The Sign
Lucy Van on the For Sale Sign
Preface
Lately I’ve been listening to No Fixed Address, the legendary Aboriginal Australian reggae band. I’ve also been thinking about real estate discourse in Australia. These two activities came together the night I watched the film, Wrong Side of the Road (1981), a fictionalised account of the band (along with Us Mob) and their experiences playing music on the road in 1980s Australia.
①
Wrong Side of the Road dir. Ned Lander (1981).
Before the gigs, before the police, before the government bureaucracy and before the Aboriginal homecoming, we get the establishing shot: a humble suburban house with a For Sale sign erected in its front yard. We then see band members getting ready to leave for a gig at this Adelaide home. An early suggestion: settler land management is connected with leaving.
The opening scene carries auditorily into the second through the song, ‘Black Man’s Rights’—the drum lick by lead singer and drummer, Bart Willoughby, Leslie Lovegrove Freeman’s lead guitar, and John Miller’s steadfast bassline provide the extradiegetic soundtrack to the car driving out of the grassy driveway (finally, they’re off!). The tune becomes narrative seconds later with the cut to Willoughby sitting behind his drum kit (the drumming is seriously crazy on this tune). He sings: “I am a black, black man / And I need to be recognised in this wretched world.” Later in the song, Willoughby sings: “We have learnt, within our soul, within our soul / and that is: the land controls you, you don’t control land / you don’t control land.” What an incredible manipulation of rhyme: the tightly matched pair, “soul/conTROL,” loses its grip on that final word, “land,” which lands as the unassimilable, true emphasis of the line, thwarting the controlling ambitions of that near end-rhyme.
A Vast Anaphora of the House
What I saw from the back seat of the family car in the 1980s was not particularly different to what I see today from the driver’s seat, except that the anaphora of the house, in the repeating geometry of our best known and most material lingua franca, is vaster. The same starting point repeats as front after front flashes by: “For Sale; For Sale; For Sale”. What I say next will seal the fate of the rest of this paper as circular (and boy would I like to insert a sexy little defence of begging the question right here). The house is more poetic today. Posing parallel with this physical geometry is an anaphora of a second (though perhaps not secondary) sort, a series of signs. Strange to use the word in the least enchanted sense possible: I mean those large, rectangular aluminium boards erected at the front of houses, the signs that appear everywhere, in a now and then sense of everywhere, along the streets, which I see in a blur when I drive by. They herald me and I think: gonfaloni (theatrical configurations of a culture in pageant, or at war). Thanks to the latest advancements in print technology, these signs bear high-resolution colour reproductions of the interior spaces of the houses they represent, along with a short sentence in large font, and longer sentences in a smaller font. Speed won’t permit me to read them—and anyway, they are not empirically addressed to me, being someone who will probably never purchase property—but I am versed in their copy nonetheless, and I feel I know what they are saying to me, having been one with the non-empirical (let’s say, apostrophic, or poetic) audience for these signs since I first saw one of my neighbours put one up; since I could read.
It is not the only place to find thriving ceremonial language here in Australia, but the For Sale sign is quite the place to begin if you’re looking for an exuberant language that binds us. “Grand Residence in Unbeatable Locale;” “Luxuriously Redesigned Sanctuary;” “Iconic Showroom;” “Stunning Office and Car Park;” “Designer Urban Retreat.” We are seldom ‘stunned,’ and we tolerate the widest senses of ‘designer’ and ‘iconic’—we understand these are not words to be taken literally, even though the national culture has historically prided itself on its intolerant stance to bullshit and its submission of questionable authority to the ‘pub test.’ I suppose I would say that these rectangular signs are a space we collectively permit a bit of poetic licence, where we allow the writer indulgence in their authorial perversion (high hyperbole). And, indeed, if we are one of those attempting to purchase property, we become skilled interpreters of photograph and text, training our eyes to comprehend room dimensions through and against the brightly-lit wide-angle lens and the hired stylist’s expertly arranged furniture, houseplants and ‘art,’ learning to read between the ‘renovator’s dream,’ the ‘in the heart of it all,’ and the ‘no more to do.’
