It doesn’t matter how long you live in a place, there is always more to learn about it.
I am very glad I took the opportunity to go on a walking tour of central Albury to find out about the public art I walk past regularly.
Organised by the local council, the Beyond the Walls: Public Art Tour ran on two successive weekends. The Saturday morning I attended in May 2023 was bitterly cold, nevertheless an eager collection of people assembled in Volt Lane which runs parallel to Albury’s main street, Dean Street. We were called together beside Nat Ward’s ‘Inland Waterways.’ A digitised version of this local artist’s painting was turned into a vinyl wrap in 2016 and transforms the eyesore of an electrical substation into a place of interest.
At Riparian, we have long been fans of Nat Ward’s evocative view of the Murray river and were honoured to get her permission to use of photo of the wall on the cover of our first joint publication, Riparian 1, in 2022.
Further along Volt Lane, the two-storey side of a building was painted in 2021 as part of the Upstream Festival. Chris Henderson, (aka SIRHC), a North-East Victorian artist, dedicated his street art to all the people who have cared for the land. Standing with curious others, I noticed for the first time that the ranger at the far end has one bare foot. This symbolises a desire to connect to the land.
At this point the Beyond the Walls Explorer’s Guide came into its own. Handed out to the children in the group, and interested adults with an eager inner-child, this small booklet has activities associated with each artwork. Here flowers, eyes and lily pads were counted up across the huge landscape.
‘The Four Fellas’ also arrived in 2021. On the corner of Volt and Amp Lanes (or AMP Lane – but that is a whole other story!), Burg’s painting depicts exactly what it says on the label. Quite a number of the tour participants were astonished that they’d been walking past this corner for years and missed these larger-than-life men. Near a picture framers, the work is perfectly framed by the wall, which might explain this, because it is an otherwise arresting portrait.
The tour wound its way to QEII Square where we first went back to 1981, an era when the previous work we’d been appreciating would easily have been condemned as graffiti and a nuisance. A sculpture was mounted on the wall of the NSW Government building as part of the Albury-Wodonga Twin City Festival in that year. ‘The Mighty Murray Mural’ is such a part of the town square it has become background, but it rewards a second and third look. The coordinator Sherryl Smith and the lead artist Peter Day corralled community groups, over sixty individual participants, to design and create the components that make up the frieze. The tiles were then fired at the local Brick Works. There is both beauty and humour to be found along the winding river of tiles.
The art tour rightly ended outside MAMA (Murray Art Museum Albury), which backs onto QEII Square. MAMA commissioned a work in 2015 for the façade to commemorate its reopened after major extensions and refurbishment.
The large work of twisted stainless steel rectangles flows high across the wall – perhaps like a river. (The Murray stamping its presence on the town – not for the first time on this walk). Matthew Harding’s work is called ‘Degrees of Separation’ as a nod to the surprisingly small distance between all people. Only six degrees according to the internet.
By this time on the tour, the people who’d congregated around our tour guide in Volt Lane had evolved into a group, friendly, chatting, sharing observations and histories. A story emerged about another competing submission MAMA received to create an artwork for this wall. According to the gossip, a local artist proposed taking their building material to the Albury Sewerage Works and dipping it into the effluence, thereby involving every resident of Albury in the final art.
I would like this to be true. Someone – anyone – can correct me here. Or we can let the story grow into urban myth.
This was a wonderful way to spend an hour, and a reminder to keep your eyes open no matter where you are. Melbourne might have their Laneways, and Benalla has had their, admittedly very exciting, Street Art Festival, but Albury too is worth a wander.
Riparian 