jaywalking sydney 2007

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Jaywalking Sydney CSAR Research Fellowship

Here and then how to locate film and sound archives on a street near you

August 2007

Much has been made of the potential for media technologies to distract and

divert attention from the here and now of real places. In particular, the assertion

is frequently made that the increasing variety and availability of digital media

provide an alternative virtual world, and possibly sound the death knell for the

urban environment with which we are familiar. 1 For Second Life devotees, the

virtual is a place in which to put on new garb, experiment with funky building

styles, take on new careers and even make a load of Linden. But those whose

allegiance lies with the physical properties of the city will often worry that the

tangential will overtake the main game of real-time socio-spatial relationships.

The fast-changing terrain of digital mapping layers both the physical properties of

geography and the digital spawn of the web. The geo-web cannot be easily pitted

as one side of the virtual/physical binary; as the web in geographic form, it is the

streets physical geography that provides the interface for search criteria entered

on location.

The potential applications of the geo-web are growing by the day. Google Earth

has been engaged in the search for missing persons, its use as a form of

surveillance is evidenced by modifications made to the interface during high-

security events such as the recent APEC Summit in Sydney, Australia. Theparticular strength of the Googles geo-web applications, which include both

Google Earth and Google Maps, lies in their wide appeal to amateur and

professional geographers alike. As a Google product manager has explained:

1 See Eammon Canniffe, Urban Ethic, p 174.

Jaywalking Sydney Essay - 1 - Sarah Barns August 2007


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We dont know where all the endangered species or the pandas in China live, or

where the best places to go bird watching are. By providing the tools, we can let

other people create it 2.

As mobile phone technologies evolve to include GPS receivers, which let the

user access the internet according to their specific location, the geo-web is also

facilitating a heightened interest in the creation of location-based web content.

This might span everything from commercially funded travel information and

shopping guides, to artistic interventions through use of sound, video and

narrative which disrupt or augment a users experience of a location.

This evolving project which seeks to redesign not only the webs searchinterface but also ones more physically embodied experience of place

suggests a quite radical reordering of the way media technologies orient and

structure daily life. As one locative media proponent has enthused "[p]eople a

generation from now will look back on how we viewed the Internet being

something you went to use as very quaint and simplistic 3.

The Research Fellowship Jaywalking Sydney undertaken through the National

Film and Sound Archives (NFSA) Centre for Scholarly and Archival Research

(CSAR) explored the opportunities afforded by developments in geo-web

applications and mobile computing for the use and distribution of film and sound

archives on location.

From a historians point of view, the immediate appeal of these services lies in

the opportunity they provide to facilitate an experience that combines or layers

both the built and recorded history of an area in-situ, connecting with an

environment both as it has been documented and in turn archived and as it

2 See Wired, p5.3 John Geraci, Grafedia http://grafedia.com/ , seehttp://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0707/p12s02-stin.html

http://grafedia.com/http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0707/p12s02-stin.htmlhttp://grafedia.com/http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0707/p12s02-stin.html


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presents to our senses, right here, right now. Using film and sound archives in

this way means the user can experience a remix of both here, and then, at the

same time.

With these possibilities in mind, the Research Fellowship set out to identify the

availability of archival material that dealt directly with the street, or more

specifically the growth and development of Sydneys urban environment.

Available archival material text, audio, photographs, and possibly moving

image as well in turn formed the basis of Jaywalks that facilitate interaction

with both the built and recorded history of an environment.

Presenting historical archives on location presents a number of excitingpossibilities and challenges: How to research the availability of location specific

archival material as well as ambient recordings (e.g. what exists?); how to build

narrative that reflects both built and recorded history? There is also an

opportunity to tell the history of the cine-city, the city as recorded on film, and to

in turn explore the bonds that exist between film and architecture, between the

art of memory and that of mapmaking. Fundamental to this research is also an

interest in how urban history more generally might facilitate greater

environmental awareness, and specifically an appreciation that the project of city-

building is always in-the-making, not done and dusted, but dynamically shaped

and contoured according to the daily habits, beliefs, and even dreams, of its

inhabitants, both past and present.

