Guerrilla Gardeners stay one jump ahead of City Rangers

It looked like authorised works last Thursday on the corner of Roslyn Street and Ward Avenue in Kings Cross. A team of sailors were enthusiastically climbing scaffolds and riding cherrypickers surrounded by the usual black-and-yellow signs redirecting pedestrians – but on closer inspection things were not quite right.

Do sailors usually install gardens on walls in Kings Cross? And there was something slightly suspect about a banner saying “Operation Feelgood – The Navy Giving back to an area that has given so much to the Navy – Royal Australian Navy & US Navy.”

US Navy? This was happening just down Roslyn Street from ‘Battleship corner’ on Darlinghurst Road where sex workers used to meet US servicemen during the R&R years.

Nor were the uniforms right. Admiral Dave Lawson had only two stripes and his jacket had the moth-eaten look of an old theatre costume, while the video gear recording it all looked a little high-end for a Navy action.

But the ruse worked long enough for Cannel 10’s Guerrilla Gardens production team to thumb their nose once more at local bureaucrats and enrich the urban landscape in a well planned one-day operation. Council Rangers turned up at dusk, by which time a street party had developed, catered for by the Brown Nuns and Good Shepherd Sisters on whose wall the work was being done – after consultation and with their enthusiastic permission.

The Rangers unsuccessfully demanded names and addresses from a couple of photographers who dared to take their photos, before approaching the street party and asking what was going on. “We’re feeding the poor,” replied one of the sisters, looking up from a barbeque full of sizzling herbal sausages. They were too, as the street event had attracted a few homeless people who were mixing happily with the small crowd.

The Rangers left, talking into a radio.

Wine flowed and there was a toast to “creative anarchy” – right under a sign declaring an Alcohol-free zone.

The installation featured four life-sized photos of people in Kings Cross, taken only the night before when the crew had hired a Cadillac and dressed as pimps. The spruikers at the Showgirls table-dancing club even let them have a turn at spruiking.

Wazza Perkins, 54, from Liverpool had been busking and posed for photographs under a neon sign at the kebab shop on Battleship Corner. His portrait is now installed in UV-proof, graffiti-resistant vinyl as part of this guerrilla garden. Busker Cathie O’Brien, a well known fixture in the Cross, also now has a portrait on the wall. During the intallation both posed for more pictures next to their portraits which are installed in arched recesses in the wall of the large Terrace House.

Matching recesses above them now display plants in pressed-metal planter boxes, complete with an irrigation system that the sisters will operate.

As night fell the Guerrilla Gardens team removed all their gear, cleaned up the area and left the Cross with a valuable public asset. When the TV show airs in about two months time, will Council have removed the work as they do with other artworks painted on walls with the owners’ permission?

Watch this space.