St Kilda walking - Public art and memorial
















Introduction

This document began whilst I was doing research on The Great Wall of St Kilda. I discovered that the mural was couched in the history and place of St Kilda - it arose from a history of both exclusion and the inclusion of diverse groups of people of St Kilda. Camille Monet, (artist and facilitator of the mural) said the mural was about ‘the real St Kilda’. 


The mural nestles in Talbot Reserve, but is connected many places all around it, in St Kilda - Acland Street, the Esplanade, Luna park, the Palais, Fitzroy Street, Veg Out, Peanut Farm. I imagined all of these places and the people who inhabit them, as part of the making process, dragged towards and through the wall where they settled on the surface, fixed. It was a representation of a particular moment in time, of St Kilda, but also an embedding of the people at that time through involving them in making the surrounding tiles. 

Initially, I wanted to find out how the Great Wall of St Kilda sat in context with the other public art in the City of St Kilda. Was it saying something new, or was it joining in song with other artworks? How did all of these visual artworks together, comment on St Kilda’s identity? I felt I needed to develop an understanding of the public art, memorials and markers in St Kilda, in order to see how the Great Wall of St Kilda sits within this context. I could not find any cohesive documentation of public artworks and memorials in St Kilda, so I undertook a survey myself. Making this document was also an aspect of the ‘observation of the physical setting’ of the artwork (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Hoffmann Davis 1995, p.187-188).

After I interviewed people about the Great Wall of St Kilda, I began to understand it as both an artwork and a memorial. When people view it, they often remember the people who were involved in making tiles, but whom have passed away since. The mural also makes them think of the ‘time’ when everyone came together to make it. So it was a memorial to people and a link to remembering a particular time in their lives. The aspect of memorial was also strong in another artwork that I had researched. I had to consider that perhaps artworks and memorials are linked in some way. So as part of this survey I have included memorials.



Scope
This research limits itself to permanent public art and memorial. Permanent artworks in this research are imagined as being intended to last fifteen years or more. I am interested in permanent public art because I believe its duration gives it a power to shape ideas about culture and place. Along with permanence comes the idea that it is important and valuable.

Non-permanent art can also influence ideas about the place, in fact because it is not permanent it often gets away with being more political and pointed. There were some artworks, such as commissioned aerosol murals which may last over ten years. I thought it important to mention these works in this context.

I tried to keep the artworks, memorials and monuments within the boundaries of Nepean highway, Carlisle Street and Albert park but included some outside these boundaries when things seemed particularly identified with St Kilda itself. Since the boundaries of St Kilda have changed many times. This survey was also an attempt create an inclusive document which might draw attention to the permanent public artwork in St Kilda, regardless of who commissioned or made it.



The Walker (method)

Charles Baudelaire invented the dandy in “The painter of modern life”(1863) as an ambulatory figure and a passionate spectator. In Walter Benjamin’s Arcades the dandy becomes the celebrated Flaneur, which has often been used as a research method for art in public space. In his Arcades project Walter Benjamin showed an interest in all that was in them, the detritus, the characters, and a broader/fuller history than the traditional history of the 19th century. I am imagining along the same lines, there is a mass of things in public space that we can define as public art, not only the sanctioned and permanent, and also when we explore places all sorts of things happen, which shed light on the life of the place. 

In his book The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau (1998) makes an analogy of walking through the city as a type of speaking or rhetoric, ‘comparing pedestrian processes to linguistic formations’ (p. 103). He is making an argument that the city cannot just be read by its order and what it is purposefully to its designers, it is also full of ‘forests of gestures’(p. 102). In my mind he makes a case for walking, which discovers not only what is written about and said to be there, but what is actually there. By walking and only by walking, can I discover the small gestures.

Andrew Hickey (2010) says that when we walk the streets we, ‘read our way through these landscapes’, ‘we consume these information disseminators as ordinary components of our urban landscapes’ (2010,  p. 168). But he warns we ‘should enter with a critical capacity to determine and deconstruct the messages beamed to us’ (p. 169). 

Through walking and reading the landscape we enter into knowledge and discourses, in constant interplay and renewal, presented to us as we pass through’ (Hickey 2010, p. 168), giving us ‘access to collective, contemporary culture, but in ways that seem ordinary and everyday’ (Hickey 2010, p. 161).

The ‘flaneur’ as researcher, is not without its problems. The first being that the flaneur can only ever be male (Hickey 2010; Livingstone & Gyarkye 2017). There are barriers to seeing women as Flaneurs and this is partly because of the dangers and cultural reception to women walking public space (Whitzman 2013, p. 421). Each time I walked I experienced making decisions about my own safety which determined which path I walked and how I looked about me as I went. Sometimes I did not go forward as planned, but crossed the road or stopped in my tracks and turned around. At one stage I made a quick decision regarding safety, which led me heading down a thin track which brought me out beside Queens Road with only the curb to walk on between the fast lane of traffic and the bush. 

The Flaneur is also privileged, he has time for leisure. This survey of St Kilda was unfortunately made in haste. In the beginning, I would come to St Kilda for half a day and wander, but later on when I was living in Tasmania, visits to St Kilda were time poor, more rushed, and less open to what I would find. 

Whitzman (2013, p. 42) argues that there is ‘no woman on the street in our language’, apart from ‘street walker’ or ‘intruder’. And so I become simply a walker, and not any walker, but me, myself. The Flaneur is also imagined by some as a pure receptacle, a pair of eyes, a figure that represents the possibilities of universal ideas (Livingstone & Gyarkye 2017), but I am a self-confessed biased individual. Like any walker I carry with me with my own interests which colour whatever I see and think about and how I present my experience.