As a result, though perhaps to our surprise, the anonymous real estate agent’s copywriter seems to have become a major (albeit unacknowledged) poet of the nation. The voice of the land, the deformed genius loci,
sign. (How else to account for our utterly irrational land management since colonial settlement other than with our bad poetry? This is the profound insight of Tom Ford and Justin Clemens’ study on Barron Field.
②
Thomas H. Ford and Justin Clemens, Barron Field in New South Wales: The Poetics of Terra Nullius (Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press, 2023).
)
In one sense, the sign bears an indexical relation with the house it purports to sell; its colonial post or rectangular frame is physically fixed to the property. Drilled onto a wall, or driven into the ground, we know by this continuity what the sign refers to. (That this house is open for inspection.) At the same time, the sign introduces the ambiguity that is part of all representation, as poststructuralism has taught us. The house referred to in the sign’s text is not, after all, identical or continuous with the physical house for sale. The rooms are not as vast and well-lit and welcoming as they seem in the photographs; the dream is never going to supersede the ordinary business of living one’s life here. We know that nothing about this house is ‘perfect,’ though we have no difficulty accepting the liberal application of the adjective whenever we read about the house. This textual house is apprehended primarily in a ‘virtual’ sense, two ways: first, in the sense that it might not [actually] exist, and second, that it may be understood to bear the celebrated ‘virtues’ of a culture.
To flirt with circularity again: I want to call this virtual bearing of the house ‘poetry’ and approach this bearing with the reading methods I would bring to other materials called poetry. I want to suggest that, as well as their composition, our ways of reading and subsequently abiding with these signs as active objects in our physical space, are part of an impressively poetic tradition. In our interpretive manner of reading, our assent to hyperbole, in our sensitivity and attunement to the language of the sign I see something difficult to rationalise in purely economic accounts. I find in the presence of poetry here an aversion from the single perspective of economy that typically marks such investigations. Could it be that the housing crisis (or rather, its causes) understood only through economic approaches, is only half of the way understood? (The half we don’t understand is its poetry.) Further, this mode should not be limited solely to sentiment or effusion (that is, the senses of the poetic often ascribed to poetry by non- and anti-poets), but rather thought with what David Shapiro called, in his reflection on John Hejduk as poet-architect, “sublime empiricism, a respect for fact and for the fact of fiction.”
③
David Shapiro, ‘The Clock of Deletion: Time and John Hejduk’s Architecture,’ np.
At the same time that Pi O and the Fitzroy anarchists were broadcasting their anti-gentrification message (“GET OUT OF FITZROY!”
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According to Tony Birch, six GET OUT OF FITZROY! newsletters were produced. See Tony Birch, ‘“The Best TV Reception in Melbourne”: Fitzroy “Low-Life” and the Invasion of the Renovator,’ Traffic 3 (2003), 26 n32.
), the Committee for Urban Action (CUA) was documenting street scenes of inner city Melbourne, recording the built heritage that they felt was under siege by rampant development and progress.
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'CUA Streetscapes,’ State Library of Victoria [last accessed 3 July 2024]
This effort resulted in the production of an extraordinary number of reels (more than 2000), or over 70,000 photographs made between 1970 and 1974. The photographs are now kept by the State Library of Victoria (SLV), which has made over 3000 of these images available for public viewing.
⑥
'Committee for Urban Action collection,’ State Library of Victoria [last accessed 13 May 2026]
Among these pictures, one comes across many ‘For Sale’ signs. A photograph of Young St, Fitzroy, shows a double storey, semi-detached brick home, for sale (according to the sign) by auction. This is the full text on the sign:
AUCTION
SAT. 8th JUNE 11:30AM
DOUBLE STOREY BRICK HOME
OFFICE BUILDING
ZONED LOCAL BUSINESS
COMPRISING
5 ROOMS
PLUS CONVENIENCES
CENTRALLY LOCATED
AUCTIONEERS
EL GRECO REALTY
235B CHURCH ST RICHMOND ⑦ Committee for Urban Action [CUA], ‘Young Street, Fitzroy, from Gertrude Street to Victoria Parade — east side,’ 1970-74, digital file from black and white negative, CUA Collection, State Library of Victoria [last accessed 3 July 2024]
Nothing in this sign exhorts the reader to imagine the possibilities of this home/office (today’s reader is accustomed to being told that ‘the choice is yours!’). In fact, nothing in this sign addresses the ‘you’ typically apostrophised in the For Sale signs of today. No idealised house. No idealised you. Nor is there a sense of excitement, anticipation, or marvel; there is simply an absence of affective rhetoric in these signs. We are presented with ‘the facts,’ rather than what Shapiro calls ‘the fact of fiction,’ the now-established discourse for imagining (specifically, imagining the purchasing of) a house. We see an underwhelming hewing to fact in another CUA photograph of Egremont St, Fitzroy:
FOR PRIVATE SALE
S.B. HOME
VACANT POSSESSION
FINANCE AVAILABLE
VINCE & CO.
354-6 ST. GEORGE’S RD NTH FITZROY ⑧ CUA, ‘[Egremont Street, Fitzroy, from Scotchmer Street to Tranere Street - east side],’ 1970-74, digital file from black and white negative, CUA Collection, State Library of Victoria [last accessed 3 July 2024]
It’s all about playing a straight game—the house is not even for sale by auction, but by a discreet private sale. For the purposes of selling the home, the agents have articulated three key facts: the house is solid brick; the property is vacant (free of tangible items) on settlement; and, finance is available to the right buyer. Around a decade later, the photographer Phillip Rogers recorded a man named Ken Gooding standing next to a For Sale sign for selling his house in Northcote:
FOR SALE
BRICK HOME WELL BUILT 1983
ON GARDEN ALLOTMENT 10m x 53m
IN ALL COMPRISING 8 ROOMS.
AT PRESENT S/c GRANNY FLAT
2-3 BEDROOM HOUSE x SUNDECK
PLUS 2 ROOM GARDEN STUDIO &
2 CAR U/c PARKING. ALL AS NEW
ENQUIRE WITHIN ⑨ Phillip Rogers, ‘[Ken Gooding with For Sale sign to sell his house in Northcote],’ c1970, gelatin silver print, Phillip Rogers’ Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria [last accessed 3 July 2024]
The rhetoric remains firmly within a semantic field of tangible facts, with an emphasis on quantity (eight rooms, two undercover car parking spaces, garden allotment 10 x 53m). The straightforward, indexical nature of this sign reminds me of a sign I saw in another early 1980s photograph that I found in the SLV’s archive, which shows an Abbotsford milk bar advertised for sale with these three simple lines:
FOR SALE
THIS PROPERTY
PETER MARCOVIC ⑩ Christopher van der Craats, ‘Exterior views of milkbars in Abbotsford, Victoria,’ 1983-84, digital file from kodachrome colour slide, Christopher van der Craats Collection, State Library of Victoria, [last accessed 3 July 2024]
Unlike the For Sale signs captured by the CUA street scenes, Roger’s photograph of Goodman shows the sign front on, in full focus. More than the photograph’s human subject (Goodman), what draws our eye is the sign that Goodman evidently created (as well, we assume he built the house it describes). I wonder whether Rogers was inspired to take out his camera and capture Gooding’s For Sale sign because the sign itself had become a case in point, representing a matter-of-factness, a sense of solidity, that was becoming increasingly rare in the nation. In 1983, the Labor government floated the Australian dollar, creating the groundwork for deregulation and decentralisation that would define the decade and change the course of the economy and culture of the nation. (Was there an intangible sense of loss that followed this, shaped to some extent by the loss of the tangible?—although we might remember that Theodor Adorno identified abstraction and virtuality in the gold standard decades earlier.)
⑪
Theodor Adorno, ‘Gold Assay’ in Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life trans. E.F.N. Jeffcott (London: NLB, 1974), 152-55.
Auguring an exuberant culture that was untethered from any fixed standard (postmodernism, or what Fredric Jameson called late capitalism), ‘solid brick’ language would be placed under increasing pressure, eventually vaporising (into poetry).
The Peter Marcovic agency still sells property in the inner suburbs of Melbourne. In 2024, they placed the following text on a For Sale sign for a property on Wellington St, Collingwood:
VICTORIAN ELEGANCE
Perfectly positioned to enjoy all the vibrant lifestyle attributes of
the Inner-North, this character filled residence, boasts amazing
style and ambience.
With a beautiful warm setting, the home has a wonderful romantic
feel.
Featuring a separate living room, stylish kitchen with dining,
modern bathroom and tranquil courtyard/garden, just perfect for
entertaining.
Upstairs offers a well thought out 2 bedroom setup, commanding
master and a second bedroom that is split into two, with robes and
desks on both sides, along with a smart design timber deck.
Retaining ornate features, typical of the era, OFP, exposed
brickwork, cool interior lighting, polished timber flooring, retaining
ornate features typical of the era and split system cooling/heating.
Location is first class, with the culinary delights, Collingwood is
famous for, scenic bike trails, parkland and local galleries. ⑫ 298 Wellington Street, COLLINGWOOD
In 1983, the short and indexical sentence, “[t]his Property,” was sufficient to meet the requirements of the For Sale sign. Four decades on, a new demand is increasingly made on language destined for the sign. We see this pressure manifest on the Peter Marcovic sign of 2024. Four of its six sentences eschew standard construction; in place of an article and subject, beginnings are marked by adverbs (“Perfectly”), prepositions (“With”), gerund verbs (“Featuring,” “Retaining”). Such beginnings give the reader a sense of jolting into another sentence, one that has already begun, whose subject is located at some other, undefined place. The two times a subject appears at the start of the sentence, they appear without an article (“Upstairs,” “Location”), emphasising, in a different way, the text’s mild but pervasive sense of physical disorientation. Once a sentence gets going, it typically and swiftly diverts into a subclause, which is swiftly followed by another subclause (and so on). The effect of this diversionary tactic is formally baroque—the sentence becomes a unit of proliferation, capable of infinite variations on the putative theme; or, rather, incapable of proposing a final, conclusive statement. One of the sign’s sentences contains a dittography that inadvertently draws our attention to the baroque imperative governing the For Sale aesthetic: “[r]etaining ornate features, typical of the era, OFP, exposed brickwork, cool interior lighting, polished timber flooring, retaining ornate features typical of the era.” The theme of the house’s “ornate features” finds structural expression in the sentence, which ornaments the idea (the notion that the house offers retention of ornamentation) with short, breathy subclauses before returning the reader to the original phrase. The sentence concludes emphatically, without a caesura: “retaining ornate features typical of the era.” The aesthetic principle of ornamentation plays out across the sign—nouns never appear without an adjective—and in nearly all cases, an ethos of ‘why use one word, when two or three will do?’ (the “beautiful warm setting” has a “wonderful romantic feel”) prevails.
We are made breathless by the house, or rather, by the copy writer’s ekphrasis of the house. The ambience of the text intends to convey the ambience of the property to be purchased; in this sense of intention, perhaps there is not a radical departure here from the raison d’etre of advertising copy in general, which routinely makes claims on our very breathing space (‘breathtaking’). We know the text intends to cultivate desire because this is what is announced by the nouns—“style”,’ “ambience,” “delights.” (Advertising, writ large.) But, we might see, the volume and texture of the prose tend to say more than intended. By volume alone, the contemporary For Sale sign makes a radical departure from conventional (and some might say, competent) advertising rhetoric. I can’t think of many other genres of advertising that would unleash six striving sentences instead of one or two succinct catchphrases. Why so not-succinct? Why can’t the copywriter nail the text? Why reach for this rhetoric of accumulation—baroque accumulation—unless it is the case that, what must impress the reader in the material assertion (that there is simply so much to say about the house (more than one could ever say!)) is a more pressing psychical claim? The long, subclause-ridden sentences blur past in their infinitude of adverbs (“perfectly”) and adjectives (“perfect”). The volume of the copy inadvertently provides a cover for speed: hurry up, you won’t get through all of this, unless you speed read! Get the gist! Get the vibe! In a practical sense of reading, we are not supposed to read this text for its manifest information (content), but through its latent texture (form): (speed). The impression, a dream state word salad, opens our view onto the real estate sublime.
