if I'm misinterpreting him — that the attraction of the laneways was the vista they provided on a changing city. From the lanes it's somehow easier to observe the changing uses of buildings, and the changing buildings themselves. 

Somewhere the National Trust describes the effect of bluestone cobbled laneways as "fine-grained". I rather like that: in the midst of higher and grander buildings, there is something human-scaled about these bluestone pitches: cut by hand, and worn by foot and hoof and wheel.

We also discussed the contested site on the corner of Nicholson and Princes St (more on that soon). I wondered how street artists might feel about bluestone as a painting surface: whether they might ignore it, or respect it, or avoid it. Unsurprisingly the answer was that it was difficult to paint on, because it is usually cut so unevenly.

One of the loveliest things about our meeting, though, was the realisation that Chris and I were both working in fields far from our first beginning. He's a chemical engineer; I'm a medieval literature scholar. And yet here we were in an Australian university setting comfortably talking about street art and urban history. Nothing not to like about that!

My Year with Bluestone: laneway encounters

A long day for me today, framed by two glimpses of human encounters down bluestone laneways.

On my way into work a bit before 9, I looked down a bluestone laneway off Neill St, and saw a young woman in a floral skirt about to set off on a bike. A young man with a beard, wearing t-shirt and pyjamas, in bare feet, had come out the back entrance to kiss her goodbye.

This evening, coming home, after a work dinner in Carlton, after 10, I looked down a laneway off Drummond St behind the pub and saw a young man with a beard, sitting slumped against the wall, with a young woman leaning over solicitously with a bottle of water.

If bluestone laneways frame the city and suburbs, they are also places for marginal, semi-private encounters. The lives of men and women in the city. 

My Year with Bluestone: The Guerrilla Gardeners of North Carlton

Today's blog post practically writes itself. There was an article on the ABC website yesterday about a group of Carlton residents who have made a community garden in a bluestone laneway between their houses. It's controversial because at least one resident wants vehicle access to the laneway.  But just look at these gorgeous photos by Simon Leo Brown.

And here's the sound bite for my project:

"I think anyone who sees it loves the laneway," Mr Gaylard told 774 ABC Melbourne's Red Symons.  

Even though they don't actually mention the bluestone in the article, I think it's clear that this love for Melbourne's bluestone laneways is apparent here. Even though the stone is hard, in these laneways the cobblestones are soft and easy on the eye, and certainly photographed lovingly here too.

See also this interview with the objecter in The Age here: