Marrickville: Is there no alternative?

Chapter 1

Epicecentre/epi-time

Circa 2018. Take a trip through the Sydney suburb of Marrickville at midnight.

Hard tek prises open Mothership Studios on Sydney Street, practically uprooting the entry gates. Straight up four to the floor LRAD-core. Get it in ya. No seccies, no licencing. The artist space hosts raves and punk shows under the radar when there aren’t the usual exhibitions, panel talks or film screenings.

It’s a euphoria chamber.

A drug free-for-all.

A love fest.

A zoo.

*  *  *

22 April 2021. Mothership Studios. 9PM on a Thursday. Antiscene. There is interactive art in a side room – tangible objects you can touch and play with – and experimental dance music in the main room. The DJs are lobbing bricks into a washing machine with complete disdain for the user’s manual. They’re kids jostling and back-slapping. But grandpa hovers.

The leaseholder (owner?) orders someone to turn down the music.  

Mothership now sells alcohol. There’s a red carpet, gold bollards and rope at the entrance like it’s the bloody Logies and you’re VIP.

Art Tunes Talks at Mothership Studios, 2019 - a creative workshop hosted by Sydney-based collective Wierd. These events, which transcended the usual night-time hours of Sydney’s clubbing economy, involved panel discussions, DJ sets and art curation. Photos courtesy: Chris McClymont.

*  *  *

Circa 2018. You pass one of Marrickville’s numerous micro-breweries. Hawke’s Brewing Co. You turn left at the end of Sydney Street. The symphony of bottle clinks at the Marrickville Bowlo compete for attention with the punk band inside.  

You duck into the Red Rattler. 6 Faversham Street. You ask the woman behind the desk what’s on tonight.

“A drag show, darling. It’s gonna be turbo.”

On Fitzroy Street, the sidewalk vibrates underfoot to syncopated breakbeat rhythms. Out the front of an innocuous warehouse, a lone woman asks you to scarper, looking over your shoulder.

According to the Marrickville Local Environmental Plan 2011, you are in the heart of what the council terms a light industrial zone.

Semi-trailers line Saywell Street, their cabs empty. Big hunkering skeletons. Come Monday morning, truckies will rock up, Dare iced coffee in hand, cigs behind ears, ready to fill trailers with boxes, pallets and kegs. Just around the corner on Sloane Street, M&J Chickens slaughters roughly 14,000 chickens per day and employs over 100 staff who run deliveries non-stop, Monday to Friday.

A warehouse, Two Flies, teeters on the edge of the road, leaning into the bass reverberations from within, contorting itself. Cracked windows rattle. A lone figure stands on the doorstep; the same face as every other weekend. Walk up to him and he’ll ask you what you’re here for. If you don’t have a good answer or a ticket to flash on your phone, you best jog on.

He waves.

But Two Flies isn’t your destination. Not tonight.

Electric guitar riffs and waves of distortion buffet in the wind. Somewhere nearby a punk band performs in a matchbox-sized room.

Strewn across the footpath are the remnants of a shattered hubcap. A discharged TV sits on the threadbare upholstery of a couch and stares at the sky. An industrial fan whooshes. A mechanical humming nearby throbs like a heartbeat.

A woman pulls up on push bike laden with plastic bags.

“Got any gear?”

You shake your head.

A bass thud gallops across the industrial estate. Your companion turns their head slightly. White teeth flash in inky darkness.

You cut through laneways where graff tags curl around brick walls like shark netting and rubbish spills onto tarmac. It’s a warning, warding off predators who misunderstand the creative utopia hidden within this urban labyrinth. The smell of fresh paint blooms in your face.

A cop car rolls past slowly, windows down, and your muscles tense.

You turn another corner into a narrow laneway that seems to stretch on forever. 4/4 techno slams into you, knocking you sideways, but the crowd steadies you. Sweaty limbs press against yours. Loose-fitting clothes and side bags everywhere. Someone has a blue mullet and a swamp of tattoos, which drip and slide from their arms, fleeing the frenetic pace of their limbs, as they lose themselves to the sci-fi soundtrack barrelling from the speaker stack. Smoke billows in opaque sheets like a line of pirate-doof flags flapping in a maelstrom of sound waves.

