Australia, Street

Australia Road writer's blog - thoughts on street names (and roads, and avenues)

I named this blog 'Australia Road' instead of Australia Street although I considered the second one. But I didn't want to steal from John Kingsmill - the late writer who documented Sydney so touchingly in his memoirs 'The Innocent' and 'Australia Street'.

Also, there is an Australia Street in the Newtown area of Sydney, and I wanted to give a nod to it but not be unalterably associated. (In coming weeks you will hear more from me about it.)

In Newtown the old street signs were attached to buildings.

I first found John Kingsmill's writing in a file at Waverley Library's local history room. The copied pages were included for their sharp detail about landmarks I was researching; Kingsmill grew up in Bondi and Waverley in Sydney's east in the 1920s and 1930s. But, in a file separated from their context, the pages didn't shimmer like the word-pictures the author paints in his books.

Later, in a used book store, I found 'Australia Street' and bought it, mistakenly thinking it had something to do with Australia Street, Newtown. (It's about Bondi.) I never discovered why he chose that title. But I did discover a good writer, concise and spot-on, like the ad man he was; with an eye for theatrical details, like the actor he aspired to be. Some parts of this book (and 'The Innocent') are so funny you will need a hanky, which is better than can be said for a lot of history. 

Maybe he picked 'Australia Street' for his title because of its implied meaning of a home base and a universality of experience. A sort of 'Anytown' idea. 

Another street sign on a Newtown building.

The words on the album poster say 'EVERYTHING NOT SAVED WILL BE LOST'.

Reflecting on 'roads' versus 'streets', I think 'streets' convey a sense of arrival at a destination. Like 'Easy Street', or 'Main Street, USA.' In England, people often call shopping strips 'the high street'.

In Stanmore you know where you stand. 

When I was growing up, I thought 'street', 'road', and 'avenue' were interchangeable.

I had a vague intuition that 'boulevard' was a larger street, and 'lane' was very small. Crescent and circle, obvious; 'parade' a delightful deviation found sometimes at coastal venues.

Kingsmill had a clear understanding of the differences. In one scene he went to visit his friend in Barracluff Avenue, Bondi Beach. "It was no more an avenue than any other Bondi street of the time - unless you counted telegraph poles as trees, in which case the regimented forest of grey posts, ghosts of fallen eucalypts, crowned with a bristling array of wires, turned every street into an avenue." * 

So, an avenue is meant to contain trees, apparently...

These wayfinding aids in Stanmore are comforting.

I'm so glad the letters have been preserved.

Recently I've picked up some other ideas. A 'road' is often the path you take to go somewhere. 'Road to ruin' or the Yellow Brick Road. Could it ever have been called the Yellow Brick Street?

You can be on Parramatta Road, Camperdown, but you must travel twenty or so kilometres before finding Parramatta. And in small, far flung Kandos, New South Wales, you can follow the Sydney Road; it will take a while, but eventually you'll arrive.

This bendy road doesn't lead to Salisbury, but it does lead to the Salisbury Hotel (pub).

Frenchmans Road** in Randwick aimed toward Botany Bay where French explorer La Perouse landed in Indigenous homelands. The road isn't straight, a distinguishing feature shared with some other roads, indicating the willingness of foremothers and fathers to follow landscape. (Most people want to save energy while traveling - why go up and over a ridge when you can go along the crest?)

I acknowledge and pay deep respect to the Eora people who always lived in Sydney and still live here. They knew the best routes and refined their paths over time. Later road-makers followed them. Frenchmans (which used to include Avoca Street) is one of the oldest roads in Australia, dating to 1788 and before.

In other places too, early 'roads' cut later streets at odd angles: Embarcadero Road in Palo Alto, California, presumably used to lead to a wharf (its meaning in Spanish) on San Francisco Bay. Now it's a quirk in a square grid imposed over it.

Australia Road and Australia Street are not common street names in Australia.

Unlike Oxford Street. People were saying during Mardi Gras that there are 123 Oxford Streets in Australia able to share Sydney's Oxford Street celebrations. And I would guess there's about one thousand Victoria Streets - my street directory shows more than one hundred in greater Sydney alone. 

Classical architecture was the favoured look for official buildings. 

This one is on the corner of Australia Street.

Australia Street Newtown might have been named because a lot of very old government type buildings stand there: court house, police station, town hall and more. In a similar descriptive vein, Church Street nearby holds the church and cemetery. 

I noticed through an internet search that there's an Australia Road in London, but it looks pretty limited so I don't think anyone should be confused by my using it as a title. Confoundingly, this  London example seems to go around four sides of a square area. Not sure what that says as a metaphor. Puts new meaning into 'Road to Nowhere'.

* p. 176, Australia Street by John Kingsmill, published by Hale & Ironmonger, 1991. Italics in quote are the author's. Note: Kingsmill is of his time, I won't pretend otherwise; some parts might not be 100% politically correct by today's standards, but his compassion for people is genuine and strong.

** Frenchmans Road is how it's spelled - the road names board wanted to keep things simple yet confusing.