This article explores the expanding terrain of the geo-web and the opportunities

and insights it might offer those interested in the history of the city. The focus for

activity has been in Sydney, Australia, with a particular focus on the inner city

suburb that goes by the delightful name of Wooloomooloo. The journey through

the archives and through the streets is far from complete. This article simply

offers some observations from along the way.



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The virtual getting kinda physical

Online maps have been moving into some interesting terrain of late.

Over the past two years, map providers like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have

created tools that let anyone with an internet connection layer their own

geographic obsessions on top of ever more detailed road maps and satellite

images. Such tools are helping to cultivate a growing market for sophisticated

and exploratory uses of the geo-web the web in geographic form as well as

tens of thousands of personal map mashups which plot text, links, and other

data onto maps from around the globe. No longer confined to the formulations of

a select group of highly trained cartographers, the contours of the geo-web can

now be outlined and augmented by teems of internet connected amateur

enthusiasts. Its a new Babel, where each weird and wonderful geographicalinterpretation finds its own unique coordinate.

Geo-web tools like Google Maps and Google Earth are essentially search

engines which use a map-based interface to locate information. As the Google

Earth download site explains Google Earth is much more than just mapping

software. It's a tool for viewing, creating and sharing location-specific information

which can be explored in an interactive and visually intuitive interface4

. Havingbeen downloaded 250 million times since its launch in June 2005, Google Earth,

which uses satellite imagery rather than street maps, is seen to offer the potential

to change the way people view, and document their world 5. Tourists can preview

their destinations prior to travel and when they get home again upload their

photos to the site by tagging them to specific destinations.

Part of the demand for more sophisticated digital maps is coming from

developments in mobile phone technology. As the informational space of the

web becomes available to intrepid 3G mobile users, multi-dimensional online

maps can in turn be viewed in-situ, becoming in a sense an informational overlay

4 http://earth.google.com/tour/thanks-mac4.html5 wired. P 4



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to ones own physically embodied experience of an environment.

In-built GPS (Global Positioning Satellite) receivers in mobile phones means, as

one advertising campaign put it, your phone can tell you where to go. This,

combined with 3G internet capability, essentially offers location specific data

which has been uploaded to digital maps via your mobile phone, on location.

Location-based services (LBS) and locative media each engage directly with

the expanded range of commercial and narrative capabilities and conventions

afforded by these innovations. They utilise a range of technologies to determine

location, from site-specific stories which can be heard on your mp3 player (like a

recorded walking tour), to the provision of commercial tourist information andservices using complex databases accessible via satellite. The range of services,

and the technologies they utilise, varies considerably; nevertheless they have in

common an interest in what the added dimension of location has to offer.

Location based services, once they hit the mass market, have the potentially to

significantly change the nature of the internet, as more and more information and

interactive media becomes centred around the location of users. "People ageneration from now will look back on how we viewed the Internet being

something you went to use as very quaint and simplistic," says John Geraci, who

founded Grafedia, which uses graffiti or words written anywhere, to link to

images, video or sound files online 6.

Commercial map providers like Navteq and Sensis are exploring licensing

opportunities their maps provide. Starbucks, for example, pays Sensis to list its

locations and contact numbers on its maps. Navteq is developing a Discovering

Cities initiative which provides tourist information via its global maps. Mobile

content aggregators are also interested in licensing video to be used as part of

ninemsns mobile tourist services. The appeal of the Google geo-web

6 http://grafedia.com/ , see http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0707/p12s02-stin.html

http://grafedia.com/http://grafedia.com/http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0707/p12s02-stin.htmlhttp://grafedia.com/http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0707/p12s02-stin.html


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applications is that anyone can upload material to these without paying a license

fee.

Many locative arts projects make use of novel methods through which to make

their project accessible, outside of the walled garden of the mobile carrier. 7 Just

as websites use hyperlinks to connect information, these projects use tags

placed at specific sites to provide information required to connect, using a mobile

device, to the projects source material.

