There’s a nice big stretch of brick wall in the railway cutting which runs under Cleveland Street. It’s a favourite target for taggers. Since January, this wall has been over-painted in plain brown paint three times. And every time, it is only a few days before the graffiti starts to reappear. The size and nature of this “art” means that it takes the tagger several days to complete – well, nights actually – as it all seems to happen in the small hours.
Clearly, there is no strategy to try and catch the culprits. It seems that neither local police, nor railway police, or rail security are advised when a wall is cleaned.
Graffiti tagging is regarded as “malicious damage” by police but there seems to be little successful effort being applied to try and stop this disfiguring of our city. I am sure that these “artists” actually love the railways over-painting existing graffiti. It gives a “fresh canvas” for the taggers to work on.
Now, my tastes in art are sufficiently eclectic that I can enjoy the murals on buildings and walls done in the graffiti street-art style. However, if we are to brighten our suburbs with murals on walls, surely other art styles should also be represented.
Graffiti may well have a place in society with regard to sharing political and social messages the mainstream media excludes. Examples can be found in ancient historic locations in several parts of the world. But the graffiti most people seem to find annoying is the mindless painting of tags, or graffiti signatures, everywhere – small and single colour, super-large and very colourful, often in hard-to-access locations.
It all seems to be driven by a perverse form of egoism, daring and competition amongst a small group of young men. Recent years have seen some control over sales of pressure-pack spray cans of paint to juveniles. But it seems that many of the offenders are guys in their 20s and 30s for whom the sales ban doesn’t apply.
We have heard that the railways intend to remove all the graffiti between Strathfield and Central in a few months. They are probably just wasting taxpayers’ money unless there is a clear follow-up strategy to catch the offenders. No doubt, the taggers will now be salivating at the opportunity the clean-up will give them.
On a glorious autumn day in recent years, I had the opportunity to take the all-day train from southern Germany, across Austria and Slovenia, to the Croatian capital of Zagreb. In Germany and Austria, there was no graffiti to be seen. As soon as we crossed the border into Slovenia, and on into Croatia, there was graffiti everywhere. If some smart countries can prevent the blight of graffiti tagging, why can’t we?
