This amazing ghost sign has appeared in Malvern advertising L.W. Holmes hardware services. A mural dating from the late 1800’s has been discovered in Malvern after a routine demolition revealed the piece of community history. On the newly exposed wall is an old advertisement for a hardware and services business, owned by Malvern’s first elected […]
Articles
Signs of Australia: Vintage signs from the city to the outback
IN this extract of the book Signs of Australia: Vintage signs from the city to the outback, Brady Michaels and Dale Campisi explore the importance of Australia’s fading, ageing signs. SIGNS come and go. But the ones that remain are a visual record of Australian social history. They tell us who we are and how […]
Melbourne Circle Project
Melbourne Circle is an account of a series of walks around the suburbs of Melbourne by Nick Gadd. Taken together, the walks form a circle around the city. Beginning in Williamstown in the south west, I walked in a clockwise direction, with very occasional brief detours into the city centre. The walk ended with a […]
Brushing Up On Old Skills
This wonderful article by Carolyn Webb in TheAge tells us that handpainted signs and murals are not a thing of the past. Young entrepreneurs make it big with hand-painted street ads A fledgling advertising company is earning up to $200,000 a job by returning to old-fashioned handpainted outdoor murals. In just two years, Apparition Media […]
Adelaide’s Fading Brick Signs
These days, you’re just as likely to learn about that hot new pair of running shoes or sugar-free soft drink in a sponsored Facebook post or promoted tweet than you are by more conventional methods of advertising. But long before social media – even before radio and TV – when brands and businesses wanted consumers […]
Halmes | Volck Kleenup
A wonderful addition sent to us by Paul of a sign on an old building opposite the Queen Victoria Market near the Dudley St intersection. I can find little on it except I believe it was a garden spray and I assume Halmes made or sold it.
Café BÜ Ghost Sign
Isn’t life wonderful? I was reading an article about this great new coffee shop in Carlton (Café BÜ) when my eye caught a glimpse of a ghost sign in the image accompanying the article. Now, I have been and photographed this location in the past, long before it became a coffee shop, and being honest, […]
Cracow Ghost Town
We often see pictures of old deserted towns in the US described as a ghost towns. Cracow in Queensland is the closest we have to a ghost town in Australia. According to good old Wikipedia, Cracow was a gold mining town in the Banana Shire local government area. The town is located on the […]
Fading Victoria
Its a wonderful feeling when you find a web site that is right up your alley and thats exactly what we found at Fading Victoria. Rowan Crowe has amassed an excellent collection of signs, landscapes and architecture covering Victoria, so pop along and take a look, you will not be disappointed: www.fadingvictoria.com www.facebook.com/fadingvictoria Some of the […]
Signwriting | Signs Of The Times
Disappearing commercial art preserved in photographs by John Hunter, Melbourne Australia. A wish to document for future generations the skill and art of generations of signwriters resulted in this collection. I wanted to record the craft of signwriters and commercial artists who who used font, colour, shape, space, a keen eye for proportion and a […]
