gullybogan

Flickr photo by Gullybogan.

Dear Reader,

If you happen to go to Fitzroy, and end up in Brunswick Street (and how can you not end up in Brunswick Street if you go to Fitzroy?), you’re legally bound to see one of these benches.

They’re covered all over, as you can see, with funky, artistic tiles, and they’re an absolute bugger to move, or even tip over.

Trust me on that.

They’ve been specifically commissioned, designed and installed purely in order to provide something for cute, suburban, late-teenage girls to pose on, their rosy, query-virginal cheeks all rugged up against the autumn wind. You know the girls i mean, young ladies standing there waiting for the snap with the exact same look on their face as when their mum asks them to pose on Santa’s lap and they’re fully aware that the “Santa” they’re being asked to sit on is really just Uncle Mick in a red tracksuit and fake beard.

Regardless, posing on these benches is the thing to do, when you’re a cute, suburban, late-teenage girl bohemianing it up in Fitzroy with your mum-slash-girlfriends.

If you don’t believe me, dear reader, you can just see the ghost of one of those boho gals there in graffiti, captured on the wall behind.

QED.

The thing that puzzles me about this scene is what ‘CAR SHARE ONLY’ means. See? Right there on the parking spot on the left of the picture (your left, the picture’s right).

Do you know?

Where i come from (lately), you get one car park per car. We’re just fully buying into that whole urban sprawl thing.

Note the gritty social realism i’ve captured by cropping in (rather than out) all the noise in the background of this shot?: the wheelie-skip; the middle-aged women slouching home; the unbecomingly, unfitzroyingly uncosmopolitan streetscape.

I’m just such a realist photographer, there’s no two ways about it. Buy me now while i’m cheap and then get me hooked on absinthe so i die sooner rather than later and your assets appreciate more quickly.