The apotheosis of this sublimity is the ‘title’ of the For Sale sign. None of the signs viewable in the CUA collection bear titles. In contrast, nearly all the signs I came across that were prepared in 2024, did. Even a sign for a humble one-bedroom flat (around the corner from where I live) that included, much to my surprise, a rare photograph of a toilet, bore this title: “Perfect Location With [sic] Great Proportions.” What is the purpose of the title, other than to orient the reader to the poetic pretensions of the text to come; or, more to the point, to instantiate the text to come as text? Peter Marcovic’s Wellington St, Collingwood For Sale sign has this title: “Victorian Elegance,” expressing the demand its writer places on language to do more, to strain harder toward some real estate rhetorical ideal.
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I see the title, ‘Victorian Elegance,’ a number of times while preparing this paper, including on a sign prepared by Jellis Craig to sell a house in North Fitzroy (last accessed 3 July 2024). I also see its (arguably substandard) variations, including ‘Victorian Excellence’ on a sign prepared by Quixley Real Estate to sell a house in Moonee Ponds (last accessed 3 July 2024)
This single, heptasyllabic line contains two dactyls (“TOR-i-an / EL-e-gance”); the metrical foot typically imparts a ‘classy’ tone, precisely what is needed to get the sign’s pitch off to a good start. And while “Victorian Elegance” connects with the rhythmic classicism of a Virgil, or an Ovid, it also utilises a designation for time that is richly, and specifically lyrical—what Anne Carson describes as the idiosyncratic temporal designation, now-then or now-again (deute), that was most often used by the early Greek lyricists.
⑭
Anne Carson, ‘Now-Then’ in Eros: The Bittersweet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 117-22.
]I bid you sing
of Gongyla, Abanthis, taking up
your lyre as (now again) longing
floats around you ⑮ Sappho, fragment 22 in If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho trans. Anne Carson (New York: Vintage, 2003).
Now-again is a threshold time, a collision in the moment that contains novelty (this is happening right now) and recurrence (not for the first time) all at once. The version of time alluded to, and desired by “Victorian Elegance” conflates an optimal present (elegant modern living) with an idealised past (the Victorian era, during which the dwelling was originally built). As Tony Birch writes, this temporal designation became increasingly prevalent in the first wave of inner-city gentrification in Fitzroy:
The crucial elements of this discourse, including the attempt to highlight the gulf between ‘old’ and ‘new’ Fitzroy, were apparent in a Herald feature describing the renovation of a Victoria Street terrace. Previously imagined as ‘bedraggled, sleazy [and] coming apart at the seams,’ the newspaper noted that the house had been transformed to ‘combine the splendours of a more gracious past with the advantages of mod cons,’ thus producing ‘A Most Desirable Residence.’ ⑯ Birch, 13.
What makes the idealisation of this particular temporality possible, as Birch observes, is the emphasis on a past “far enough back in time to ensure that the market value of the residence was not ‘tainted’ by its more recent and culturally relevant working-class and migrant history.”
⑰
Ibid.
The For Sale sign formalises this threshold time, constituting and binding an ideal past with an ideal present at the same time that it removes from view the unsightly business of actual and recent habitation (remind you of anything?).
Idealised now-then, speeding past, again and again, in a fuzzy exuberant anaphora(!). What does it mean that the signs are everywhere? What do they herald, other than the obvious: bad news for renters, the young, the elderly, First Nations people, families, couples, single people, friends, housemates, those without capital, migrants, those living with disability, those living with illness, artists, ordinary workers, white collar workers, the disorganised, the organised, the precarious workers and nonworkers, the nearly everyone who is not already a holder of some sort of property? Speed all the way although I don’t come here today to speak directly of the roided-up economy, speed impresses itself upon us through this theatrical configuration. John Hejduk often uses the term “masque” to describe the object-subject relations that shape life in our cities, and many of his projects are directly conceived as masques series, including Lancaster/Hanover Masque 1979-83, Berlin Masque 1981 , Victims I 1984, Chicago Fair 1984, Riga 1985, and Vladivostok 1983-87.
