NATALIE OLIVERI | Art MATT STUCKEY
Suggests how we can start improving the future of Hindley St right now.

It’s a Friday night, around 6. I step off Rundle Mall onto King William and head towards Hindley Street. Stepping onto the opposite footpath, I am immediately hit by the aroma of coffee and fast food. I continue to walk and the smell slowly disappears, as do the school kids and general working crowd making the most of Friday night shopping. The street feels deserted after the hustle and bustle until I near Station Arcade and the thoroughfare to the Railway Station. Cars zoom down the street; I hear wolf whistles and am heckled by a middle-aged drunk man sitting outside a pub overrun with pokies. “Carn’ love, give us a smile, where you goin’?” Apparently I look like a hooker. I give him a quick smile and with head down, cross the street.

Walking towards the West End, nothing amazing is catching my eye and I feel the surroundings sucking the joy out of me. Dingy, dirty and horribly lit, it’s deserted. What the hell?

I had just come from Rundle Mall, a hub of busy shoppers, excited teenagers and atmosphere you can feel in your nostrils and mouth, filling one with the scent of cheap clothing, heated air and hippy soap. Many people cross the street at the King William Street intersection – but where do they all go? There’s no one here. But know what? It doesn’t even feel that sinister. I’m not afraid – just… lonely.

Hindley Street needs some love.

For a while now I’ve made it my little pet project to spend a bit more time there. I guess for a street to be successful, it needs to have some kind of attraction – something the scenester can munch on – and there doesn’t seem to be anything cultural much during the day. Still I continue to fight for the cause. If a dinner is proposed, I propose Hindley St, and there are some sweet little eateries down there (see: Jerusalem House). These efforts are all well and good, but only if you can prize your friend out of the car and say with conviction that he’s not going to get knifed by a hoodlum.

There are some problems, you see. There’s this stigma attached to the ol’ H.S.

Recent reports of Hindley St highlight little effort being put into improving its reputation – especially that story about Maccas getting trashed, scary stuff. But in all seriousness, reports from the mid to late 1990s paint it as a ‘violent entertainment strip’, sleazy, sinful and downright dangerous. Newspaper clippings about Hindley yield stories in relation to missing persons, rapes, stabbings and murders: one of the most horrific being the Bednikov incident in 1996, when two, twenty-two year old cousins were shot dead after provoking the assailant with racial slurs.

These days, maybe we’re not so much afraid as disinterested.

One lunchtime I ventured to the far West End of Hindley St to UniSA. I was convinced that if anyone was going to use Hindley, it was going to be the students who study there everyday. I entered the campus and came to a group of young men eating food from a van parked nearby. Curious and a little confused, I approached very slowly as not to scare away their mullets. I asked them if they used Hindley St during the day. One responded: “Wha’ for?” Another gave a more elaborate answer: “We really only go down there to grab a drink or use the snack bar. We’re not really down there during the day, but the 24hr convenience does sell weed which can be convenient.” You get the gist.

But can you really blame these guys? Hindley isn’t exactly known as the coolest place to hang – it’s got no Borders. After Morphett Street, there are so many vacancies that it looks like a ghost town.

It concerns me that in Adelaide’s CBD, on our Federation street; there are vacant shop fronts – even unused cinema complexes for goodness sake! Last year the last mainstream city cinema, Greater Union, closed. It quashed any remnants of the tradition Hindley once held as the place that hordes of people would frequent for dinner and a movie. There was no closing party or screening, and Greater Union Cinemas only shat out a measly press release stating that they were closing due to a “decline in attendance in recent times”.

A while back, in response to people’s negative impressions of the street, the Adelaide City Council planned to ‘de-sleaze’ Hindley St, seeing them try to eradicate tattoo parlours and adult entertainment. This doesn’t seem to have happened. But it’s not even like Hindley St is full of sleazy operations – it’s just not full of anything much at all.

Briar is the owner of kick-ass clothing store Irving Baby in what she calls “the Paris part of Hindley St” – a very small strip across from Arts SA and near the Grainger Studio. I ask her what she thinks of the services provided on the street. “As far as shops go,” she says, “there has been an explosion of Chinese massage places, there are many of them, probably too many. There are also numerous Seven Elevens even though there doesn’t seem to be any need for that many – but I just don’t think landlords care and unless landlords start caring and want to create something down here, it’s not going to improve.”

