Tributary
Audio description
Text description
- Title: Tributary (2023)
- Artists: David Cragg
- Wall size: Approximately 6 metres high by 9.8 metres wide
- Location: 84 Dickson Street, Newtown
'Tributary' by David Cragg is located at 84 Dickson Street, Newtown, on the side of a single-story brick worker's cottage. The mural, overflowing with vibrant colour, contrasts sharply with the concrete and asphalt of the adjacent laneway.
Within the work, a vivid landscape unfolds. In the background, an orange sun is setting behind red and green hills. Blue and purple shadows gather in the knolls and vales, and beams of white light extend toward the point of the cottage's pitched roof. In the foreground stand the crooked trunks of six trees – black wattles and brown and white gumtrees, and paperbarks. In the underbrush, a rich variety of plants are thriving – shrubs with curving slate-blue foliage, smaller wattles with flowers like huge golden polka dots, squat palms with sharp, pointed fronds, and ferns with oversized leaves in acid green or rich red.
From a central gumtree a horizontal branch juts out, providing a perch for an enormous kookaburra. This titan, many times its natural size, has turned its back to Dickson Street, displaying its russet wing feathers and the barred plumes of its tail. The kookaburra's head is tilted to the right, appearing in profile. It peers over a long beak of grey and tan. It’s one visible eye, round and black, reflects a mote of white light.
Connecting foreground and background, a dark red track winds from the foot of the trees up into the hills. The way is marked by two black, cruciform telephone poles, their odd-angled trunks strange and stark amongst the tremendous vitality of the forested hills.
The concrete kerb beside number 84 Dickson Street is narrow, only a few handspans across. The adjacent alleyway is blocked by a steel gate brush-painted red, its closing stile held shut with a chain. A red 'no stopping' sign stands so close to the mural that Cragg has painted the steel pole to match. The sign itself pokes up beside the kookaburra, producing a contrast between the great kingfisher's colourful bushland home, and the bare urban scene beside it.
In the lower right corner, between the crimson leaves of a huge plant, the signature "DAVID CRAGG 23" has been etched in the same shade of red. Just to the left, easy to overlook, two white ears and two black eyes of a local cat peep around the trunk of a tree the artist notes that a small stream appears on the corner of Dickson Street in heavy rains, and historical documentation suggests an intermittent waterway once existed there. The water feeds into the drains and canals where there were once wetlands and waterholes, making its way through the now largely urbanised and concreted Gumbramorra wetlands, and into Goolay'yari (Cooks River). 'Tributary' speaks to the natural world reliant on these waters, drawing together the past and present of this particular corner in Sydney's Inner West.