Australian Graffiti Revisited - Rennie Ellis & Ian Turner

Returning to the walls, toilets, laneways, train stations, and public spaces that once acted as Australia’s unofficial message boards, Australian Graffiti Revisited expands on Rennie Ellis’s earlier documentation of the country’s anonymous street voices. Teaming with Ian Turner, Ellis captures another wave of raw slogans, jokes, political rants, sexual confessions, drunken philosophy, and accidental poetry scattered across urban Australia. The photographs preserve a world of hand-scrawled communication where humour, rebellion, loneliness, and social tension collide in marker ink and spray paint.

What makes the book so compelling is the way it treats graffiti as social archaeology rather than simple vandalism. Every wall becomes a snapshot of the anxieties, obsessions, frustrations, and dark humour circulating through everyday Australian life at the time. Some entries are hilarious, some bleak, and others unexpectedly poetic, creating a portrait of a country speaking to itself anonymously through concrete and steel. Like Ellis’s earlier work, the book captures an era before digital culture absorbed these conversations, preserving the strange humanity hidden in public scribbles that were never meant to last.