On either side of you factory brick walls stretch like skyscrapers. Cig ash and dust fill your throat. On the outskirts of your kaleidoscope vision, lights swirl like neon clouds.

Someone has placed some candles on a wooden palette which sits snug against one wall like a kitchen table. No flames flicker. There’s no wind; no draught sweeping through. We’re sealed off from Sydney. But within this pocket universe, this deafening micro-utopia with its own community anthem, borders don’t exist – neither between performer and audience nor between strangers. There’s no stage for the DJ. No elevation. All the gear is stacked on a plank of wood atop a few crates. People pile onto each other, share drinks and lend each other keys.

It’s a free party of borrowed equipment, a fuck you to the bullshit commercialism of mainstream club culture with its seccys, ticket-checking, vanilla boom-clap music and man-made boundaries between punters.

Welcome to the heart of Sydney’s rave belt.

A snapshot of Breakbeat Chaos 2 at Two Flies in Sydney, 14 July 2018.

*  *  *

The dining and drinking bible Good Food describes Marrickville as “the craft beer capital of Australia”. One Domain reporter recently labelled the suburb “both hipster heaven and a hick’s haven”.

I’d say Marrickville is becoming boring.

Real-estate agents flog off mould-infested, cracked-window terraces with three bedrooms for $1000 a week to naïve students, while spruiking Marrickville as the “new Paddington” or “new Newtown” to yoga enthusiasts and marketing executives. At the same time, a few struggling creatives still pay cheap rent in communal living spaces, making homes, sesh dens and studios in the urban ruins, laneways and warehouses near Sydenham Station.

Is this latter form of living a more “authentic” manifestation of bohemianism or just another form of capitalist recuperation with a veneer of radicalism?

Across the last thirty years, lease-holders and residents, alongside outside party organisers, threw raves and band nights regularly with little consideration for licencing laws, sound limits and OH&S. When COVID-19 hit, some of those warehouses folded. Many worn-out owners and renters have turned their back on raves and mid-week art exhibitions. Others have pursued licensing and legitimacy. Mothership Studios has irrevocably transformed. There’s still the odd warehouse rave but it’s once in a blue moon.

Judging from the constant redevelopment plans debated at local council meetings, many locals see those rows of derelict, graffiti-smothered warehouses and narrow laneways near Sydenham Station – this light industrial zone – as an eyesore. Developers see a blank canvas. Like a half-finished jigsaw puzzle on a summer day, those streets are a curious anomaly. They’re not, however, intriguing enough to spur sustained attention.

One controversial plan to redevelop the Sydenham Station area, shot down in 2018 by a coalition of Greens, Liberals and Independents. But I’ll get to this later.

In a Sydney Review of Books essay on St Peters, Vanessa Berry promotes the “radical potential of taking notice”. Deploying psychogeography as a field strategy, she describes how “highway landscapes slide by the car windows, warehouses, petrol stations and fast food restaurants on repeat… Scrutinising these places and following their stories describes a different kind of city. This is a Sydney of margins and edges, of criss-crossing identities”.

Historian Grace Karskens, meanwhile, suggests there’s intrigue in the unknown but also danger, particularly from a heritage perspective. Growing up in western Sydney, Karskens witnessed suburbanisation and commercial development consume neglected farmhouses. In The Colony: A History of Early Sydney, she remarks that “while there are kernels of truth in… foggy tales, places, like stories, need to be taken seriously, they need to be researched as well as visited and experienced; they need history.”

Urban planners and private developers, however, tend to reduce human experience to what is visible through maps and models. When we are infatuated with statistics and tangible metrics, chasing urban renewal, we fail to hear the relentless bass thud that shakes the walls of an abandoned building. We never taste the bitter flavour of a warehouse swaying with indoor smokers. We never smell the fresh bread of Marrickville’s bakeries at dawn. The owners give free loaves to the ravers and junkies who wander the empty streets before sunrise, but you’ll never know if you haven’t looked.