This can be as basic as posting mobile phone numbers on signs around a

neighbourhood, as used by the Canadian project called [murmur], which users

can call to hear an anecdotal history of the site recorded and archived by

someone who knows its history 8. Other projects use RFID (Radio Frequency

Identification) which require special readers 9, or barcodes photographed by a

phone which connect to a website 10, and bluetooth. As the UK artist Simon Pope

has suggested, the novelty of [locative] projects seem to be in the way they

extend the human community to include an array of agents, arranged in space

which includes antennae, rooftops, trees, buildings, masts and the like 11.

Semapaedia barcodes, once printed and tagged on a street, can be

photographed by your mobile phone, taking you to a relevant Wikipedia website.

This, like Grafaedia , is a relatively low-fi option that introduces the idea of a

treasure hunt into the experience of location-based internet surfing.

Between 2004 and 2006 UK arts group Proboscis developed an experimental

software platform called Urban Tapestries 12 for what they call knowledge

7 Lack of commercial appeal is also a factor.8 www.murmurtoronto.ca 9 This is popular in the UK where the London rail card Oyster uses RFID.10 See, for example, Semapaedia.com11 S. Pope, The Shape of Locative Media, Mute Magazine Issue 29, February 9, 2005.12 See http://urbantapestries.net /

http://www.murmurtoronto.ca/http://www.murmurtoronto.ca/http://www.murmurtoronto.ca/


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mapping and sharing public authoring, which aims to enable to become

authors of the environment around them. It combines mobile and internet

technologies with geographic information systems to allow people to build

relationships between places and to associate stories, information, pictures,

sounds and videos with them.

In this way digital maps are clearly no longer just useful guides to finding your

way to the next meeting. A recent feature by Wired 13 on developments in the

field concluded that were all mapmakers now, which means geography has

entered the complex free-for-all of the information age, where ever more

sophisticated technology is better able to reflect the worlds rich, chaotic

complexity. The particular significance and strength of these open sourceweb-based tools lies in the ability of anyone with an internet connection to

contribute, essentially forming a volunteer army of amateur cartographers. As a

Google product manager has explained: We dont know where all the

endangered species or the pandas in China live, or where the best places to go

bird watching are. By providing the tools, we can let other people create it

(wired, p5).

Information designer Dan Hill, formerly of BBC Music interactive, describes his

experience of Barcelona in Google Earth, and speculates about some possible

extensions:My overwhelming sensation at this point was a desire to slide the city back through its

development, to watch the port developments shrink back on to land, to see the Eixample

retreat block by block, to watch the city walls rise up again ... And then slide it forward.

[]There is almost unlimited potential here - including overlaying different periods,

annotations, a more suitable user interface etc. []

After accumulating a few hours of virtual city stalking, it occurred to me that it's all so quiet.

10000 feet up, one might expect not to hear anything. Closer to the ground, 70 feet up, we'd

surely have a sense of the sound of the city? Imagine being able to turn on 'sound' and hear

the sounds drifting up to meet us celestial listeners to Google Earth. There are numerous

13 Wired Google Maps is Changing the Way We See the World 26 6 07.



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field recordings available with plenty more to follow once location based services really kick

off with which we could augment the images with some richer representations of earth .14

Here the interaction designers specialised experience in the design and

architecture of information how to develop straightforward and compelling

navigational experiences through the world of networked data converges with

an urbanists fascination with the multiple forms, layers and experiences of the

city. Information designers have thus begun reading the modern metropolis for

the multiple layers, whether visible and not, that condense and give shape to the

space of the city, presented as both informational space and as the physical

spaces comprised of buildings, streets, and parks. So to Dan Hill, while Google

Earth is essentially utlilitarian, it inadvertently creates a near transcendentalexperience 15.

Many of the spatial interrogations of information designers are published

independently to the Google sites. Searchscapes: Manhattan for example,

offersa tridimensional map of Manhattan utilising existing data from the web.

