Gary Nunn looks at the evolution of the dynamic street art culture of Victoria, Australia.
When asked why people want to come to Australia, some responses are so common, that they’ve almost become cliché: the beaches. The wildlife. Kangaroos. Uluru. The Opera House. One tourist attraction you may not associate immediately with Australia is the stunning and unique street art in Victoria, which is Australia’s second most populous state.
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Even street art itself might be a misnomer. In Melbourne, one man, Shaun Hossack, 38, had the idea of converting Australia’s vast decommissioned silos into canvasses for some of the most striking and distinctive artworks you can see anywhere in the world, with backdrops that leave you breathless. They now form an art trail that is one of the country’s most undiscovered secrets.
Making the World More Vibrant
Shaun grew up in a small country town in Victoria, Australia. “There was very little opportunity to see or experience art,” he says. “I was always looking for a creative outlet: I wasn’t interested in sport and wanted to paint and draw.” Shaun headed to Melbourne, where he’d found Australia’s leading street art network. “I found my creative community there, in a big warehouse in Fitzroy, where artists and creatives from across Australia would come to work and live,” he says. “This was before gentrification; it was affordable! We formed an informal collective.”
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Using the skills of the collective, Shaun began curating outdoor street art exhibitions on some of the suburb’s buildings. “They were done semi-legally!” he says. Then he started getting commissions from councils, which he’d offer to artists in the collective. “It started small: brightening up things like traffic signal boxes, or doing ‘anti-graffiti’ treatments. People didn’t know how to define it, how street art differed from graffiti — the former is usually legal, the latter isn’t. However, interest grew.”
The growing collective needed a name, and, poignantly, it was named after one of its own artists, who died aged 26.“My childhood friend, Justin Brooke, was a talented artist, who worked under the pseudonym Juddy Roller,” Shaun says. “He lived in the warehouse with me, and lived a very rock’n’roll lifestyle. He died at 26, so I named the collective after him.” The collective became a street art network, with the initial aim of “making the world more colourful, vibrant and engaging — one wall at a time.”
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De-gentrifying Street Art
Eventually, Shaun’s collective was invited to paint entire stories of buildings. It sparked an idea. “I thought about scaling this to something with a uniquely Australian landscape: the decommissioned grain silos,” Shaun says. “I lobbied GrainCorp to beautify one of their disused ones, transforming it from an eyesore into an artwork.”
The artist behind the first silo mural spent 30 days living in a caravan next to the structure until the giant mural was completed. Soon, people were approaching Judy Roller to paint their silos too. There are now 54 grain silo artworks on the Australian Silo Art Trail, 30 of which were completed by the artists of the Juddy Roller collective. Shaun believes the mural on the 30-metre-high Brim Silo Art Trail is the group’s most iconic and archetypical Australian work, representing “bush culture.”
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The series of grain silos in the Wimmera region of Victoria aims to uncover regional Australian social issues, including population decline, drought and isolation. Now Juddy Roller had a mission: to transform the way Australians engage with public spaces, de-gentrify art and bring about positive change. Shaun says people from less privileged backgrounds may have grown up without easy access to contemporary art; something he wanted to change.
“People uncomfortable with walking into stiff white galleries can view art democratically: in the street,” he says. “It’s about reclaiming public space, bringing art to the masses, and creating opportunities for artists who haven’t gone through the typical channels like art schools.”
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The Tallest Mural in the Southern Hemisphere
Once Juddy Roller built a reputation, Victoria’s Planning Minister, Richard Wynne, asked if Shaun had ever considered painting an entire tower. “I said, of course I’ve thought about it. I just never thought it’d be possible.” Together the two came up with a proposal for the Wellington St High Rise on the Collingwood Housing Estate. Artist Matt Adnate created a mural covering the entire city facing wall of the 20-story, 220 apartment tower block, reflecting and celebrating the multicultural and migrant community within, with the goal of breaking down social barriers.
It was one of the largest community arts projects in Australia’s history and would become the tallest mural in the southern hemisphere. Consultation with residents took three years. “The Victorian government now spends millions on projects like this,” Shaun says. “They share our goal of democratising art to transform communities and cement Melbourne and Victoria as one of the top urban and rural locations for murals and street art.” Today, Juddy Roller has created 500 murals. “They’re a huge part of the cultural fabric of the city and state,” Shaun says.
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