Love or hate graffiti like Pam the Bird, Melbourne’s reputation wasn’t built on permission slips

Like or loathe it, Pam the Bird has become a pop-cultural figure in Melbourne. Not because everyone loves the work or agrees with the methods. But because the image is funny, familiar, and rebellious, and keeps appearing in places where it seems almost impossible to reach. Pam is also a symbol of a bigger uncomfortable conversation.

Pam looks more like something from a children’s book than the calling card of one of Melbourne’s most notorious vandals. People who know nothing about graffiti can understand the joke, recognise the image, and participate by photographing it and wondering where it will appear next.

That does not mean the public is endorsing everything allegedly done in Pam’s name. The man police allege is behind the bird, Jack Gibson-Burrell, has pleaded not guilty to more than 200 offences, most related to alleged graffiti damage. He faces a further 13 charges arising from the alleged incident on Bolte Bridge that caused traffic chaos last Tuesday, including burglary, criminal damage, and conduct endangering life. These are serious allegations.

But the reaction to Pam is not simply about graffiti, although that is often how it is framed. It is about who gets punished, who gets celebrated, who gets erased, and who gets paid once subculture becomes useful.

I have spent more than 15 years working within this tension. Through Juddy Roller, the street art and placemaking agency I founded in 2011, I have helped deliver hundreds of large-scale public artworks, including the famous silo art trail across regional Victoria. I have seen street-based artists become internationally recognised professionals, and watched the visual language of graffiti move from train lines and laneways into galleries and corporate marketing.

The line between vandalism, expression, public art and cultural value is rarely as clear as either side wants it to be. Unsanctioned graffiti can be a cost, an eyesore and, in some cases, a serious safety issue. On the other hand, Melbourne has spent decades benefiting from the global reputation created by the same broader visual culture.

Melbourne’s graffiti culture took hold in the 1980s, influenced by New York subway art and hip-hop. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, the city had become internationally known for stencils, paste-ups, characters and political street art. Hosier Lane developed into an unofficial gallery and is now described by the City of Melbourne as a de facto free-to-paint area.

Our laneways, dense with layers of murals, tags, paste-ups, stencils, poems and posters, are packaged for tourism. Melbourne’s reputation as a city where art spills out of galleries and onto the street rewards tourism bodies, councils, property owners and brands.

But often, what is celebrated is the version of street art that has already been made safe for mass consumption. The version that has been curated, sanctioned, mapped, branded and monetised. The messier culture underneath it – the culture that gave those laneways their charge in the first place – is harder to talk about.

That culture emerged through experimentation, competition, repetition and the need to be seen. It gave young people a way of creating identity and belonging outside established cultural institutions. It was not always beautiful, considerate or lawful. But it created its own visual language, standards, hierarchies and pathways long before governments and brands understood its value.

To be clear, this is not an argument in favour of vandalism or a defence of dangerous behaviour.Nor does public affection for Pam mean the person allegedly behind it should be exempt from the ordinary legal process.

But neither should one spectacular incident be used to collapse every form of graffiti, street art and unsanctioned expression into the same category.

Lord Mayor Nick Reece’s line, “you spray, you pay”, is catchy. It speaks to a real public frustration. Property owners are sick of paying for damage. Councils are sick of cleaning the same surfaces. But it is far too blunt for Melbourne.

A teenager writing on a back-lane wall, someone pasting political messages, an artist working in Hosier Lane, a crude tag across a family business and a person allegedly accessing dangerous public infrastructure are not equivalent acts. They involve different levels of consent, damage, risk and cultural intention, and should not be discussed as though they are interchangeable.

Artists such as Rone and Adnate, who are now celebrated globally, were shaped within a culture that has always existed in tension with authority.

Melbourne’s street-art reputation was not built through permission slips, procurement panels and public-art strategies. It was built through risk, experimentation, illegality, rivalry, obsession, and repetition. It was built by people who marked the city before the city knew how to sell those marks.

Of course, not all marks are created equal.

Melbourne should be able to condemn dangerous and destructive acts while still acknowledging the cultural ecosystem from which its celebrated street art emerged. It should be able to protect private property without pretending that all unsanctioned expression is worthless. It should be able to recover genuine clean-up costs where responsibility is established without treating criminalisation as the only possible response to every mark made without permission.

The answer is not to romanticise everything sprayed on a wall. Nor is it to sanitise the city into a risk-free outdoor shopping centre.

The answer is a more intelligent and proportionate framework.

That means dealing seriously with behaviour that endangers people or causes substantial harm. It also means more legal walls and more artist pathways where experimentation can occur without young artists needing to put themselves or others at risk.

It means recognising the difference between a small business repeatedly targeted without consent and a neglected wall whose owner may happily make it available. It means making it easier for emerging artists to find somewhere to develop their practice.

Most importantly, it means councils working with people from graffiti and street-art culture, not reacting to controversy.

Melbourne should establish a street-culture advisory group that includes artists and graffiti writers from different generations. Its role should not be to decide what counts as “good” graffiti. It should help the city distinguish genuine danger and damage from the broader culture, identify appropriate spaces and develop responses more sophisticated than removal and prosecution alone.

Once the allegations around Pam the Bird are dealt with, Melbourne should do something it has avoided for too long: bring the people who created this culture into the room and develop a street-art and graffiti framework with them.

Shaun Hossack is the founder and creative director of Juddy Roller, a public art and placemaking agency working with artists, governments, developers and brands.

The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.