The site explains:

Each person constructs his/her image of the city. This image is made out of facts, memories, experiences, stories, news - mostly invisible data, and not onlyof architecture, buildings and streets. The objective is to compare the city's"physical spaces" and "information spaces" (search results). This is an attemptto materialize information: to give it dimension and physicality 16.

Christian Nold goes even further with his Bio-Mapping project 17, which maps

people's emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. More

recently the real estate company Trulia have gone some way toward fulfilling Dan

14 Dan Hill, Jan 26 2006, athttp://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2006/01/two_possible_go.html 15 ibid16 http://searchscapes.net/ 17 http://biomapping.net/

http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2006/01/two_possible_go.htmlhttp://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2006/01/two_possible_go.html


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Hills fantasy with the launch of a new site called Trulia Hindsight 18. This enables

users to watch the growth of streets, neighbourhoods and cities over time, using

the gold mine of the real-estate company's vast amount of data from all property

sales in the United States, mapped to location and over time back to the early

20th century.

Historians are also exploring the potential of Google Maps for storytelling. John

Hopkins academics Jay Crim and Shekar Davarya spent the summer of 2002

driving across the country on Route 66, collecting interviews with the people who

live, work and travel on the old road. The audio, video and images on their

Google Map page America's Highway: Oral Histories of Route 66 are the result of

that summer, and offer a glimpse into what life was like on the now-decommissioned highway and what remains for those who still travel the road.

The America's Highway project was intended to create both a history lesson on

America of the past as well as a travel guide for visitors on 66 today 19.

Developments in the geo-spatial web are in this way inspiring a new appreciation

of the malleability and complexity of spatial form. The networked environment of

online information infinitely connected, layered, filtered, and forwarded in turn

becomes a prism through which to represent the many indices of the earth. MIT

Professor Sherry Turkle has noticed how windows and links have become

potent metaphors for a multiplicity of perspectives, enabling the expression of

different aspects of self and place. 20

18 See http://hindsight.trulia.com/ 19 See http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?

ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=103763259662194171141.000001119b4b42bf062c2&z=5&om=1 . The work was supervised by Professor Bill Leslie, History of ScienceDepartment and Mike Reese, Center for Educational Resources, The Johns HopkinsUniversity. 20 In Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Simon & Schuster NY, 1995,quoted in Lucy Bullivant Responsive Environments: Architecture, Art and Design, V&Acontemporary, London, 2006, p11.

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=103763259662194171141.000001119b4b42bf062c2&z=5&om=1http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=103763259662194171141.000001119b4b42bf062c2&z=5&om=1http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=103763259662194171141.000001119b4b42bf062c2&z=5&om=1http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=103763259662194171141.000001119b4b42bf062c2&z=5&om=1http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=103763259662194171141.000001119b4b42bf062c2&z=5&om=1http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=103763259662194171141.000001119b4b42bf062c2&z=5&om=1http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=103763259662194171141.000001119b4b42bf062c2&z=5&om=1


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Mapping a history of the cine-city

In her book called Atlas of Emotion, Guilana Bruno mapped 21 a cultural history of

the spatio-visual arts, observing that in our own time, in which memories are

(moving) images, the cultural function of recollection has been absorbed by

motion pictures 22 . She considers a history of cinema in the context not only of

developing conventions of sight-seeing but also site-seeing. Her work moves

away from a long-standing focus within film theory on sight toward the

construction of a moving theory of site , initiating what she describes as a

theoretical shift from the optic to the haptic. She argues:cinema defines itself as an architectural practice. It is an artform of the street, an agent inthe building of city views. The landscape of the city ends up interacting closely with filmicrepresentations, and to this extent, the streetscape is as much a filmic construction as it isan architectural one. Filmic incarnationsbecome part of its geography 23.

Upon Brunos map appear examples of Italian neo-realist film, early dal vero

films (shot from real life), and the ideas of filmmakers from Sergei Eisenstein to

Wim Winders. Bruno notes that in the 1920s the city became the subject of a

number of landmark films that shaped the body of the cine city in important

ways, such as Manhattan (Paul Strand and Charles Cheeler, 1921), Metropolis

(Fritz Lang, 1926), Berlin Symphony for the Big City (Walter Ruttmann, 1927),

and The Man with the Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929). Italian neo-realism, such asBicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica), was concerned with daily urban fiction, making

any-space-whatever proliferate urban cancer, undifferentiated fabrics, pieces

of wasteground 24.

