Walking down Sydney Rd, Brunswick on a Saturday afternoon is like being in some interstitial space – you’re aware of the Friday night that has past, and the Saturday night to come; aware of who’s there, and who isn’t. The weird kebab stand cleans the night off itself and waits for a fresh batch of drunken revellers. Those citizens not likely to be seen participating in the nighttime economy move about between their weekend exercise routines, op-shops and Italian food wholesalers, stocking their pantries for the week ahead. The street’s layers of gig bills and other material debris curl up towards you and point, spilling over their boundaries and each other, vying for your attention.
The people here are working to maintain a kind of order, an order that will be deliberately disrupted in a few hours time. It’s this maintenance, this boundary work, that sets the stage for other lives, and other spaces. If you look at the ways in which the street blurs its edges, you can see these lives and spaces bleeding through.
Wayfaring is a term borrowed from Tim Ingold, who describes it as a way of moving along a way of life. It describes a way that places, and lives, are continually acted out through movement. This series of posts is a way of combining visual ethnography and writing to come to a different kind of understanding about places. It’s also an excuse to use my camera.
