Well I have lived here so long and never taken a picture of the most famous site in Newtown – the ‘I have a Dream’ mural. I do regularly get and take pictures of some of the graf that is around, its amazing how often it changes, there is even a stencil art wall in Enmore which morphs and evolves on a regular basis..
Just wander on thru the back streets and you find a world of artwork (some may not classify it as so) that is everchanging…
and from the City of Sydney Site
Paula Hamilton and Paul Ashton who kindly gave permission to reproduce the following extract from their article in Public History Review Vol. 9, pp23-36 (see especially pp30-32)
Another memorial in the Inner Western suburb of Newtown is painted on a wall. It is at the less salubrious
end of the area on a main traffic thoroughfare in one of the most congested streets in the city. Adorning a whole wall in bold colours, it is impossible to miss. It bears the classic realism of the spraycan artist. There are two images: the Earth, and the face of Martin Luther King, both stark against a black background.
Underneath are the words ‘I have a dream’. Across the bottom third of the wall is the Aboriginal flag and the injunction: ‘Please show respect, post no bills here.’ But despite this mural’s visual accessibility and prominence it is often viewed ‘in a state of distraction’-as opposed, for example, to the intense focus when in a museum- because it is part of the public streetscape of buildings, shops, people and cars. It is arresting, but becomes part of the urban visual wallpaper. Memories embedded in buildings like this one acquire meanings different from those the architect intended, and the mural obscures any sense of the three storey building underneath it.