Desire and Abject Pity: robbing the cradle to feed the grave

In early 2000 a Bourke Street retailer from either Darrell Lea’s chocolate shop or Minotaur’s

popular culture bookshop decided to work the city into a body when they renamed the
corner of Bourke and Russell streets the Golden Elbow. The city entered into full body status,
corporeal and transformed into a racist target. Residues of Burma and Thailand could be
sensed in the track marks that trailed around the traffic lights and into the amusement arcades.
What an exemplar of a city-becoming-body. The Golden Elbow is a sign of fear, it is both an
imaginary space and a real space.

The city cradles the bodies of its dead and we often can encounter the dead in ruptures of ordered space-time. In the isolated alcoves in the centre of Melbourne’s CBD are collections of scribbled obituaries to those who have died from heroin overdose (Obituary wall).

These alcoves are the shrines and memorials to those loved ones that die in the midst of the city’s pleasures. Their bodies are gone, however the dead bodies become inscribed in walls and make sense in the dirty little nooks.

The dead bring the surfaces of the city to life.

One obituary, scribbled on a sheet of cardboard was left at an overdose site in the loading bay for a Chinese restaurant. Splattered with mud, the cursive blue biro message said:


‘Wish I could have been there when you died. Your baby son misses you.
He’s too young to know, I'll make sure he never forgets you. Love ... '

This message puts us in touch with the absent lover. An encounter. An alcove measuring 4m × 2m × 3m, filled with used syringes, spoons, used swabs and stinking urine and shit is no place to die and certainly no place to remember the dead. Now it is a place not just to remember the dead, it is a place where the dead become very much alive. The body of the dearly departed has become a part of the city, well, for as long as the obituary remains.

A knot can form in your stomach when you see these images. Knots, boiling points, moments such as these are moments when events inhere in surfaces to produce sense.

This rupture in the surfaces between wall, body and time is an encounter. It tells us not just that someone died here. It also tells us that for someone who loved the departed, this place lives one. Somehow when we experience this we also become part of a body of the city. We connect with a dead body and dead's loved ones through a scrawl on a wall.


This space is memorable as it moves us, it connects us with the dead.

On the corner of Bourke and Russell streets, opposite the Golden Elbow and adjacent to the lolly shop is a landmark. It is a bus stop where hundreds of my steps have accumulated over the years. As a fourteen year old, I used to wait, guitar in hand, at this bus stop after wandering about the city for an hour or so following my six o’clock music lesson. At around eight o’clock each Friday night, while waiting for the bus to carry me back to the suburbs I used to check the rising pulse of the city, and then sadly take the forty-five minute bus ride home to mum’s salmon casserole.

Extracted from City Becoming Other co-authored by JOHN FITZGERALD, a Vichealth Senior Fellow in the Centre for Health and Society, University of Melbourne. He is currently completing a book/DVD on Australian needle and syringe policymaking and;

TERRY THREADGOLD, former Professor of Communication and Cultural Studies, and Head Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies and now Pro Vice-Chancellor for Staff and Diveristy, Cardiff University. 

Her book Feminist Poetics: Poeisis, Performance, Histories (Routledge, 1997), a study of race, nation and identity in Australia, remains a key text in the field of feminist cultural studies and critical discourse analysis. Her most recent book, with Justin Lewis, Nick Mosdell and Rod Brookes is Shoot First and Ask Questions Later: Media Coverage of the 2003 Iraq War (Peter Lang, 2006).

Terry Threadgold on Creating a Positive Working Environment