In my own looking around I have met people who walked the storm water tunnels; people who walked the underground train system in the quiet between midnight and three a.m. on Sunday mornings, searching for the “false starts,” the abandoned tracks, the odd buildings said to remain in obscure places; people who visited disused gasworks, brick-pits, the underneath of old wharves; people who boat up old industrial canals, who comb landfill sites and take tours through sewage treatment plants; people in Sydney who know about the underground passageways linking old mental asylums with landing-stages on the harbor. There’s a lovely freedom in momentarily stepping back into the privilege freely taken by children, finding the gap in the cyclone wire fence and sauntering along in that heightened state of casual alertness, just having a good look around.

– Susan Murphy, from “The Secret Life of the Street,”

Tricycle, Winter 2006

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The Secret Life of the Street

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