⑱
I have been checkmated by Vladivostok—couldn’t write anything for months after I read it. John Hejduk, Riga, Vladivostok, Lake Baikal (New York: Rizzoli, 1989).
Throughout these series, Hejduk establishes and develops an analogy between the theatre and the city. Just as the theatre entrusts the mask to make the character of a society evident, architecture manifests the characters that build the city. Architecture in this sense is not a passive field of empirical objects, but objects that are both, as Mirjana Lozanovska writes, “social constructions of material space and mechanisms that construct human subjects.”
⑲
Mirjana Lozanovska, ‘Abjection, Otherness, Performativity’ in Migrant Housing: Architecture, Dwelling, Migration (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2019), 44.
While Hejduk acknowledges that architecture is not simply made in the ‘context’ of civilisation, society and art, but rather is contingent upon these things, he insists that the very notion of a human subject does not exist outside the object of architecture. But to imagine this co-constitutive relation as harmonious is to miss the point of the relation. Objects ought not be presumed as passive; they are not neutral and, indeed, they are often oppositional. They fight back.
Understood in relation to the masque, these signs bear complex emotional charge, and adopt theatrical configurations that are often in opposition to the inhabitants of the streetscapes they share. They might, indeed, fight back against the very inhabitants of the house on whose behalf they propose to benefit through the sale. Hence, I think, the prominence of the For Sale sign in the marquee episode of the children’s cartoon series, Bluey.
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Richard Jeffery and Joe Brumm, ‘The Sign,’ Bluey series 3 episode 49 (Ludo Studio, 2024)
The episode, ‘The Sign,’ was promoted by the national broadcaster as a special television event and tested the length of the format, running at twenty-eight minutes (instead of the typical seven). ‘The Sign’ is a wedding episode, a standard motif for a season finale (the titular Bluey’s uncle Radley is about to marry her godmother Frisky). In the second narrative, parallel with the wedding storyline, Bluey learns that her parents plan on selling the family house. In this story, Bluey and her sister, Bingo (as well as her cousins, Muffin and Socks), attempt to remove the sign, in the belief that this will prevent the sale. They rather competently identify the sign as an agonistic agent, introducing new chaos into their lives. They add to this belief an idea (wish, fantasy) that Frisky will help them keep this sign down, at least, for the duration of the wedding—a fantasy to be scuppered when Frisky suddenly calls off the wedding. The storylines intertwine here: restoring Frisky to her wedding means (to the girls) removing the For Sale sign, and keeping the family home. ‘The Sign’ resolves along the satisfying lines typical of romantic comedy: the wedding takes place (with new and important insights gained by the newlyweds), and the sale falls through.
“Mum, what does the sticker say?” asks Bingo. “It says ‘SOLD’,” answers Chilli, the girls’ mother. I had to watch the episode twice to check the ending. Chilli and Bluey’s father, Bandit, stand at the For Sale sign, freshly affixed with its ‘sold’ sticker. “I just want to give them the best life I can,” says Bandit. “I know,” says Chilli. Bandit wonders if he has made a mistake. “Probably,” answers Chilli, before taking his hand: “But let’s make it together.” It’s the affective reassurance Bluey’s audience has come to expect (this exemplifies the high standards the show has redefined for depictions of healthy family life on television). But, perhaps curiously, this ending also passively submits to the presumptions of the market embodied by the For Sale sign: the idea is that ‘progress,’ under the banner of ‘a better life,’ is something we either do not accept or learn to accept together. If we are mistaken, we commit to the mistake, and live out our mistake steadfastly. The predicament of the Heeler family, namely, that no single member of the family believes selling and leaving their family home is a good idea, is resolved by a (convoluted) quasi-deus ex machina involving a coin, public binoculars and a (random) swimming pool: “That was lucky.” Indeed. On viewing the pool, which is part of the property of another house also bearing a For Sale sign, the prospective buyers (a pair of sheepdogs) change their minds about the purchase and the Heelers can stay.
