The Cellar Years: Darts, Choc Ices, Dem/Dat Big in Greenhill Road
This series of photographs maps the geography of friendship through the specific coordinates of 33 Greenhill Road - Ian Gilmore's house, which served as both destination and gateway in the careful choreography of my childhood movements. The images attempt to document not just a suburban street, but the invisible pathways that connected domestic base to public adventure, though like all efforts to photograph relationships, they capture the stage rather than the performance.
Greenhill Road functioned as my daily corridor - a walking route to school and, more importantly, to the Barracks via Ian's back garden and the gap in the fence that provided our secret passage. But the road also served as the spine from which other friendship territories branched. Andrew Walsh lived on Fieldhead Drive, the side street that represented another node in our social network. Further up Greenhill Road, at an intersection that felt significant in our childhood navigation, Stephen "Punky" Price made his home, adding another coordinate to the mapping of who lived where.
Number 33 became a second home where friendship was measured not in grand gestures but in the accumulated rituals of shared time: the basement where we'd retrieve choc ices from the freezer, the same cellar where we played darts and where Ian would grow increasingly frustrated with my habit of disposing of sweet wrappers through the honeycomb brick ventilation system. In the upstairs rooms, we'd stage elaborate tea match cricket games, our commentary channelling Richie Benaud's distinctive cadences as we transformed domestic space into sporting theatre. The Vic-20 computer provided different worlds entirely—Gridrunner's geometric challenges and a remarkable Pac-Man knock-off that occupied hours of our attention.
John and Marie Gilmore created the domestic framework within which these friendship rituals could unfold, while the street itself provided the broader network that connected us to Walsh, Punky, and the others who formed our extended childhood community.
Through my lens now, I seek to understand how suburban geography shapes friendship, how specific streets become the essential infrastructure of childhood connection. The camera searches for evidence of these intimate networks - the branch roads, the intersections, the walking routes that connected domestic spaces to shared adventures.
These photographs pose questions about how proximity determines possibility in childhood. How do street layouts influence the formation of friendships? What transforms a neighbourhood from mere addresses into an emotional landscape? How do we measure the significance of walking routes that, in retrospect, formed the pathways of formative memories?
