It has given locals a bit of hope for the future.” “The mural now entices visitors to come out here and maybe spend a few bucks at the local pub. “Thallon wasn’t a tourist destination at all before,” says Brosnan. Their sky-scraping efforts were worth it: “The Watering Hole” has been a lifeline for the community, and it was named the best work of public art at the inaugural Australian Street Art Awards in 2019. It took the artists-who go by The Zookeeper (Fergie) and Drap (Vinson)-21 days and 500 cans of spray paint to execute the piece, working from the basket of a long-armed crane.
Unauthorized use is prohibited.ĭubbed “The Watering Hole,” the outsize mural by Brisbane street artists Joel Fergie and Travis Vinson depicts a fiery sunset over a landscape dotted with sheep, rainbow-hued rosella parrots, and a scarred tree-a nod to the region’s indigenous community, which strips bark to make weapons. Ideas the group helped to implement included a statue of a six-foot-tall hairy-nosed wombat in a park and, in 2017, a massive mural covering four 98-foot-tall grain silos opposite the town campground. “By 2015 Thallon was on its knees, so we got the community together to see what we could do to reinvigorate the town,” says Leanne Brosnan, secretary of the Thallon Progress Association. (Related: Eyeball stunning natural wonders across Australia.) Passenger railway services to and from the town-located roughly 355 miles southwest of Brisbane-stopped in the 1990s, hastening its decline. In southwest Queensland, the cotton- and sheep-farming community of Thallon (population 257) is one of many Australian outback towns now at risk of being wiped off the map by climate and population changes.
But farmers in southeastern Australia have had it particularly rough over the past couple of years, with crippling droughts forcing many to sell off their livestock to survive or even walk away from their agricultural businesses for good. Life isn’t easy in rural Australia, where your nearest neighbor might be hundreds of miles away, and it could be years between each rainfall.
0 kommentar(er)
