Pole Posters of the week
As anyone who sees Sydney’s naked, information-free light poles knows, this is a Tidy Town. Only those who can afford commercial advertising can get information to the public, and that’s as it should be, because poor or struggling people such as emerging artists obviously need to be kept down. You can’t have just any old Tom, Dick or Harriet advertising their garage sale or spare room, for free. It might encourage the wrong types.
Council has achieved this uncluttered uniformity by spending millions of ratepayers’ dollars to tear down offending bits of ratepayers’ paper as soon as they are posted, declaring them to be pollution and imposing fines of up to $1,500 for such a serious offence. This is much higher, for instance, than the $1,069 fine for a truck speeding through a School Zone at 44 km/h above the speed limit.
Clearly these priorities are appropriate. So it was with wonder that our roving poster photographer found the City of Sydney logo on a series of pole posters. The first was just one logo of many on a poster for this weekend’s Newtown Festival, posted on the corner of Crown and Stanley Streets in East Sydney. A minor inconsistency, you might say. But down the road on William Street were a series of A4 notices from the City itself, sticky-taped to poles, advertising proposals to put pedestrian crossings across side streets.
These crossings will be very welcome on this busy footpath connecting Kings Cross and the City, but what about the clutter from the posters? And the pollution! These were not mere paper artefacts but were plastic-laminated as well, no doubt to deter the obsessive-compulsive person who roams these streets slicing and slashing such posters in a paroxysm of self-righteous civic duty.
Will the City now fine itself? Or is this a signal that only the City has permission to use pole posters – its activities obviously far more important than the needs and wants of its residents and ratepayers?
by Michael Gormly
