Developers deal Art Deco decline for dollars?

Yesterday, Alexx and I went to the inner city Sydney suburb of Dulwich Hill to see an exhibition by a photographer friend of ours. Neither of us had ever really stopped off in Dulwich Hill before.

At one point I went for a walk through the streets and laneways which I find is always a good way to get the feel for the essential nature of a place.

In a back street I found this small run-down block of Art Deco flats. The frontage was quite interesting and very art deco I thought. Ironically, the name Silverdale conjures up ideas of beauty and riches perhaps which is at odds with the down at heel back streets of Dulwich Hills.

As I stood and relished the Art Deco style I imagined I could smell the developers gathering like vultures, scenting a killing, building their mansions, always somewhere else, on the bones of local texture and the past's riches. I didn't really know but, given past performance, seemingly relentless, it seemed highly possible.

People, I think, can be divided into those who value what is and has been and wish to fit themselves into and around it, recycling and transforming but retaining connections and continuities and those who see themselves and their concerns as the immutable point of it all and seek to sweep everything away for illusory gain.

Oh! I know nothing is black and white and I do see the value in the new and know that the way of the world is change but a natural environment changes over time, incorporating the past into the present into the future, doesn't it? What happens to a tree when it becomes rootless?

Ironically, as we clear fell forests of Federation and Californian bungalows we hold a much touted Art Deco exhibition in Melbourne.

Of course, we not only lose Art Deco style but also somewhere where someone with less that a combined income of $200, 000 can live. And we lose the rough and ready but fertile environments where upcoming artists and writers and thinkers and changers and savers can grow - like our friend and his friends.

Beware council makeover plans that do not include waste land and the unrenovated, the unimproved and the underutilised!

Oh! I have become a lover of faded, drab walls and weedy lots along rusty rail lines and the old shopfront no one has ever done anything with!

Mmm! Maybe I'm wrong about Silverdale? Maybe this old girl has years left in her yet?