Kilburn and I – SPACE AND CULTURE

Dr Chloe Cannell, University of South Australia

Growing up my friends and I would remark that you could watch the class decline on the G10 bus ride from the city to Gepps Cross—though I’m sure we used cruder phrasing than class, like ‘rich’ to ‘povo’. The trip passes the bustling businesses on North Adelaide and down Prospect Road where the titular suburb first greets you with renovated character cottages, costly private schools and upscale retail stores and cafes. Past the intersection with Regency Road, I remember the faded signs on empty local businesses and scratched and bent street signs and light poles. Towards Grand Junction Road, the South Australian Housing Trust (Housing Trust) properties have short fences around empty yards and men in hi-vis smoked outside the galvanising manufacturer. But the trip, while still a noticeable shift across suburbs, has changed a lot since I finished school.

I’ve always called Kilburn home. I grew up in a Housing Trust home—a block from the street sensationally dubbed ‘Adelaide’s scariest street’ (“I know what a gunshot sounds like”, 2024). As an adult I moved five streets away to rent a newer build, before the rent priced us out and we secured one of the oldest houses on a street closer to the more affluent area of Prospect.

Over the road from my current home, there’s a reserve with plenty of greenery, a basketball half court, and a small playground. If my rent wasn’t already enviable for the area, then the proximity to swings and in-ground trampolines would attract high demand. Free trampoline access is among the things I’m most proud of about my suburb. Given my state-of-the-art playground access, it’s understandable why I might have missed something in the reserve in my years living nearby.

To the side of the half court is a low wall—lower and thinner than you could comfortably park your bum as an adult but may be an ideal size for a child to rest in a game of 3 by 3. The wall is adorned with mosaics commemorating significant milestones in Kilburn’s history. From the first post office to the Islington Sewage Farm, the multicoloured murals tell stories about the people and places that made up this suburb.

Small, black, white and red pieces form a rabbit in a green paddock. An older resident remembers rabbits running around open areas on their walk to the local primary school, the white text on a rectangular black tile above the mosaic tells me. Each mosaic is accompanied by notes.

I hear shoes against pavement as people with dogs or people walk themselves following the circular route around the playground and open green field, skirted with trees and a few benches. Dressed in sweats, the walkers check their watches as they mark their second, third, fourth lap. The birds talk to each other across the treetops more than the neighbours passing through the park. The birds’ home here is acknowledged in another similar mosaic art project closer to the playground, showing local plants and animals.

Besides the half court with a backdrop of bushes and cars on the road, the mural includes a mosaic of red pieces around a yellow centre representing wildflowers. Flowers so beautiful early Enfield settler Thomas Rake wrote to England about them in 1850. The Rake’s family imprint on the area can be traced through archives in the Port Adelaide Local History Collection (Rake, 1950) and in newspaper clippings digitally stored in Trove (Family Notices 1877). These archives are ‘“History” with a capital “H”’ as Wiradjuri writer, poet and academic Jeanine Leane (2017, p. 242) calls it.

Leane describes the intentional forgetting by settler Australians of the ongoing oppression of Aboriginal peoples and the erasure of Aboriginal stories from the broader histories of the nation. She argues that archives reinforce ‘dominant colonizing narratives’ and attempt to disrupt Aboriginal memory and histories (p. 249). As Narungga poet and academic Natale Harkin (2016) says, ‘From the earliest colonial files, Indigenous peoples are depicted as a problem to be solved, as something to be dispensed with or absorbed for the greater good’. Harkin is one of the Aboriginal women writers Leane explores: women who rewrite their family stories of trauma and resilience.

Harkin studies her own family records, often in dialogue with fellow First Nations artists, using creative praxis to bear witness to injustices, both those present and absent from the archives. ‘Archival-poetics offers one way to re-signify, assert and re-insert such agency, and privilege the voices of our ancestors,’ she says (Harkin, 2020, p. 166). Harkin and Leane trace the influence of the state’s public records on the present and contemporary treatment of Aboriginal peoples.

Blood everywhere . . . everywhere blood on the record.

(Harkin, 2020, p. 5, emphasis in original)

They follow blood, not flowers. They rewrite the told histories and write into the absences. 

Read this Black angst against
these white pages

(Leane, 2017, p. 247, emphasis in original)

I try to read the Black against the Kilburn mural.

One of the mosaics depicts a black hand and a white hand holding a football. They may be the team colours of the local football team, but it makes me think of the legacy of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander players in football. Sport is in the blood of the national story. The colonial archives and histories contest the origins of Aboriginal influence on the game (Gorman et al., 2015). Certain stories are privileged on these lands, and it is rarely the longest living caretakers.

Still, the contemporary significance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participation in football cannot be denied. From the achievements of prominent AFL and NRL players to the racial abuse hurled by spectators (Gorman et al., 2015; Perry, 2014) and recent cultural wars stoked regarding Welcome to Country ceremonies before games (Brennan, 2025; Cross, 2024), the colony has an uneasy relationship recognising Aboriginal involvement in sport and the ongoing national story.