Bruno also explores the role of cinema in expressing a love of place. For a

director like Wim Wenders, landscape has everything to do with cinema. Bruno

recalls that Wenders, like Antonioni, is affected by a form of topophilia, a

21 She uses this term metaphorically, in the more general sense of a survey.22 Bruno, G. Atlas of Emotions - Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film, Verso NY,2002, p8.23 Bruno, p2724 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1 The Movement Image, quoted in Bruno, p30.



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syndrome, first defined by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, that manifests itself

variously as the love of place 25. For Wenders topophilia concerns the habitability

of place, which involves always, a work of mourning, a resistance that provides

the energy to travel inside the site to know it and describe it filmically 26.

Brunos excavations bring to light Walter Benjamins seminal ideas on the space

of the modern city developed during the 1920s. Part of his legacy was to render

the city and its structures buildings, streets, laneways, intersections, shopping

centres, tenements, all of them fine, solid things as porous, constituted not only

by what we see but the organic totality of what is both seen and what is

concealed, an interpenetration of modern and archaic, interior and exterior

(Gilloch, 1997, p25). As Richard Williams has noted, Benjamins understood thecity to be a multi-authored, layered phenomenon, whose existence was found as

much in its representation in cultural ephemera as in material objects like

buildings 27.

Such ideas remain highly relevant to the work of contemporary practitioners such

as Jeremy Height, who in 2003 developed an interactive site specific narrative

which used GPS to deliver a sound-based historical fiction set about the railroad

industry in downtown LA. The project, titled 34 North, 118 West and undertaken

in collaboration with Jeff Knowlton and Naomi Spelling, made use of a GPS

device to not only determine the users position but also how the story was

delivered, such that the landscape became the interface, where the users

footsteps would trigger moments in time, enabling them to wander through a

landscape inhabited by the sonic ghosts of another era 28. Sounds included old

wooden carriage wheels, an older car horn, and trains where remnant tracks

25 See Topophilia: A study of environmental perception, attitudes and values.26 Wenders interviewed in Cahiers du CCI, no 1, 1986, pp104-7, quoted in Bruno p3427 Williams, R. The Anxious City, p21.28 See quicktime piece about the project athttp://34n118w.net/34N/site_media/34NORTH_4x3.mov . See alsohttp://34n118w.net/htmldir/Descriptn.html

http://34n118w.net/34N/site_media/34NORTH_4x3.movhttp://34n118w.net/htmldir/Descriptn.htmlhttp://34n118w.net/34N/site_media/34NORTH_4x3.movhttp://34n118w.net/htmldir/Descriptn.html


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appeared in streets or where trains would have passed.

In his online essay titled Narrative Archeology Height draws on Benjamin,

explaining:

A city is constructed in layers: infrastructure, streets, population, buildings. The same is

true of the city in time: in shifts in decay and gentrification; in layers of differing architecture

in form and layout resonating certain eras and modes in design, material, use of space and

theory; in urban planning; in the physical juxtaposition of points and pointers from different

times. Context and sub-text can be formulated as much in what is present and in

juxtaposition as in what one learns was there and remains in faint traces ( old signs barely

visible on brick facades from businesses and neighborhood land usage long gone or worn

splintering wooden posts jutting up from a railroad infrastructure decades dormant for example) or in what is no longer physically present at all and only is visible in recollection

of the past 29.

Archival research to inform such projects initiates a kind of archaeology of

recorded action, rather than surviving artefact. Graham Gilloch suggests in Myth

and Metropolis that [t]he task of the archaeologist is to dig beneath the surface

of the modern city and the modern sensibility it engenders, to unearth the

evidence of past life and the shocks that have become lodged in the depths of the unconscious 30. As Eammon Caniffe, an urban planning theorist from

Manchester, has noted historical remains in the urban context have already

undergone an editorial process where their significance rests in their very

survival31. He suggests that [h]istorys meaning for the city lies in what remains

and what has disappeared rather than what might be replicated or what is

ignored (Canniffe, 2006, p79).

