Catalogue essay for Sweet Suburbia: 2020 Photography Competition
View the catalogue here.
The suburbs of the Inner North run deep in my blood. In a cold Canberra winter, I was brought home to a house on Ainslie’s Officer Crescent, thus beginning a lifelong relationship with Canberra’s ‘lentil belt’.
I grew up climbing the equipment in the park across the road and took dawdling walks to the shops that now garner so much acclaim. A few houses along was the friend’s house I went to in college to eat Mi Goring noodles and a few streets up was one of my first share houses—a cottage so damp I got tonsilitis six times in a year.
Along Officer Crescent winds the ambling bus route I took to primary school, high school, to the cinema when I skipped class during college, to university, and even during my first days at HerCanberra. If I close my eyes, I can trace the Number Two bus route street for street, house for house. Ainslie is acorns underfoot as you walk to the shops, the rasp of breath as you walk up the mountain, the smell of jasmine on night walks.
When I was five, we moved across Majura Avenue to Dickson, where I learned to ride a bike on a dusty oval where lush wetlands now stand. Down the bike path was my best friend’s house, the pool where my dad taught me to swim and sticky finger buns from Baker’s Delight. Dickson is buskers outside Woolworths, the crisp chlorine of the pool and the glow of the oval floodlights, bright and clear across the dusk.
When I was 10, we moved north across Phillip Avenue to Hackett, where I would walk the streets constantly, a sulky teen with my iPod Mini and our new puppy. A rule of thumb for Hackett is that the houses get bigger and grander the steeper the street’s angle. Hackett is echoed shouts from soccer practice on the oval, the sting of crushed eucalypt leaves along the Mount Majura trail and surprisingly intricate Christmas light displays.
Cross Antill Street and you’re in Watson, where one winding street holds the family home of my first serious boyfriend, a sweet modern cottage where I housesit, and my friend’s share house that was gate crashed during a Halloween party, leading to a brawl in the street.
When I was younger, I sometimes found these suburbs stifling. Now I treasure their quiet, calm atmosphere—each tree familiar yet street names unknown. We don’t know these places by name, we know them by feel.
It’s these familiar feelings that DESIGN Canberra has captured in Sweet Suburbia—an exhibition that is both a celebration of Canberra’s unique geography, and a meditation on our tethered state in 2020.
In Canberra, suburbs surround us and in 2020, there has been little escape. However, we soon realised that escape wasn’t what we needed—or wanted. The suburbs and their communities have nourished us, checked in on us, supported us. The suburbs kept us safe.
Sweet Suburbia encourages Canberrans to find the familiar—and the unfamiliar—in a quilt of suburban living—and to celebrate it—with imagery from the heart of our community, from names both known and emerging. These photos capture the achingly familiar and introduce us to new ways to see the places we think we know. What’s old is new again.
Beatrice Smith
Editor, HerCanberra
Sweet Suburbia: 2020 Photography Competition exhibition, 9-29 November
Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Queen Elizabeth Terrace
Opening hours: 11am-5pm Tuesday-Sunday
Find out more here.