Urban Remnants

Nestled on a bed of crumbled bricks and dirt, numbers written in fountain pen mark a stained record-card over a three year spell. Bookkeepers were as meticulous as they were patient in a time when there was no such thing as a delete button or backspace. Were they were ever paid a bonus in the good month of October ’46?

Obscurely located on a footpath in a Collingwood side street an old petrol bowser, rich in mechanical complexities and cast steel, stands disused and obsolete. It served its duty tenfold back in the good old days, now the elements eat away at its rusted seams. The day will soon arrive when its metal body is ripped from the ground and compressed into scrap. 

Concrete balconies with their row of fiesta-blue doors look more like a Mexican jailhouse than the now-derelict training centre that once schooled rookie firefighters.

A ladder emerges from a mound of bricks and heads skyward through a broken trapdoor in the ceiling. A shaft of light exposes charred walls that were regularly set ablaze to test trainee extinguishing skills. Their successful graduation would surely break a pyromaniac’s heart.

Behind giant red garage doors, a dust-laden stillness is dotted with a trail of paw prints that double back from every doorway and stairwell with satisfied curiosity.

Are bill posters ever prosecuted? Fresh layers piled over last months concerts, plays and album launches conceal a disused shopfront. Gaps in the wallpaper paste and graffiti reveal an empty lot that opens up to the sky.

Chimney stacks rise from corrugated rooflines that have been gutted of the homes they once sheltered and a disused antenna stands barren against a blue sky. They are characteristic silhouettes of the early days in working class, inner city Melbourne.  

Afternoon light streams through the remaining façade of a gutted building, illuminating a suspended white doorway that leads nowhere.

Façade: fah-sard (n) leave intact to prevent any guilt and receive less historical-building-lovers’ hate mail after knocking down an entire structure 13 decades old in just a few days.

An old oil drum nestles in a ring of weeds beside a corrugated iron outhouse on a vacant lot. Did someone think it a grand gesture to leave the loo standing after tearing down the whole house?

A broken mirror reflects an empty foreground where three other walls once stood. The questionable future of an abandoned neighbouring building looms in the distance.

Through windows and structural wounds, sunlight sneaks into barren rooms and travels down darkened halls. The light softens the emptiness somehow, adding warmth to the forgotten and uninhabited spaces that will soon disappear.
 

 

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