In a similar vein, an archaeology of the cine-city the city recorded over time

must also contend with existing editorial processes designed for a history of

29 http://www.xcp.bfn.org/hight.html30 Gilloch, 1997, p70.31 Canniffe, 2006, p78.



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cinema, or a history of musical composition and recording, rather than that of the

urban habitat. This is not a criticism of existing curatorial practices but rather

points to an emerging field of practice, whose interest in archives extends

beyond that of the space of the cinema to new spaces streets, railways tracks,

demolished buildings and ruins spaces whose documentary heritage is

appealing to different audiences in new and intriguing ways.

Researching a history of the street at the NFSA

The way in which changes to the urban fabric have been recorded and

documented over time was a major theme of the Research Fellowship. Prior

research indicated the National Film and Sound Archives presented a range of

perspectives on urban change, accessible through oral histories and yarnspinners, musical recordings, radio, newsreel footage, 35mm negatives, and

films representing first hand, reported, or reflected experiences.

Three Sydney based locations were identified as potential research subjects:

Pyrmont, Wooloomooloo and a stretch of Hickson Rd, Walsh Bay known as the

Hungry Mile. These sites were selected for their historical significance, both as

subjects of recorded history and more broadly as locations of cultural and

historical resonance within Sydneys urban development. These locations served

as a research guide, however the research identified useful footage and material

beyond these specific sites as well. A particular focus was also on sound

recordings undertaken on location throughout different periods of Sydneys

history.

Items obtained in the course of Fellowship research included a range of early

filmic documentation of Sydneys city streets, which focused on changes to its

built environment, its transportation systems and its public culture. Much of this

early footage was shot between 1908 and 1930s by Movietone news and

Cinesound.



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Three documentaries were also obtained, with permission granted by copyright

holders. These included two documentaries by Sydney filmmaker Pat Fiske, shot

during the 1970s: Wooloomooloo and Rocking the Foundations . These

documentaries profile the history of the Builders' Labourer's Federation of N.S.W,

including newsfile footage of the Juanita Neilson case, film footage of a street

party in opposition to the Victorian St development, as well as extensive material

on the Green Bans and its role in the protection of Australias built heritage. Much

of Wooloomooloo was shot and recorded on-location.

The third documentary was Concrete City , produced by Frontyard Films and

dealing with community unrest surrounding the redevelopment of the Pyrmont

peninsula in the mid to late 1990s. In 1995 Pyrmont Bay was the site of Australias largest urban development, which completely transformed the

topography of the environment. This development was fiercely opposed,

particularly by local residents who fought to maintain the areas community

facilities and unique character, which reflected its special role in Sydneys growth

as a whole. .

Unexpected finds included the discovery of three feature length films shot on

location in Wooloomooloo during the 1920s: The Kidstakes , Sunshine Sally and

The Sentimental Bloke . These feature the busy street life of the times, dealing

with such issues as the experience of poverty and class in a poor inner city

district, childrens game-playing and general shenanigans and lost loves much

of occurring in the out-of-doors, on the street.

An original focus for the research was the NFSAs sound collection, in particular

location based sound recordings. The research identified a very limited number

of ambient recordings, outside of those included in the Fiske documentaries. This

in part reflects the history of sound recording technology, which prevented much

sound recording occurring outside of the studio.



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Description of work

The Jaywalking Sydney project explores the documentation of Sydney streets

using archival film and sound recordings. You dont have to sit at the computer

using a search engine you can navigate these archives as you walk around the

city.

Victoria St soundwalk

Victoria St, Kings Cross is one of Sydneys most prized locations, described by

the National Trust in the 1970s as the Montmartre of Sydney.

