The mulleted mentor who won over the mayor with his vision for Brisbane

There’s more to Matt Tervo than meets the eye – which in the most immediate sense is the thick mullet cascading down his back, resting just below his shoulder blades.

“It’s the best haircut. It lowers everybody’s expectations of you,” says Tervo, laughing. “I haven’t been smiled at by a cop in the last five years.”

The scrutiny couldn’t be more at odds with who the high school teacher and local street artist really is.

“It’s funny. I’ll make fun of the kids at school’s haircuts, and they’re like, ‘But sir, you have a mullet’, and I say, ‘Yeah, and a master’s. You can criticise me when you’ve gone through this much higher education.’”

The man behind the audacious haircut is a mentor and passionate advocate for the city’s street art community. Credit: Markus Ravik

It’s a Wednesday afternoon and Tervo is striding across the grounds of Kelvin Grove State College to teach his last class of the day: a street art group he established when he started at the school two years ago.

“When I started here, the toilets were getting thrashed with [graffiti],” he says. “An email went out about keeping an eye out for certain tags [the pseudonyms graffiti artists write] ... I replied and said, ‘You’re never going to win that war, but I’m more than happy to chat about some alternatives.’”

The college’s senior school principal, Matt McCarthy, was receptive. He proposed a “sacrificial wall” for kids to practise art and spray-painting, and Tervo negotiated a class to put structure around it.

“We’re not a completely naughty boys club, which was really important to me. For a while, we just turned into a girl gang, drawing dragons and anime. The uniting thing is you genuinely enjoy art.”

The kids in today’s class are mostly students in year 8 or 9, an even split of boys and girls. Some work on tags and sketch faces, while others draw on iPads and create short anime clips. Two non-verbal students with autism spectrum disorder are learning colour theory and refining their fine motor skills.

Tervo says the class provides an opportunity for kids, especially those struggling to fit the typical academic mould, to see themselves being good at something.

“There no such thing as a bad kid. There are just kids that are really good at being bad at school.”

Tervo grew up in Ransome near Tingalpa Creek in outer Brisbane, and went to school at Villanova College in Coorparoo. His approach to teaching is informed by that experience.

“My home life was great [but] I had a pretty rough time growing up,” he says. “I have complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I had awesome teachers who helped me with that. I only started teaching [when I was] 30, so coming to it later, I saw it a little bit differently. I’ve seen a bit more of the world, and I was like, ‘Oh, you just need an adult.’”

Principal Matt McCarthy’s “sacrificial wall”. “This is not easy to do,” Tervo says. “The boys that submitted these designs were super proud to deliver this.”Credit: Courtney Kruk

A mulleted 32-year-old isn’t the mentor every kid needs, but there’s no denying the rapport he has with the students.

“I don’t think every teacher should be like me – that’s a horrible idea, the future could not handle it.

“But my thing is, kids should be able to see themselves in at least one teacher or mentor figure in their life. That’s all you need.”

It’s not just the students of Kelvin Grove State College benefiting from Tervo’s influence.

In 2023, he and Canberra street artist James “Smalls” Small pioneered the city’s first successful legal street art wall in Ekibin Park East in Greenslopes.

In January, he helped launch a second legal wall at the Tingalpa Spillway, a site immortalised by the “founding fathers” of Brisbane’s graffiti scene in 1993. Three months later, he stood beside the lord mayor to unveil a third site at the Paddington skate park.

“People have been trying to make this happen since the ’80s,” he explains. “Government-supported legal walls have been a dream for over 40 years.

“I’m not the first one to knock on the door. It just opened when I knocked.”

History paints a hostile relationship between the city’s street artists and authority. At one stage, Brisbane City Council, Queensland Police and Queensland Rail each had a task force dedicated to eradicating graffiti and punishing vandals.

It pushed Brisbane artists to other cities that were embracing the culture. “[Artists] were leaving to go to Melbourne, Sydney, Europe and America to chase opportunities. We were getting nothing.”

That began to change after a chance meeting with Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner in 2022.

Tervo and Smalls had been commissioned to paint for a corporate event, but it was rained out, so the organisers invited them – in paint-splattered T-shirts, shorts and Vans sneakers – to join the function.

“We literally got the most disgusted looks from people,” Tervo says, laughing.

Tervo with former students at the launch of Brisbane’s third legal street art wall in Paddington.Credit: Markus Ravik

“[I ended up sitting] two seats away from Adrian and I figured, at the end of the day, he’s kind of a public servant, he works for me. Why should I feel embarrassed to talk to him? So I reached over and introduced myself, shook his hand and told him what I did.”

The mayor asked what it was like to be a street artist in Brisbane.

“I told him, ‘It’s shithouse, thanks to your Liberal government.’ I said, ‘In 10 years’ time, you’re going to have the Olympic Games and the artists of Brisbane will be gone.’”

Schrinner has become an avid supporter of growing Brisbane’s street art scene, and describes Tervo as one of the most “ambitious and creative street artists” he’s ever met. “His drive to share his knowledge and skills with others is unrivalled.”

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April 24 is not a day Tervo will forget. Shortly after he launched the third legal wall in Paddington, his twin girls were born by emergency C-section at The Wesley Hospital.

While he’s settled into fatherhood, things have hardly slowed down. On top of teaching and art practice, Tervo is negotiating a role as Brisbane City Council’s first street art adviser.

It’s been an unconventional journey, but one that proves the adage that everything happens for a reason.

Matt Tervo and fiancee Stevy with their twin girls, Maeve and Mila, born in April.Credit: Elana Mullaly

He draws a line from the struggles he went through in his 20s – a long-term relationship ending, losing his job, unhealthy drinking and serious depression – to a new way of looking at the world, when he picked up a paintbrush and started working for art supply company Ironlak.

This is where he learned about graffiti culture and Brisbane’s street art history, where he found a community of artists, then teaching, then his own capacity for mentorship.

He sees the council role as a way to give back to the culture, bridging the gap between artists and authority and finding ways for talent to thrive without leaving Brisbane.

(From left): Tervo, Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner, muralist Fintan Magee and Lisa Atwood, councillor for Doboy Ward, at the launch of Brisbane’s second legal public art wall in Tingalpa.Credit: Brisbane City Council

“I want to achieve a bigger, better, more beautiful Brisbane because we have the talent. The artistic talent here is phenomenal,” he says.

“At first I thought I didn’t have a right to speak on behalf of this culture. I told people [who I felt did] how uncomfortable it made me. They basically said, ‘Who cares if you’re comfortable or not? This is your job. This is what you have to do for the culture.’”