Melbourne Street Art: Hosier Lane and AC/DC Lane

Hosier Lane street sign surrounded by layered graffiti and street art in Melbourne.

Hosier Lane is one of Melbourne’s best-known street-art locations.

We ended up at Hosier Lane on August 14 partly by design and partly through logistics. I needed to stop at the DoubleTree on Flinders Street as part of a Hilton credit experiment, and we also wanted to find the meeting point for the following morning’s Yarra Valley wine, chocolate and whiskey tour. That meeting point was beside the Ian Potter Centre, almost directly across Flinders Street from the bottom of Hosier Lane.

Street art elsewhere in the CBD had already caught our attention, including a Bart Simpson mural on one of the side streets, so we were always going to make our way here. The day’s logistics simply put us in exactly the right place.

Large Bart Simpson mural on a wall beside a narrow Melbourne laneway.

A Bart Simpson mural on one of the side streets.

Graffiti-covered corner in Hosier Lane with a large black-and-white skull and several painted faces.

Layers of paint cover almost every surface in Hosier Lane.

Melbourne calls them laneways: the narrow lanes and side streets running between the larger streets of the CBD. Many have developed identities of their own, with street art concentrated around a handful of them. Hosier Lane is the best known, but it isn’t an outdoor gallery in the conventional sense. The walls keep changing, with new work appearing over or alongside what was there before.

Street art covering the Culture Kings building and entrance on Hosier Lane in Melbourne.

Culture Kings has a second entrance directly onto Hosier Lane.

Hosier Lane was packed. Tourists lined the walls taking photographs of each other, sometimes waiting for a clear section of mural or for other people to move out of the frame. We wandered slowly up the lane before continuing toward Flinders Lane.

Graffiti-covered brick corner at the edge of Hosier Lane with pedestrians walking past.

Hosier Lane, where the painted walls meet the surrounding city streets.

Pink cartoon figure surrounded by colorful painted hearts beside a doorway in Hosier Lane.

A doorway almost disappears into the layers of work around it.

Large painted face on a doorway surrounded by hearts, tags and other street art.

Portraits sit among the tags, paste-ups and layers of earlier work.

Seated figure in a red-and-black jester-style costume painted on a wall.

Smaller works are easy to miss among the larger murals.

Girl with a red bandana covering her face painted on an exposed brick wall.

One of the portraits we stopped to look at away from Hosier Lane.

Long pink, green and blue mural covering a brick wall in a Melbourne laneway.

Not every wall is the dense, overlapping graffiti associated with Hosier Lane.

Long perspective down a narrow Melbourne laneway with murals and graffiti covering one wall.

The character of the street art changes from one laneway to the next.

Large turquoise cartoon dog painted against a red background on a Melbourne laneway wall.

Street art on one of the smaller CBD laneways.

From there, our route brought us through AC/DC Lane and adjoining Duckboard Place. The contrast with Hosier Lane was noticeable: far less foot traffic, fewer people posing for photographs and more time to stop and look at individual pieces.

Large female portrait with other painted and sculpted figures on a brick wall in AC/DC Lane, Melbourne.

AC/DC Lane brings a different mix of portraits, music references and street art.

Weathered orange portrait beside a large window and sticker-covered benches in AC/DC Lane.

Music references are built into the walls of AC/DC Lane.

AC/DC Lane was renamed for the Australian band in 2004, becoming the first street in Australia named after a rock band. Officially it is ACDC Lane: Melbourne’s street-naming rules initially prevented the slash from being used. The signs now make the intended reference harder to miss.