Installation adjacent to 140 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy.

Sunday 31st August, 2008.

2:00pm.

‘I had no idea what was going to happen.’ Fiona Hillary, public artist, Atherton Street installation, Sunday 31 August 2008.

The congregation stood in the middle of the outline of a single-fronted house that was marked on the grass in white paint. At one end of the house was an image of a picket fence, screened in black, white and grey and printed on Perspex. In the middle of the house, there was an image of a single window. In one of the rooms was another print of some 1950s kitchen canisters.

People at first, walked around the outside of the house, before becoming more adventurous. It seemed as if they were venturing into a display home minus the features. By the time that the actual memorial began, all were standing within the confines of the house.

Tony Birch launched the proceedings with a background of the Victorian Housing Commission’s slum clearance program and how it displaced people and communities, including his own family. He read a moving chapter from his novel, Shadowboxing:

“Our street was the last street to go…Our house, the red house, which had once been packed with the other terraces into these narrow streets and lanes was quickly reduced to a speck on the landscape as the houses around it disappeared. And then, it went too. Finally there was nothing left but the vast emptiness. It was as if we never existed.”

But they did exist; Fiona’s installation was a moving human experience. People stood eerily on the land where generations of Tony’s family and friends, ate, slept and played.

As we reflected on the lives of those who once existed, we turned to face the picket fence for a rendition of Guiseppe Verdi’s Va Pensiero performed by Josh Hillary, Timothy Harford-Lehmann and Janet Todd. Some joined in, swaying up and down in time with the music. This aroused reflections of happy times within the street, when families sang tunes from their homeland or along to tunes on the radio. The opera was abandoned for a tune closer to home, ‘The Road to Gundagai.’ One could imagine women with long lost names, chatting over their fences, while children played and rows of washing flapped in the wind. The ground, in which we stood, seemed to be speaking.

As quickly as the memorial began, it came to an end. Like a congregation from a Sunday church gathering, people lingered to share their experiences.

And then it rained. Black umbrellas blew inside out. Those remaining ran for cover under the towers of the multi-storey blocks while the house became deserted. Like in the 1960s before the bulldozers moved in.