This will hurt me...

A crime has been committed. De Bomford Lane turn off, East Derwent Highway, Geilston Bay. April 2011. If you think that Hobart is some serene and peaceful idyll filled with blissful and benign sprits floating around gently hugging each other, THINK AGAIN ! I couldn’t possibly comment on the perpetrators of the heinous act I’ve photographed above, but I suspect that it might have something to do with the kind of internecine war commonly found in groups like the Cripps , the Bloods , Mara Savatrucha , Sureños , the Hells Angels , the Babysittters Club and the Muppets . The local hardcore exxxtreme posse is the notorious Risdon Vale Boyz . Note the nerve-jangling utilisation of a ‘ z ’, as this flagrant disregard of the correct plural suffix indicates an exxxtreme challenge to established authority. You see, the breakdown of society begins with importer syntax and sentence construction, it continues through car theft and wilful destruction of authority, and into the kind of anarchy that ...

The big boys court is just up the road from my work, which means that if you walk down that street of a morning, you often see the real nasty characters innocent until proven guilty being loaded from a cage on wheels into a cage around a door (leading to another cage just inside the door, one suspects). I usually have the camera safely tucked away, lest we have some kind of misunderstanding . justice a full Phil meant nothing of it. "a joke, a stupid joke gone wrong" (fuck forgive me look at me don't judge me) to the charge in court (a full six months later) phil could only say "sorry" nothing (quite so dramatic) was intended.

I am continuing my ‘urban grit’ theme today, with another image of the out-of-control wild streets of Hobart. Yes, today we have a photograph of barbed wire. For reasons obviously beyond my feeble comprehension, there is a bundle of haphazardly arranged barbed wire on the side of the fire escape to keep reprobates off of the roof of this building. The logic behind this placement intrigues me. You see, the barbed wire only extends perhaps 1.5 metres across the ledge adjacent to the roof top, but the fire escape itself extends at least 2.5 metres, but more likely 3. This would allow enough space for all but the most corpulent of miscreants to freely access the roof and commit all sorts of heinous acts with the pigeons nestled on top. This oversight leads me to think that I can safely rule out roof access as the reason behind the inexplicable placement of the barbed wire. However, the wire does not sit in front of anything but a bare brick ledge. It protects no skylight, vent, power box o...