The local black and white football team are nearly a century-old club. Recognising the power of sport to promote social diversity, the Kilburn Football Club invited young people from the local African migrant community to join in the early 2010s with support from community programs and grants (Port Adelaide Football Club, 2014). Many of the eager participants were teenage girls. While women and girls have always been a part of football’s history, this was prior to the establishment of a professional national league in 2017 (Hess & Lenkić, 2017). In 2014 the Kilburn Football Club received the Governor’s Multicultural Award for their efforts (Port Adelaide Football Club, 2014). Kilburn Football Club president Dale Agius has said,

We see [Kilburn FC] as a cultural place for us and it’s a good example of how people from different cultures can come together. Tension in sport is prolific […]. Racism is no longer swept under the carpet [so] when you get a safe place like Kilburn FC for Aboriginal people to come and play and be respected without being judged, it’s very important to maintain.

(“Nearly century-old Adelaide sports club”, 2019)

The mosaic may have chips and other signs of wear, but the black and white hands on the red football are still brightly coloured.

The Kilburn mural underscores the industrial foundations of Kilburn with a quarter of the mosaics depicting railways, a train and other references to industry. Our state heritage listed sites include the Former Tubemakers of Australia and the Islington Railway Workshops (SA Heritage Places Database, n.d.). The Islington Railway Workshops moved to the area in 1891 and employed thousands, including many locals (Enviro Data SA, n.d.). There’s also mention of limestone quarries, diaries and the abattoir which, alongside the unfavourable landscape (swamps, boxthorns), made it unappealing for housing at the time. Five decades on, the story on housing drastically changes.

A red and yellow house with green grass captured in a mosaic depicts the story of how the Housing Trust shaped this suburb. The accompanying notes describe the exponential growth of rental homes for low-income workers in the following decades (HOUSING TRUST’S BIG PROGRAMME, 1949). Now red brick houses are less likely to fit the needs or, more importantly, budget of low-income workers, so a lot with two houses is converted to ten townhouses (Westside Housing, 2023). They’ve long told my parents they won’t repair anything major because they will be the last to live there, and I expect there are vulnerable people with more pressing needs in affordable housing. I trace my pale finger in the gaps between tiles of the house mosaic.

‘Mummy!’ A child calls. I look up to see a little girl with light brown skin in a rainbow sweater under the gazebo. Her mum, wearing a burnt orange headscarf and brown dress, converses with a friend on a park bench a few metres from her daughter. The mum dashes to the girl and picks her up in the air. The girl giggles in delight.

I continue my inspection of the mosaics and discover a tile that I missed on first look. At the end of the low wall, on the side out of view from the half court, there’s a plain black tile with a multi-coloured border and text in the middle explaining the mural. It was made in 2004 by students from Gepps Cross High School. The school I attended. Now I drive past tractors and other industrial equipment on the road where it used to stand. I’m sure many of those students went to Kilburn Primary School like I did. That’s gone too. I wonder how many of those students lived in Housing Trust houses. Did they too have a semi-attached house sharing a wall with their neighbours? Were their houses among those cleared for more smaller dwellings? Sold to private developments? Maybe they are still standing and house another family.

More children arrive at the playground in a race with the setting sun. The families converse with each other as the young girl shows off her pink bike to another girl. I hear the adults switch between English and another language my monolingual brain doesn’t recognise. Over half (52.75%) of Kilburn residents use a language other than English at home, which is double the national average (24.8%) (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2021).

This suburb has transformed in the two decades this mural has resided here. Kilburn is rich in culturally diversity welcoming more people from Afghanistan, India and Vietnam than the rest of the state, even the country (ABS, 2021).

Some of the mums joining the playground chatter wear hijabs. The mural includes a catholic church built in the 1950s. It’s no longer the only local place of worship, nor the only kind of worship.

There’s another mosaic showing black and white hands joining, sans football, to symbolise the resident action to keep the YMCA building, which later became a community centre. While the accompany note does not explicitly mention cultural groups, the visual representation suggests diversity and unity. The Kilburn Community Centre celebrates diversity through a wide range of programs for the area including language lessons for newly arrived refugees. It’s contributed to why so many migrant communities have stayed and developed the suburb (Nazari, 2018). Many locals in the past decade have opened grocery stores and restaurants boasting a variety of Middle Eastern cuisines. Local business owner Ramazan Najafi said, ‘I have seen the change happen around me and it makes me proud to be part of it’ (Nazari, 2018).

I haven’t always been proud to call Kilburn home.

I return to the tile with my alma mater emblazoned. My fingers are tingling with the cold as the sun disappears and the streetlights turn on. Dogs bark a street over.

I see my reflection in the shine of the tile. My white skin is hidden behind a pink phone and pink sweater. I am reflected here in more ways than one, but the young girl on the playground might be harder pressed to see herself or families like hers.

Nevertheless, the difference migrant communities have made to Kilburn is palpable on the bus ride down Prospect Road.

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Acknowledgement of Country

This work was created on Kaurna Yarta. I respectfully acknowledge the Kaurna peoples and their Elders past and present, as the traditional owners of the lands on which I live and work.

About the author

Chloe Cannell teaches creative writing and literature courses at the University of South Australia. Her PhD thesis (University of South Australia, 2024) explores the challenges of writing underrepresented LGBTQIA+ characters in contemporary young adult fiction. More broadly, she is interested in diversity in young adult literature, queer writing, and collaborative creative practice research. Her short stories can be found in the Green: A Blue Feet Anthology (Buon-Cattivi Press, 2022).

Works cited

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