The story behind the Smith St women’s mural

A Melbourne graffiti writer’s painting over of a feminist mural has reopened a decades-old contest over a brick wall in Fitzroy. The eastern boundary of the now defunct Gas and Fuel depot on Smith Street is 45 metres long and 10 metres high. It presents an enticing canvas.

More than 30 years ago, Megan Evans and Eve Glenn picked it as the site to paint a mural about the women of Northcote. On a night in February this year, a tagger – known by the moniker Nost – picked it as a spot to paint his name. None of the artists found their decisions well received. This wall doesn’t paint easily.

“It was problematic really, picking that wall”, Eve explains. “We could have picked a much more simple wall.” I’m sitting with Eve and Megan at a cafe looking across the road at the four large white letters that now cover most of what they fought for years ago.

There was something lovely about those sort of very male unions supporting a women’s mural. That was one of the things I loved. – Megan Evans

“It was as bold as that graffiti is, in its day”, Eve reflects. “It was only bloody-mindedness”, she says about their battle to get that mural on that wall. “When we said we wanted that wall, people thought we meant that we wanted two square feet in the middle.”

But their idea was for something big. They wanted to paint images of women across its entire face. They wanted to paint the women they met when they went knocking on doors in the area: women from the high school, the prison, the Greek women’s group, the elderly citizens club, the fruit shop, the record shop and others.

“It was really a bit of an attempt to counteract all the advertising that was out there of women as objects”, Megan says. It was the 1980s and big was in: big eyebrows, big business, big advertising. “It was a time when they started having trams with a naked lady full length along the side”, Eve says. A mural painted on this wall was a chance to match that scale. “For me, it was about something I wanted to say. It was about politics; it wasn’t about art”, Megan adds.

They had the support of Northcote Council and some government arts funding. The wall was on a government-owned building. Surely, they thought, they’d be able to paint it. “No”, was the answer. The Gas and Fuel Board didn’t want a women’s mural, or “a painting of raging lesbians”, as one of the seven-man board described it. “They weren’t going to let a couple of girls loose on their wall”, Eve says.

“They couldn’t understand why you would paint women”, Megan says. “They couldn’t understand what would be interesting about women.”

Eventually, after two years of campaigning, they got an approval – of sorts. They could paint the wall, which was then bare bricks, but would have to cover it with cladding first. “That was the deal”, Megan says, “so they could take it off if they wanted to”. The board also reckoned that the two women would struggle to come up with the money needed to pull off a building job of that size.

“That’s when the union movement came in”, Megan says. The painters’ union, the Operative Painters and Decorators – whose membership was mostly painters working in the construction industry – also had an art workers’ section and a policy on securing jobs for artists. “There was an understanding at that time that artists actually did work”, Eve says.

Under the leadership of Albert Littler, the Victorian branch of the union had won an art clause in the industrial agreements applying to city building sites. It stipulated that 1 percent of the cost of all new major buildings would be spent on commissioning art works for the buildings.

Littler and the union were “really supportive” of the project, according to Megan. “There was something lovely about those sort of very male unions supporting a women’s mural. That was one of the things I loved about it.”

With the backing of the Victorian labour movement, the women managed to negotiate a generous donation of the building materials they needed from construction boss Bruno Grollo – whose appreciation for feminist murals was previously unknown.

Cladding and scaffolding secured, they painted the mural in two months. A couple of other artists contributed – Carol Ruff painted some of the portraits, and Marina Baker designed and painted a graffiti-inspired section – but most of the work is Megan and Eve’s. “It was a very intense time”, Eve says. “We had one ladder on one end and most of the time we climbed up the front of the scaffold with the paint bucket on our arms”, Megan recalls. “I’ve never been so fit. I had muscles on my muscles.”

The Gas and Fuel depot was operational throughout. “All the men used to drive in and out all the time in their trucks, and they related”, Megan says, re-enacting how the depot workers would raise a fist in support as they passed. “They could see we worked really hard.”

It’s a few days now since the Age broke the news of the mural’s destruction and enough time already for a handful of people to have offered Nost their critique of his work. “No style, no concept, no talent, nost”, reads one scrawling review sprayed onto the wall.

In 1986, when the mural was officially opened, it was “Go home mural”. Megan laughs as she remembers a banner, hung from the second floor balcony of a nearby terrace telling their giant painting to piss off. “We were inflicting our thing on the world, and those people didn’t like it”, Eve says. “You can’t please everybody”, she continues, not unaware that Nost might share that view.

Both of the artists express a sadness for the women who have been covered over, but neither wants the mural repainted. “I’d like to see something else happen there, but I don’t want it restored; it’s had its day”, Megan says.

She might be right. But since its destruction, the call to restore the mural has been loud. Megan and Eve’s painting on that wall may have become worn and faded over the years, but it represented something that the act of an individual graffiti artist, however bold, never will.