Description

Walk the borderland between historic Melbourne's Hoddle Grid and waterfront Melbourne's Birrarung Marr and Southgate. Art, architecture, and urbanism write this story of Melbourne as Australia's Cultural Capital. Visualise screen culture's public history and clandestine street art, and experience secular ceremony through sonic and kinetic sculpture along the Green Line, Melbourne's newest park and oldest meeting place. Your urban tour will weave together two Melbournes through sculptural bridges and art in public space. Your city reader guide is an artist, academic, and cultural producer.

What's On

Walk with your artist-guide between two Melbournes: Hoddle Grid Melbourne (est. 1837) and Waterfront Melbourne (est. 1990).

Beginning at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Federation Square, we cross to Hosier Lane, where street art attracts as many visitors as most art museums. We go down Flinders Lane, through Melbourne’s former rag trade district, then through Flinders Street Station and along the Yarra (Birrarung) River to the creative youth studio, Signal, to the Northbank entrance to the Sandridge Bridge, built in 1853 and pedestrianised in 2006.

Nadin Karam’s public artwork, the Travellers (2006), crosses the Yarra/Birrarung and connects our two marvellous Melbournes. Along the Southbank promenade, iconic sculptures lead us to Roy Grounds’ high modernist Hamer Hall (1982). King’s monumental sculpture Forward Surge (1972-74) signals us back across the Yarra/Birrarung to Federation Square, where we walk upon Paul Carter’s artwork Nearamnew (2002). Along Birrarung Mar, our story ends with Federation Bells (2001), a musical instrument created by Hasell and McLachlan, at the nexus of Melbourne’s cultural and sporting precincts, linked by the William Barak Bridge (2005).

Children's Activities

Midway through the walk, participants will be invited to make a frottage of parts of Paul Carter's Nearamnew in Federation Square. Paper and rubbing medium will be available for participants to take a 1:1 impression from a letter, word or phrase from one of Carter's nine visions of Federation.

In Collaboration With:

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  Anthony McInneny

  Anthony McInneny is an academic, visual artist, and cultural producer with 20 years of experience in art and public space. His professional career began at RMIT University in 2003, where he developed the studio teaching methods for the Master of Arts, Art in Public Space program.