Taking, Sneaking

If you have spent time in Annandale some time in the last forty years, you would know this piece of graffiti that has been on the corner of Collins and Johnston Streets since 1977:

It’s a lot more faded these days and barely readable – this photo was taken at least 10 years ago. I read it almost like a poem, set out in a stanza, my favourite parts “taking, sneaking” and “what more can I say?” as the ending, like the writer has thrown their hands up in the air at the dishonourable scene that passed by in 1977.

What distinguishes this graffiti is firstly its longevity. It has few remaining contemporaries, apart from the slightly earlier (c.1970)  Stop Vietnam War graffiti still visible on the sandstone rock face below the Tarpein Way at the end of Macquarie Street, facing the Opera House.

1970 and 1971 saw large-scale Vietnam War protests in Sydney with the three moratorium marches, the last of which occurred shortly before Australian troops were withdrawn. By the end of the 1970s peace was again the focus of activism, as was environmentalism. The anti-nuclear lobby had grown in strength and marches and demonstrations were held in capital cities across Australia. There were also a series of Rides Against Uranium, with groups cycling from Melbourne and Sydney to Canberra to protest against uranium mining and export.

The second distinguishing feature of the Annandale “taking, sneaking” message is that, unlike most graffiti, it marks a particular event that happened at that place at a specific time. By reading these words I imagine the convoy of trucks travelling down Johnston Street late at night, past houses and apartment buildings where people slept on, unaware of the radioactive cargo being transported through their suburb. But not everyone was asleep.

Friends of the Earth member Geoff Evans describes the blockades that met the trucks at White Bay, “protesting shipments of yellowcake from Lucas Heights being secretly spirited out in massively guarded convoys of trucks speeding through Sydney’s suburbs in the dead of night, only to be exposed by an elaborate network of activists alerted by the Lucas Heights campers, and mobilised through elaborate ‘phone trees’ that could get hundreds of protesters to the wharves within an hour.”

Things came to a head in September 1977. Around 200 protesters, and 240 police (numbers given in news reports at the time) were down at the wharves when the trucks carrying the yellowcake arrived. Some of the demonstrators sat down on the road to prevent the trucks moving through and were dragged off one-by-one by police, and some arrested. There is a painting by Toby Zoates (painted in 2015), who was one of the protesters, showing the scene as he remembers it (or as his “fantasy wishfully remembers” it). He describes the scene of the protest, then the benefit gig he organised to help pay the fines of those arrested.

Poster by Toby Zoates, from NGA.

But who painted the graffiti on the wall in Annandale? I don’t know, but I’m not the first to wonder. In 1993 two filmmakers sent out a request in the Sydney Morning Herald to try and find the writer, although the film doesn’t seem to have gone ahead. In the article one of the filmmakers said: “if we don’t find the person who did it, it will remain an unsolved mystery”.

From the Sydney Morning Herald, April 1993.

In 1993 the filmmakers also said:”It’s been there since 1977 – that’s a long time for a little piece of graffiti”. Now it is forty years since the trucks passed by taking, sneaking.

The words are very faded and unless you had seen them there in the days when they were more visible and knew to look for them, you would probably pass by them without noticing. They are painted on a low wall, at calf-height, so I imagine whoever painted them sat on the pavement to do it, daubing each letter with a paintbrush, using the bricks like lines on a page. In their unusual position the words are like a footnote, annotating this place with one of its secrets.