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On a sunny spring morning, the Sydney lord mayor, Clover Moore, leaves her apartment in inner-city Redfern to walk to her town hall office. Under a canopy of mature London plane trees along Bourke Street, the 79-year-old, who recently won a record sixth term, sets a brisk pace.
All politics is local, and Moore’s career began on these streets. In the late 1970s, Moore created a lobby group, Redfern Community Concern, to fix up a little park in Kepos Street and improve local traffic.
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War and cultural destruction are echoed in art amid this deeply conflicted geopolitical moment. In Standing by the Ruins, a floor-based installation by Jeddah-born and based artist Dana Awartani at the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane, geometry and craft combine with the Arabic trope of “ruin poetry”. Today, the form, founded in pre-Islamic times, offers the inspiration of rebirth in the rubble.
Awartani, 37, who is of Palestinian, Saudi, Jordanian and Syrian descent, is creating a floor to be contemplated rather than walked upon; jewel-like with a subtle earth-coloured palette, and the repeating patterns that are found in mosques.
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On a windy Monday afternoon, actor and singer Simon Burke stands outside the home where his family lived for his first 13 years of life, a two-storey cream Victorian terrace in inner-Sydney’s once raffish Paddington. Fifty years on, the wooden front door is unchanged.
At four, little Simon would sit on a letterbox here, pretending to play piano on this spiked wrought-iron fence. We gaze up at the jacaranda on the street, its purple spring flowers blooming above the power lines.
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