[This is flat country. Bulleke-bek it’s called, which means ‘flat country’, or Merri-Bek, or Philiptown, or Brunswick. Leslie Street, it’s called, or possibly Club Street, behind the Victoria Hotel. Across the flat land of the centuries its farmland, warehouses, grassy plains teeming with yam daisies.

In the 1860s footballer and farmer Donald Leslie occupies this land, and in time immemorial, the Wurundjeri. In the middle-twentieth century Leslie Street is a one-sided row of factories and warehouses. Number 23 is the Brunswick Ice Works, supplying ice to nearby shops, and storing fish and beer. In the 1980s, it’s a recording studio where Men at Work worked, and John Farnham works. In the early twenty-first century the street has a wholesale butcher, a jazz club, a dance studio, and a lone, graffiti-covered house that refuses to be engulfed.

Number 23a, upstairs, is artists’ studios. A faded, reversed sign advertises a defunct picture framers. Plasterboard frame walls carve corridors and form twenty-five spaces for painters, sculptors, potters, photographers, from Naarm, lutruwita, Aotearoa, Hong Kong, Zimbabwe, Finland, England, Jersey and elsewhere, all via Brunswick, via Bulleke-bek.

[here] encapsulates the work of 23a’s residents here and now. Soft abstracts find hard edges. Nature finds interiority. There is no plan, or theme, or brief, but patterns and forms emerge.

Priscilla Manthey’s prints of charcoal and Valentina Palonen’s glazed porcelain and raku clay twist bodies into new forms. Lana Daubermann and Charlotte Watson isolate the natural world into colour and depth. Glen Fox and Ashton Wastney’s works on canvas find the kinetic in the human face.

Charlotte Ivey, Sandra Espinoza and George Duckett’s earthy abstracts draw solid shapes from intuition, butting against Ray Carter’s hard-edged abstraction. Josh Simpson and Wendy Black pull focus to natural forms. Steady patterns of time and process ripple across the paintings of Graeme Thompson and the ceramics of Betty Ma.

Time and process endure. New patterns and forms emerge. In the 2040s, the street is lined with apartment buildings, barbers and bakeries. Self-driving cars roll silently across concrete under which yam daisies once flowered. All continues, all co-exists. This is flat country.

–Will Cox is a lutruwita-born, Naarm-based writer and critic. He’s a regular arts writer for The Age, and his short fiction has appeared in various journals and online. His novella Hyacinth came out in early 2023.