Strange to see it: nothing is learned in an otherwise, by form, didactic television show about locating feelings and connecting these with agency. Despite gaining new insight into their desires, the adult Heelers take no measures to change their family’s fate. The fantasy of ‘The Sign’ is to stay, to forestall that which enters our collective intimate lives under the banner of progress, to reverse the market, to banish the sign. That this fantasy is staged by a children’s show (and not just any show, but the runaway national hit and our entertainment industry’s premium export—there has been sustained talk of making Bluey Australia’s Olympic mascot)
㉑
Joe Hinchliffe, '‘Bluey Creators Offer to Design Unique Brisbane Olympics Mascot,’ The Guardian 26 July 2022; Brigette Duclos and Dave O’Neill, ‘Could Bluey be the 2032 Brisbane Olympics Mascot?’ABC Radio Melbourne 27 June 2024
(last accessed 3 July 2024)
suggests something of our collective national consciousness, which is to say, of our helplessness, our own infantilisation before the sign. Real estate—that process by which we attempt to control land by turning it into permanent property—is out of control. You don’t control land. We might like someone to put it back: Daddy, the Prime Minister, a pair of sheepdogs (described by Bluey as “those dogs without eyes”)—anyone (but us). ‘The Sign’ announces our national fantasy (to put back the sign), but in the meantime, out there on the street, there is no end in sight. This may be the defining feature of the Australian real estate masque: that it keeps going; in fact, that it eschews narrative altogether, in the traditional sense, in favour of permanent crisis.
WORKS CITED
✷ Adorno, Theodor. ‘Gold Assay’ in Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life trans. E.F.N. Jeffcott (London: NLB, 1974), pp. 152-55.
✷ Birch, Tony. ‘“The Best TV Reception in Melbourne”: Fitzroy “Low-Life” and the Invasion of the Renovator.’ Traffic 3 (2003).
✷ Carson, Anne. ‘Now-Then’ in Eros: The Bittersweet. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986, pp. 117-22.
✷ ‘Committee for Urban Action [CUA] Streetscapes,’ State Library of Victoria
✷ CUA, ‘Egremont Street, Fitzroy, from Scotchmer Street to Tranere Street - east side,’ 1970-74, digital file from black and white negative. CUA Collection, State Library of Victoria
✷ CUA, ‘Young Street, Fitzroy, from Gertrude Street to Victoria Parade – east side,’ 1970-74, digital file from black and white negative. CUA Collection, State Library of Victoria
✷ Duclos, Brigette, and Dave O’Neill. ‘Could Bluey be the 2032 Brisbane Olympics Mascot?’ ABC Radio Melbourne 27 June 2024.
✷ Ford, Thomas H., and Justin Clemens. Barron Field in New South Wales: The Poetics of Terra Nullius. Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press, 2023.
✷ Hejduk, John. Riga, Vladivostok, Lake Baikal. New York: Rizzoli, 1989.
✷ Hinchcliffe, Joe. ‘Bluey Creators Offer to Design Unique Brisbane Olympics Mascot.’ The Guardian 26 July 2022.
✷ Lozanovska, Mirjana. ‘Abjection, Otherness, Performativity’ in Migrant Housing: Architecture, Dwelling, Migration. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2019.
✷ Rogers, Philip. ‘[Ken Gooding with For Sale sign to sell his house in Northcote],’ c1970, gelatin silver print. Phillip Rogers’ Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria
✷ Sappho. ‘[fragment 22]’ in If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho trans. Anne Carson. New York: Vintage, 2003, p. 41.
✷ Shapiro, David. ‘The Clock of Deletion: Time and John Hejduk’s Architecture,’ in John Hejduk, The Collapse of Time and Other Diary Constructions. London: Architectural Association, 1986.
✷ ‘The Sign.’ Bluey, Series 3, Episode 49, dir. Richard Jeffrey and Joe Brumm, Ludo Studio, 2024.
✷ van der Craats, Christopher. ‘Exterior views of milkbars in Abbotsford, Victoria,’ 1983-84, digital file from kodachrome colour slide. Christopher van der Craats Collection, State Library of Victoria,
✷ Wrong Side of the Road dir. Ned Lander. Ronin Films, 1981.
Lucy Van writes poetry and criticism. She is currently a research associate at the University of Melbourne where she is completing a monograph on postcolonial poetry, The Beginning of the Poem. Her first poetry collection is The Open (Cordite 2021).