Melbourne’s on-again off-again embrace of street art is now tested by the trial of the alleged artist behind ‘Pam the Bird’
“Now,” begins Jonathan Barreiro, the defence barrister leaning close to the screen as if trying to peer inside Melbourne’s Magistrate Court. On the stand, police informant senior constable Michael McCarthy twists in his seat so he can see Barreiro on the monitor. “Let’s begin with the street art char—”
“I wouldn’t call it that,” McCarthy interjects.
The lawyer leans back. “What would you call it?
“I’d call it graffiti vandalism.”
There’s a pause, Barreiro bringing his face close to the camera again.
“Well,” he says finally, “let’s agree when I’m talking I’ll call it street art and when you speak you can call it what you want.”
There is a titter throughout the court, and for a moment there it is, the proceedings alighting on what could be considered the heart of the matter. But then the language of the court swiftly dims back into legalese, as the police informants stridently argue against bail for alleged graffiti “associates” 21-year-old Jack Gibson-Burrell and co-offender 39-year-old Matthew White. There are 76 charges, mostly for graffiti, between them. Gibson-Burrell, say police, has caused “chaos in our state” and presents an “unacceptable risk” to society. As for White, the senior constable believes he will “go to any length to destroy evidence if released”. Several years ago, explains McCarthy, White ate a page of his sketchbook when police accidentally left it on him after they arrested him near a freshly painted illegal mural.
It’s the first week of February, and word on the streets of Melbourne is that “Pam the Bird” has been grounded, with police alleging Gibson-Burrell is the sole creator of the “distinct cartoon birds” that have become prolific throughout the city in the past six months. White, they say, is his sometime co-offender, though others trained in abseiling may simply call him a crucial part of the process: a “climbing buddy”. On my way into the CBD for the bail hearing, I counted 41 Pams, the bird’s single eye and rotund body hopping from concrete pylon to pylon, flitting up to the ledges of industrial buildings, and flickering across the patina of brick, cement and corrugated iron as if in flight beside the train.
“We typically see this bird graffiti has a sharp triangle pointed beak with a line that separates the upper and lower portion of the beak that approximately extends three quarters away from the tip,” describes senior constable Scott Nicholls in court, the officer in charge of the Pam the Bird operation, which began a year ago and racked up some 200 hours of surveillance.
“Are you an artist?” a second defence barrister, Jonathan Miller, interjects.
“No,” says Nicholls carefully.
“And yet you’re able to lay out the form of this bird,” says Miller. “I put to you that the bird could have any number of imitators.”
Nicholls shakes his head rigorously. “An amateur in a controlled environment could – but these are not controlled environments.” McCarthy also dismisses the same suggestion regarding White’s alleged graffiti, such as the SROCK tag that has appeared alongside Pam. “I disagree,” says the constable. “There is a distinct precision and quite a lot of talent behind it.”
A reviewer from the Australian Arts Review smothers a laugh. Magistrate Johanna Metcalf, however, remains inscrutable. For a “distinct cartoon bird”, it is all very serious – and notably there are some ugly allegations among the charges, specifically in relation to Gibson-Burrell. Nicholls outlines a series of alleged crimes that includes the theft of two cars, and purposely driving one of them – tagged with the words “WE DON’T ACCEPT CASH HERE” – through the front wall of Nando’s in Footscray. He is further alleged to have punched a retail assistant in the face during an attempt to steal two jackets, and while Nicholls believes Gibson-Burrell is also behind a violent assault on another man in the graffiti scene, no charges have been laid.
Nothing to scoff at. But despite Nicholls’ passion, in the world of cops, court and the media, this is small fry, and definitely not sufficient to warrant a year-long police investigation, including a request to the FBI to execute a warrant in the United States to unlock an Instagram account dedicated to Pam the Bird, claimed to be managed by a “third party”. No, the reason why we are all here is because of the bird.
For two or so years now, Pam the Bird has been sighted along Melbourne’s western railways and arterial roads, appearing on fence lines, the bellies and sidings of road bridges, silver train carriages… Sometimes in colour, other times just an outline, Pam cascades over low-lying tin roofs and across mammoth freeway sound barriers, and nests in the nooks of gable-roof buildings – and for many locals, my family included, it’s been fun. When travelling on a train, it’s not unusual to hear children calling out, “Pam!” It may have all started in Melbourne’s west, but over the past six months Pam’s range has not only broadened, the bird has flown higher than perhaps any other graffiti Melbourne has seen. Pam went manic: it dove down silos and smokestacks, went splat on the face of a skyscraper, squished and stretched on the grey metal backs of overhanging highway signs, and appeared upside-down on a Flinders Street Station clock with the words “my clock” painted underneath. Too far, tut-tutted heritage advocates.
Soon enough, it felt like almost everyone with their eyes open in Melbourne was talking about the bird. Those games of Spot Pam turned to How the fuck?
Since the ’60s, culture jammers and activists around the world have taken to ropes and harnesses to access a city’s exclusive skyline, but “rappel graffiti” has been relatively rare until recently. In Melbourne, a city once internationally feted for its street art scene, some say the unexpected appearance of Pam the Bird against a skyline increasingly dominated by tower fetishes and prime billboard real estate for billionaire politicians and multinationals has been an awakening of sorts.
For a decade, numerous planners and urban designers have been warning the city council and state planning ministers to recommit to the people-friendly principles that brought Melbourne to life in the ’80s. A recent study by planning experts Marcus Spiller and Jo Noesgaard estimates that the amount of public open space will shrink by 25 per cent over the next 20 years if business continues as normal. In this, one might argue Pam the Bird is asking a vital question: Who owns this city?
