Redfern is the pop culture mecca of Sydney. Here’s why

The cultural life of Redfern was summarised by three distinct events at Carriageworks in May.

The first crowd came cloaked in black leather, bleached eyebrows arched over Y2K sunnies, as they prowled towards Australian Fashion Week. From my vantage point of a decaying terrace balcony, I watched the high-speed bike lane between the train station and the venue transform into a perilous catwalk, filled by fashionistas smizing death in the face.

Fashionistas, BookTokers and Hollywood come to play at Redfern. But its Indigenous and queer history is forever. Credit: The Sydney Morning Herald

During this time, you couldn’t venture outside without copping an up-and-down glare from an influencer cowled in an avant-garde shawl.

But by the turn of a weekend, the mood shifted. Platinum mullets morphed into slate grey bobs. The clack of stilettos gave way to gaggles of book nerds, slouched and tote-bagged. My people. The Sydney Writers’ Festival had arrived, and I emerged, gleeful in daggy dress, to wait in line for the free events alongside groovy grandmas and BookTokers on Youth Allowance.

And then, with the pop-up bookstore packed up and the annual SWF culture war successfully ignited (this time by way of Laura Tingle), Hollywood came to play. As I walked past Carriageworks late one night, a crew of American international students peered down into the cavernous concrete quadrangle taken over by a film crew, stuntmen and crane cameras.

In May, the fashionistas came, and I was dazzled yet home-bound.Credit: Getty

“Have you seen Mark Wahlberg down there?” they whispered of the A-lister, apparently here shooting an upcoming crime-thriller flick called Play Dirty. “We think they’re about to blow up that police car!”

If there’s one thing Redfern has, darling, it’s range.

Deborah Mailman, Anthony Hayes and Rarriwuy Hick in the Redfern Now episode, Promise Me.

But when I first moved in, the streets were drained of vitality by lockdowns. Friends fled the suburb for the more reliably buzzy streets of Newtown, claiming Redfern had lost its exciting edge.

The only artistic action on my street back then was an enormous neon sign glowing red attached to the top of Carriageworks, spelling out: REMEMBER ME.

The glowing artwork installed by Reko Rennie in 2020.

The sign held a haunting hue in those days of spiking death counts and heart-aching isolation. Installed by Kamilaroi artist Reko Rennie on the 250th anniversary of James Cook’s landing, it heralded the history of these streets as sites of First Nations protest and politics.

Aboriginal activists founded the National Black Theatre in Redfern in 1972, which served as an incubator for the debate and cultural force that fed into the Aboriginal Tent Embassy and would go on to foist the formation of other institutions, including the Bangarra Dance Company.

“We have a significant history right there, at Carriageworks, in Eveleigh and Redfern,” Narangga and Kaurna artist Jacob Boehme told me in 2022 as he prepared to launch a series of panels and parties hosted by local drag icon Nana Miss Koori in the lead-up to the Voice referendum.

“You can change the look of the streets. You can change the neighbourhood all you want. But that kind of history remains deep under your feet and you can’t wash that away.”

Local icon Nana Miss Koori, the drag persona of Gadigal Elder Graham Simms.Credit: Rhett Wyman

Tales from these streets have continued to propel Aboriginal stories into the mainstream: Redfern Now, the first drama series created by Indigenous Australians, was a landmark TV moment when it premiered in 2012 and turbocharged the magnificent careers of Leah Purcell and Deborah Mailman.

Around the same time, Christina Ricci of The Addams Family fame was recruited to star in a movie about the Redfern riots as a teacher who attempts to set a troubled Aboriginal boy straight through the power of Shakespeare. (Let’s just say it didn’t achieve the same cultural cut-through.)

Christina Ricci and co-star Hunter Page-Lochard in Redfern to shoot Around the Block in 2014.

And which other suburb, I ask you, can boast of being the launchpad of a teen sensation who went on to become one of the biggest artists in the world?

Though he’s now based in LA with the hybrid accent and veneers to boot, Kamilaroi superstar The Kid Laroi grew up in housing commission between Redfern and Waterloo. His duet with Justin Bieber Stay is in the top-10 most-streamed Spotify songs of all time, undoubtedly Sydney’s greatest pop musical coup since Billie Eilish sampled the staccato of our pedestrian crossing buttons in Bad Guy.

Street artist Scott Marsh’s The Kid Laroi mural in Chapel Lane, Waterloo.

The rapper from Redfern was so famous by 2022 that he had to visit the local mural crafted in his image flanked by five bodyguards. Nikki Webster might’ve claimed the 2000 Sydney Olympics, but Laroi has taken the world.

Billboard charts and Wahlberg cameos aside, the allure of Redfern hinges on the local art, music and performance scene, and they’re all pumping. One afternoon I ran into a Reg Mombassa pop-up (attended with nonchalance by the Mambo legend himself) and was narrowly convinced out of buying a portrait of a man with hair and beard made entirely of penises.

Maintaining the theme, over the road a drag king named Keith took to the stage at queer institution The Bearded Tit armed with a dildo and an exhaust pipe, and got creative with a rendition of Shannon Noll’s Drive.

On my walk home there’s an art-gallery-turned-bric-a-brac-stall hawking anti-vax paintings, statues of Wonder Woman and a newly installed sculpture of a bloodied ear labelled: Donald Trump’s Ear. $9000.

Stage to horny performers, wannabe models, Hollywood A-listers and sculptors with questionable politics, when it comes to Redfern I only wish the émigrés to Newtown who complained the suburb had turned boring followed Laroi’s advice: Stay.

What do you think the best suburb in Sydney is for pop culture? Share your thoughts in the comments section.