IT TASTES GREAT FOR DAMIEN

Kia ora friends

Ronan and I have been in the Australian city of Melbourne for two days so far and it has been jam-packed and excellent. Here is a taste tester of our trip, specifically written with our moosey friend Damo in mind. We will write a full write up once we get back, so for now we will just tease you with a juicy carrot sized NJOY blog post.

Upon our arrival we bussed into town and had a quick exploration of the city. Melbourne is well-known for its street art so we were stoked to come across an alleyway filled with street art and tagging.

REGAN, STOKED

The laneway had a ridiculous amount of cool art and graffiti:

 We then noticed a reference to Aotearoa New Zealand on the wall. It was a stencil of Tama Iti, a renowned activist and generally great person!

Kia ora e Tama

Seeing this piece of street art instantly connected us to our home land (whenua) and we nearly cried with njoyment....Thank you to whoever had the excellent idea of putting Tama up on the wall.

The picture of Tama Iti made us wonder whether there would be any other New Zealand related works on the wall, but unfortunately there was nothing else in that alleyway. We walked down another that was connected to it however and spotted this iconic image:

East Side Dogs?

 When we saw the above tag we wondered whether it could have been the work of the East Side Dogs, which is a youth gang that was founded in Wairoa, New Zealand. Wairoa is a small town in the North Island of New Zealand that our good friend Damien was born and raised in. It has a population of around 5000 people, a lovely river (awa) and unfortunately quite a few gangs, resulting in a lot of graffiti bearing the acronym "ESD". Damien recently went on a week long trip to his hometown and showed us many photos of these tags. He also informed us that the East Side Dogs originally called themselves the Red Side Dogs but changed their name to ESD because people called them "Really Small Dicks" based on their original graffiti acronym (RSD). East Side Dogs is certainly more inscrutable to derisive nicknames.

When we saw the ESD tag in Melbourne we were hopeful that it was the work of an East Side Dog, repping New Zealand to all of the dogs living abroad, but we thought it would be a lot more likely to just be some local tagger that used the same acronym. However, a bit more searching revealed this tag close by:

BOOM

This is surely concrete proof that someone from Wairoa had tagged in Melbourne, so the ESD tag could be 100% legit East Side Dogs! My theory is that Damien is secretly an East Side Dog and was sent on a mission to Melbourne to spread the word. He tagged "ESD" and "WAIROA 4 LYF" and then returned back to Wairoa with glorious hi-res pictures of his work. He was then rewarded with pineapple lumps and gangsta rap CDs. PLEASE CONFIRM IF TRUE DAMO!!

MORE BLOGS TO COME ERRYBODY