The Victoria St soundwalk deals with the street in the 1970s, when developer

Frank Theeman won approval to build three 45 story residential towers on thewestern side overlooking the city. The Victoria St Residents Action Group

opposed the development and gained the support of the Builders Labourers

Federation (BLF) who instituted a Green Ban on the site which prevented any

builders labourer from working on the site. The protest movement swelled to

include students, communists, artists and other activists who all opposed the

developers plans, which would, as they saw it remove the right of low-to middle

income workers to live on the street. As protesters and squatters held up

development, the fight turned ugly; protesters were intimidated, beaten, even

murdered. Both sides had their victories and their losses Theeman was

eventually able to build, but the delays cost him $4m (in 1970s dollars), and even

then he only gained approval to build one out of three of his apartment blocks,

which stands today. The protesters had prevented the demolition of a number of

historic houses on the street and by so doing had limited Theemans plans, but

they hadnt been able to prevent the eviction of low-income tenants like Mick

Fowler, who worked down at the docks at Wooloomooloo. Juanita Nielsen lost

her life. As former BLF President Jack Mundey saw it, after the events of Victoria

St, governments at all levels, Federal State as well as City councils, would no

longer be able to go ahead and approve development plans without consulting

the wishes of the people.



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Ultimately, each side was fighting over their rights to a street, which represented

their claim on the city, and what it meant to them. For Frank Theenan the city

was obviously all about making money, whatever the cost. For the Askin

government who approved Theenans plans for the site, there was a need to

attract large-scale property investment, to remake city as a global city of

international standing. For the BLF the fight was about workers rights to a safe

working environment in the city, one that accommodated not only the needs of

the wealthy but those of the working classes too. For local residents it was a fight

to stay at home.

What is seen today on Victoria St gives little indication of its remarkable history,but nevertheless the story is richly documented in audiovisual history, particularly

thanks to the dedicated work of documentary maker Pat Fiske. The NFSA

collection includes two of her documentaries, Wooloomooloo and Rocking the

Foundations, which each deal with aspects of the story. The NFSA collection

also contains songs from the Green Bans movement, and oral history recordings

and/or transcripts with Jack Mundey, BLF President at the time, and

documentary maker Pat Fiske.

The Victoria St walk combines Fiskes location recordings of the protesters in the

1970s - clashing with police, gathering at the eviction of Mick Fowler, being

interviewed by Fiske. It also of featuring excerpts of her interviews with key

players about the events occurring on the street, as well as protest songs,

location recordings of the street today, and some of my own reflections on the

streets history.

This component of the project is deliberately focused on the use of sound to

create an experiential aural environment that layers the present and the past.

This component draws on my own doctoral study into the opportunities provided

by the sound for site specific story telling and environmental awareness. As it is



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designed to be heard in-situ, via mp3 format, it is todays streetscape that

provides the visuals. It is not intended to be listened to in a darkened room.

Jaywalking Map

Jaywalking Sydney also explores how Sydney streets can be navigated using

new, open source digital maps. These maps provide a new search interface

through which to present archival recordings that of the streets geography.

Using the Google Maps application, film and sound excerpts along with photos

and text have been uploaded to reflect their location. Using GPS-enabled mobile

phones these excerpts could also be made available for download on location. In

this example the material is not publicly accessible.

Future directions

The development of location-based services provides exciting opportunities for

the presentation of archival material in-situ. The rise of map-based search

interfaces should be of particular appeal to archiving institutions, whose existing

repositories are of increasing appeal to the increasingly geographically-aware

audience of global web users.

However the new tools of geo-web and mobile applications do not themselves

serve to guide us toward new fields of understanding about the places we love to

inhabit. That remains the job of the historians, the researchers and the

storytellers who remain fascinated with the interweaving narratives, political and

socio-economic forces, personalities and personal experiences that give

muscular and unique definition to sites and spaces. From a research perspective,

developments in digital media technologies outlined in this article provide somenew editorial axes through which to explore the city, navigating potentially fruitful

interactions between what remains, what has been lost, and what remains

archived in dark, cold storage rooms on fine sunny days.



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jaywalking sydney 2007

Documents