What I propose therefore is a sensorial history of Marrickville and, by extension, gentrification.

A warehouse rave at Mothership Studios in 2018, organised by DUNJ. Photo courtesy: Chris McClymont.

* * *

In his seminal work Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?, the late Mark Fisher argued that late stage capitalism functions by convincing us that “it is the only viable political and economic system… it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative”. He coined this form of cultural indoctrination “capitalist realism”.

A sense of inevitability pervades the text. Our plight within late stage capitalism is one of “spectatorship”. To make the case, Fisher harnessed diverse sources including the film Children of Men — with its dystopian images of global infertility and non-descript representation of fascism within familiar political structures — as well as Francis Fukuyama’s widely read essay ‘The End of History?’ and gangster rap. He created a picture of humanity as soon-to-be lifeless roadkill, paralysed in front of the semi-trailer of mass consumerism, which barrels down the highway through a barren cultural wasteland defined by cynicism and post-ideological fantasy. In the driver’s seat is Capitalism — a force that knows no bounds, stops for no one and “consumes all previous history.” In short: “Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.”

If we are trying to locate capitalist realism imaginatively, the ever-slippery idea of suburbia is a good start. Think of those netherspaces where bleary-eyed architects copy and mirror each other and boredom seeps through doorways like the smell of an unattended, open jerry can sloppy with petrol. Kath and Kim clones bicker over sangas at a backyard barbie. Streetlights droop in arvo heat. Rusty electrical appliances line dried-up creek beds. Teenagers thirst for new experiences. They make their own fun, pitting them against those on “the other side of the tracks” – the “noise complaint narcs” who prefer a tomb-like silence.

Via the Roman pillars and lion heads of McMansions and Vaucluse estates, we dream of Little Italy. There’s a slice of England in our creaking, wood-filled pubs. What do we have to show for our own imagination? A spinning hills hoist with some goon sacks hanging off it and some 17 year olds playing Goon of Fortune.

Everywhere we look, we see a capitalist machine that cares little for our individuality – a machine that erects high-rise apartment buildings and offices with a Terminator efficiency. Here we are at the “end of history” (Fukuyama’s words, not mine).

Suburbia is a void of lost futures without a past. There’s only an elongated present rife with repetition. 7-Eleven after 7-Eleven.

After 7-Eleven.

After

7-Eleven.

24/7.

* * *

Suburbia is an easy target and derision has become a Parthenon in the Australian cultural landscape, resplendent in marble, a monument to self-mockery. In the Australian classic The Castle – a tongue-in-cheek muse on Australia’s cultural cringe – the Kerrigan family home is located at the end of a dead-end street. Dale Kerrigan explains in an introductory voiceover that the property was “going to be the heart of a major housing development that never got up”. It’s an apt metaphor for the cynicism and existential dread buried underneath suburbia. Nostalgia for the peaceful Australian suburbs of old is of course a whitewash – a figment of the collective memory of post-war baby boomers. Suburbia has always been contested space.

In his song River of Tears, Murri man Kev Carmody recounts the police murder of Aboriginal man David Gundy in his Marrickville home in 1989.

“They took him out at point blank range/

In his home with his small young son/

Shot him dead in his Marrickville bed/

With a pump action 12 gauge shotgun/”

Over an acoustic guitar and clapping sticks, Carmody’s voice wavers. There’s barely a pause in breathe for the entire three minutes. There’s simply a tidal wave of disjointed phrases. Vibrato is easy when there’s real pain.

“Fatherless child and a grieving wife/

A black fugitive on the run/

On the run two centuries/

From oppression’s loaded gun/

We say oh oh oh oh oh oooooh/

Gunned him down/

Sad rivers of tears/

Two hundred years in the river of fear/”

Three years after David Gundy’s death, videos surfaced of NSW Police members in blackface at a charity event. The “boys in blue” were mocking Aboriginal men who had recently died in custody including David Gundy.

Anyone who says Marrickville is a merry slice of suburban utopia isn’t paying enough attention.