Andy Watson is probably as cool as they come. Having worked for reputable clothing companies in the UK and Japan, he’s returned to settle down in Adelaide where he spent his adolescent and hipster years, to put together a clothing store giving Adelaideans good clothing choices. Rhd (Right Hand Distribution) is on Ebenezer Place (behind Rundle St) and was originally searching to be part of Hindley’s rough and tumble repute. “For me to go down there,” says Andy, “there has to be choice, options. I know the guys from Value King, and I thought ‘finally, a good little store’ – but they just couldn’t get people down there. They were why I considered going down Hindley, but when we watched people walking past, they’re not the kind of people who’d come into the store and even the Uni kids just walk straight down to Rundle Mall.”

Andy doesn’t deny that Hindley has its appeal. From experience, he’s seen bad streets become destination streets through the convergence of good independent stores. “Melbourne’s got Smith Street and Collingwood, they’re great little streets but they used to be utter crap.” He reckons the streets worked mainly because of their residential situations and the culture of the people who ran the shops and frequented the stores. However, he’s not entirely sure that it could work for Hindley unless the clubs that make the streets look so dead in the day are moved upstairs or eradicated altogether.

“As much as I’d love to see it doing well, it doesn’t get good press, and I think that press is quite deserved to be honest. I sound kind of harsh, but the bars that are there aren’t particularly inviting – they’re not cosy little pubs open during the day, with a couple of nice old arm chairs where you can sit and have a pint and sit and read the paper. Everything’s full of poker machines, don’t even get me started on poker machines…”

I guess the question is: how do we breathe life and particularly culture into Hindley St; culture that’s not blood stained or soaked in vomit? There are plenty of ideas out there. These include having Gillies-style markets on alternating weekends on Hindley. Briar agrees that the idea could work. “I know in Sydney when they’ve got the Paddington markets on, the streets are packed. Creating a different sort of vibe down here would be good.” The extra foot traffic created on market days could improve business for the permanent stores on the street and encourage already established stores to put another store on
the street or move altogether.

Another idea for H.S. is the phenomenon that is ‘pop-up stores’, a craze taking over the world where big brands like Nike and UNIQLO set up temporary stores in vacant shop fronts. Andy witnessed this when working in East London. “There was this store about 120 square metres, where they used to lease the space out to pop up stores. Nike would do pop ups for their new shoe launches. They used to black the windows out and put graffiti on the windows themselves so it wouldn’t matter if people added to it. Then they’d scrape the paint off and it’d be a brand new store for a week or two. It’s just really cool.” The point of the pop up store is to incite excitement in the customer and let them know that they only have a limited amount of time to purchase a certain item. It is supposed to get the customer into the store asap, like Christmas sales but not as intense.

Lacking shopping, atmosphere and any kind of ‘street cred’ (yes I went there), the quickest way to improve Hindley might be through art. Being so close to UniSA and all those creative types, the council could work with landlords in the far West End to provide their vacant shop fronts to art students for a small cost. The students could use them as studios during the day and for exhibitions on regular evenings. The University of Newcastle has a similar initiative called WattSpace, which is a contemporary art space in the CBD area of Newcastle that exhibits the work of current students. The role of the space is to provide students with the opportunity to curate and manage a gallery. I put the idea to Brigid Noone, who is one of the founders of FELT Space on Compton Street – an artist-run initiative exhibiting new works by emerging Adelaide artists. “I think this is a great idea,” says Brigid. “There have been a few attempts to get this sort of project going. Shop art was really active in the late 90’s and early 2000’s and was also done in Port Adelaide.”

Recently, art collective 2% have had a few successful exhibitions towards the Light Square end of Hindley. The Format Festival was also held over Fringe in a vacant club, which zapped the street with a dynamic program of workshops, exhibitions, zine fairs and performances.

I ask Brigid if she thinks that this usage of vacant shop fronts to enhance activity on the street could become a permanent thing. “From my observations, different waves of enthusiasm have come about in regards to the idea of using empty shops on Hindley St – and what seems to prevent these waves from becoming permanent is the property owners’ fluctuating interest and support. It would be amazing if a new working model could be introduced working with local council, government, arts funding bodies and private property owners to develop a workable structure for these kinds of ideas, with possible tax cuts for property owners.”

Wondering if these suggestions would fly, I got right onto Premier Mike Rann – harassing him with emails and even joining Twitter so I could ask him how he, as the ‘Minister for the Arts’, is helping make Hindley a cultural, arty hub in Adelaide. I sent him my ideas. His response was lame:

“As you know the Arts Department & ASO are based in Hindley. I’ve asked the Arts Dept to brief me on other opportunities. Thx for email too.”

I guess it’s up to the people who care about Hindley to make shit happen. In the meantime, hold your breath because if something gives, Hindley St may just be the next best thing since bikini jeans.