It’s a February evening in 1985, on Melbourne’s Swanston Street. Down at the Flinders Street intersection, a road closed sign swings gently while a policeman redirects traffic away from the city centre. His elbow-length white gloves articulate instructions in frank, vaguely theatrical gestures. On the footpath, a metre-high pile of rolled turf is a sign of what’s to come.
“No-one knew what we had in mind, there was a lot of scepticism, and so to unroll the event by laying out the grass was spectacular…”
– Sonja Peter, co-designer, Victorian Government Department of Planning and Environment, 1985
Lucy Salt, writer & editor 