For police in Victoria’s transit division, however, each bird painted is perceived as a taunt, each sky-high appearance a humiliation, all of it a game of cat and mouse. At sunrise in inner-city Kensington, Pam materialised on the side of a 30-metre-tall apartment block, kicking a soccer ball (“David Peckham”, read the tag). In Geelong, the bird chirruped “This is my city” on the Mercer Street silos.
In October, it really poked the hornet’s nest. Overlooking a sea of traffic, there was Pam perched on what is colloquially known as the “cheese stick”. Erected in 2000 and intended to be reminiscent of an ascending boom-gate, the 70-metre-long yellow steel rectangle block that cantilevers over the busy freeway was Victorian premier Jeff Kennett’s “gateway to the city”, built around the same time his government was practically giving away enormous swathes of public land to private developers.
“He he meow,” recites Nicholls, deadpan, as he relays the tagged words beside one of the bird’s most recent exploits: 100 metres in the air and about the size of a van, Pam popped off the glimmering gold cladding of the Novotel hotel in South Wharf.
Nicholls isn’t amused.
Nor is the lord mayor of Melbourne, Nick Reece. “Let’s be clear, Pam the Bird ain’t no Banksy,” said Reece on Channel 9’s A Current Affair. In what seemed somewhat outsized outrage, the newly appointed lord mayor claimed the graffitied bird was affecting the city’s “pride and reputation”. The City of Melbourne had put aside select laneways for murals and street art. “I’d encourage Pam the Bird to sign on for one of these,” he said.
Alison Young laughs when she recalls the lord mayor’s remark. “Well, back in 2003 no one wanted Banksy here either,” quips the criminologist and deputy director of University of Melbourne’s Centre for Cities. Young’s interest in street art stretches back to the late ’90s when the graffiti scene was joined by the stencil art movement. “There was this feeling of excitement,” she recalls, “a city with paint running through its veins. At the same time, police were – and still are – taking the hard line”.
Nevertheless, in 2003, when Banksy visited the city, adding his stencil art to the flourishing open-air galleries, he had remarked on the dialogue of Melbourne’s streets, the “noisy” walls. “The city doesn’t look like it’s run by mean-spirited bureaucrats and the police,” Banksy said. “It looks like the city belongs to anyone who wants it. It feels like there’s more opportunity.”
Fast-forward seven years and the city’s then lord mayor, Robert Doyle, extended an open invitation to Banksy to return to Melbourne after the council’s anti-graffiti squad – part of Doyle’s zero tolerance approach – “accidentally” painted over a Banksy stencil in Hosier Lane.
But despite the Banksy love-in and a Tourism Victoria campaign centred around the city’s decorated laneways, the state’s anti-graffiti legislation hardened considerably in 2007, with on-the-spot fines jumping to heavy penalties and incarceration, as well as prohibiting sales of spray paint to minors. New offences were introduced for possessing spray paint near public transport “without lawful excuse”, and officers were now allowed to search anyone they thought was 14 years or over.
While graffiti goes back millennia (the Romans were apparently notorious for carving cock and balls into stone walls), it only acquired its “miscreant” status in the ’60s. In the poor neighbourhoods of New York, heady streaks of black unfurled like foliage over subways, bus stops and abandoned buildings. The public was outraged, encouraging the crackdowns, rough handling and criminalisation of kids by police and council crews. Graffiti was folded into the “broken windows” theory of social decay, which suggested that even small signs of vandalism and antisocial behaviour created an environment where more serious crimes could thrive. As such, there needed to be zero tolerance and swift criminalisation for the pettiest of misdemeanours. Cities around the world followed suit.
But despite hardline advocates pointing to cleaned-up and gentrified neighbourhoods as a reason for zero tolerance policing, critics differ, pointing to other factors for the reversal of so-called social decay, such as the lift in crippling unemployment. “Since the ’70s, millions of people have been drawn into the criminal justice system for street art,” says Young, “but graffiti as a gateway to prison is a construct, easily changed.”
Like so many complicated dialogues, court is just where unfinished business tends to end up. When the magistrate retires to consider the arguments for and against bail for Gibson-Burrell and White, social media is abuzz with predictions. If Gibson-Burrell has to stay in remand, it will likely be a long wait: 18 months, perhaps longer, while Nicholls prepares a “complex” brief to visualise the “correlations and coincidences” involving call charge records, “phone pinging”, distinctive clothing, police witness statements, possible DNA samples and handwriting experts.
To those familiar with the machinery and interpretations of law, bail is clearly not only about the severity of the alleged crime, but about the accused’s likelihood of reoffending and sticking around to face justice. And in this, the police are right, in a way. If, as they say, Gibson-Burrell is responsible for all the Pam the Birds, or even most of them, would he be able to resist throwing up another?
Magistrate Metcalf doesn’t think so. She declares the 21-year-old will stay behind bars due to risks of his alleged graffiti spree continuing to “boost and maintain followers on social media”, all the while putting lives at risk. Reminding the court and Gibson-Burrell himself that he had already been on bail during some of the alleged charges, the magistrate says the accused has shown a “disregard for the law”.
“In my view the totality of the charges is serious.”
Behind the perspex, Gibson-Burrell stares straight ahead. When the magistrate gives the go-ahead, he stands between the two security guards and leaves the room without a flicker of emotion. White, despite his demonstrated willingness to eat drawings, is allowed to go home. A few days later, in the city’s Presgrave Place, one of the lord mayor’s “designated” laneways, Pam the Bird appears in a cage with a jailbird teardrop tattooed below its eye. “GAME OVER”, reads a stencil below.
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