‘Our contemporary discourse holds that who you are influences the way that you know, and the way that you can or cannot speak’ (Livingstone and Gyarkye 2017).

And so I have identified myself. I am in the text of this work. My survey of St Kilda Public art is coloured by my own ideas, particularly because this survey of public art and memorial in St Kilda was initiated by my research into The Great Wall of St Kilda.  (I have replaced the ‘he’ with ‘she’ in Hickey’s statement.) 

‘It is [she] who stops to exert [her] reading, [her] observation of the streetscape in order to fix it in a point in time and space’(Hickey 2010, p. 169). It is not only biased by my own ideas but also limited to a particular place in time - 2017-18. 

I walk and see, I record this through my own lens and then use the writing, photographs and drawing to my own ends. When I publish it as a pdf document it becomes set and ‘operates as a fixed point on the temporal continuum of a transitory space’ (Hickey, 2010, p. 169). It cannot hope to say much as immediately after I pass through a place, it continues changing.

This survey is also a particular political moment, seen in the light and perspectives offered by The Great Wall of St Kilda and the people I interviewed as part of that research. So perhaps it should be pointed out that this biased walker is a woman - a very lucky, healthy, white middle-class Australian who went to university, owns a home, more than one car and has an income and money in the bank - who walks through the streets of St Kilda hoping to witness and interpret the permanent public art and memorial, but who sees it through a particular light. I am also an outsider because I do not live in St Kilda, it only belongs to me through my experiences of visiting, working in, and more recently researching the place.

Contents:

Introduction
Scope
The Walker (method)
Structure:
Trips: 
Acknowledgement
Short Background of St Kilda and the City of Port Phillip 
Findings

Places in St Kilda which house Public art
CLEVE GARDENS
ALFRED SQUARE
PEANUT FARM RESERVE
O’DONNELL GARDENS


Edwin Knox Memorial Fountain
South African War Memorial
Historic marker of the first colonial building in St Kilda, stockman’s hut
Fairchild Memorial Fountain
Isaac Jacobs Memorial Fountain
1909 Pergola off Fitzroy St, Albert Park
Sali Cleve Memorial Fountain
HMS Endeavour memorial with Captain Cook Sculpture
The St Kilda War Memorial (Cenotaph)
Memorial to James Bennett
The Catani Memorial clocktower
Edward O’Donnell memorial fountain
Vice Admiral Sir William Rooke Cresswell KCMG KBE
Memorial to Thomas Murray
The Victoria cross sculpture
Regal and Vice-Regal Landings at St Kilda Pier
Mirka Mora’s Mosaic Map of St Kilda
Memorial Plaques
Cultural Marker
Margins, memories and markers - the Port Phillip project, 
Monument on wheels 
Circle of hands
Aunty Alma’s Seats
The Rain Man and Rainman II
Indigenous Murals
The Jackson street mural 
The Fallen Tree Homeless Memorial
The St Kilda Botanical Gardens 150th Celebration Gates
The Gatehouse Mural
Veg Out Ceramic Mural
Linda Stilwell Memorial
Bunjil’s Children 
Veg Out Ceramic Mural 2016
Veg Out Ceramic Mural 2017 
The Great Wall of St Kilda
Raoul Wallenburg Memorial
Mosaic by Glen Romanis
Bronze Direction Plaque
Aerosol Murals
The Melbourne Solar system trail 
Timeline of Installation
Findings
References

Structure:
It was difficult to find an order for this document. I initially wanted to list the artworks and memorials in terms of place, as they are in context with each other in places. But in the end I listed them chronologically according to the date of installation.

Trips: 
18 Jan 2017 - The first trip made with this purpose, I caught the light tram rail from the city to St Kilda station - Fitzroy Street, Foreshore Gardens, Luna Park, O’Donnell Gardens, Veg Out, The Peanut Farm, Talbot Reserve, Iceland Street across to Fitzroy Street to catch tram home.

Late 2017 - (by car) I met friends at the Peanut Farm Farmers Market, and later walked around a little, to Talbot Reserve.

November 2017 - (by car) Fitzroy junction park, grey St, Jackson St, Barkly St, Carlisle St., back streets, Iceland Street and the St Kilda Botanical Gardens.

December 2017 - by car, parked in Grey St, then moved after two hours and parked nearby in a side street.

January 2018 - by tram no.96  And return through south Melbourne by tram no.12 

Feb 2018, (by car) - parked in Jackson St, and looked at Cleve Reserve, parked in Carlisle street and went to the mural, Iceland St, Veg Out. Parked in Alma rd and looked around Pinaroo Estate then up Chapel Street a bit.

Acknowledgement
Information has been gleaned by walking but I also make use of information found in literature and websites. Noted sources include Meyer Eildelson’s walking tours of Melbourne and Monument Australia. In the context of my earlier statement that I could not find documentation of the public art in St Kilda, I need to acknowledge Meyer Eidelson’s, documentation of many sites of art, memorial, acknowledgment and historical significance in public space, which were useful, not only as references but as guides to discovering those works. I also used the City of Port Phillip’s websites which related to heritage and public art.

References are listed underneath each artwork or memorial, to make it easier for the reader to explore further if they wish.


Short Background of St Kilda and the City of Port Phillip 


What we know as Port Phillip Bay was named Port King by John Murray (the commander of the first British ship to enter the bay) on 15th Feb 1802, after Phillip Gidley King, the then Governor of New South Wales. King later officially renamed it Port Phillip in honour of his predecessor Arthur Phillip. St Kilda was named after a ship ‘The Lady of St Kilda’, which moored on the nearby foreshore for many months.

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