Why one man wrote ‘Eternity’ on city streets up to 500,000 times
Arthur Stace was a down-and-outer who was lucky to survive a horrendous, brutal childhood. But one remarkable event set him on a quest to spend the rest of his life writing one word.
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For more than three decades one word – Eternity – was scrawled across Sydney hundreds of thousands of times in the dead of night.
It was always written in yellow chalk in perfect copperplate script on footpaths, roads and walls, and especially around railway stations.
For many years his identity remained a mystery, so he was dubbed “Mr Eternity”.
Mr Eternity is the subject of the latest episode of the free In Black and White podcast on some of Australia’s forgotten characters, available today.
The story is told by Chris Adams in the Sydney Volume 1 edition of the Grave Tales series of books.
The mystery man was eventually unmasked as Arthur Stace, a reformed drunk who had suffered a horrific, violent childhood.
Adams says Stace grew up in extreme poverty in Redfern in inner Sydney and was badly beaten by his parents, both alcoholics.
“He slept under the house, rather than in it, and survived by scavenging for food and from rubbish bins, stealing neighbours’ bread and milk after it was delivered in the early hours of the morning,” Adams says.
“By the time he was 12, by his own recollections, he was a ward of the state, placed under the protection of a legal guardian, worked in a coal mine for two years of his life, and had been jailed for drunkenness.”
As a teenager, he acted as a “cockatoo”, or lookout for police, at the brothels where he said his two sisters worked as prostitutes.
Stace said his two brothers died hopeless derelict drunks.
In 1930, Stace heard an inspirational sermon from evangelist and “mender of broken men” Robert Hammond, a former VFL premiership player for Essendon.
From then on, Stace gave up grog, embraced Christianity, and radically transformed his life, devoting himself to helping the down and out.
The word Eternity in Arthur Stace’s distinctive script is now iconic in Sydney.
It featured on the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the millennium New Year’s Eve fireworks as well as the Opening Ceremony of the Sydney Olympics.
Adams says two years after Stace’s transformation in 1930, he was again inspired by a sermon from visiting preacher John Ridley on the theme of eternity.
Ridley apparently said: “Eternity, eternity, I wish that I could sound or shout that word to everyone in the streets of Sydney. You’ve got to meet it. Where will you spend eternity?”
That was the moment that led Stace to spend more than three decades, before his death in 1967, writing “Eternity” all over Sydney.
“Apparently, Arthur was so inspired by Ridley’s sermon, he had a piece of chalk in his pocket, and he knelt as he left the church and wrote on the footpath the word ‘Eternity’,” Adams says.
Stace estimated he wrote the word half a million times.
Listen to previous episodes with Chris Adams from Grave Tales including Dan Kelly, the bushranger who came back from the dead, the surprise twist behind the story of Whelan the Wrecker, the man who may have been Australia’s first serial killer, and the story of Charles Brownlow, the man behind the medal.
Subscribe to the free In Black and White podcast on Australia’s forgotten characters on iTunes here or Spotify here or on your favourite platform.
Buy the Grave Tales books in book shops or at gravetales.com.au.
And check out In Black & White in the Herald Sun newspaper Monday to Friday to see more stories from Victoria’s past.