hell’s paving stones

Found in the Gentlemens’ Amenities between the 1st and 2nd floor of the John Medley Building, East Tower, Melbourne University.

HPS staff planned to do a post on the toilet cubicle graffitti around the Melbourne Uni campus way back last year, but never got round to it - something about carrying a camera into the Gents’ seems a little unsavoury. There were some beauties though, including an epic dialogue in the loo at the Student IT labs between an atheist (or possibly a Muslim, it was never very clear) writing in pink pen, and all comers. It took up two of the available walls.

The basement Gents’ in the Baillieu Library is always interesting - there’s a guy who gets very passionate about causes that generally went out of style a few years ago - Ban the Grand Prix, Privatisation of Public Transport, French Nuclear Testing etc. He often uses the microfilm readers to print out newspaper articles from the ’60s (”Menzies turns away defector ballet dancer Nureyev”). Nobody ever takes him up on his declarations (”Vote Marlboro”). We wouldn’t mind meeting him one day… for a few minutes.

Unfortunately, Buildings Maintenance seems to have adopted a zero tolerance policy on graffitti since late 2002 - there’s a lot less of it around from when we started uni 4 years ago.

Anyway, an interesting fact: an anthropology student at Melbourne Uni is writing an honours thesis on toilet graffitti at that same campus. If we ever get a chance to find this person and pick their brains, we’ll let you know what transpires.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 4th, 2005 at 12:44 am and is filed under The people's opiate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.