Street Art Central: Caringbah

For my final Shire post before I move on for now, I'm going to do something different to what I normally do. This is

Caringbah

So if you're expecting an in-depth exploration of Caringbah today, you will be disappointed.

Caringbah is a big suburb full of homes, stores, an industrial quarter and even a park or two. Instead of all this though, today I want to focus on something unique that I stumbled upon in this suburb.

You see, I took a bus from Lilli Pilli and landed at Caringbah Station.

While the northern end of the suburb has plenty of "heavy retail" (think car dealerships, warehouses and Bunnings-es), down here it's a little bit more tame. A few takeaway stores, banks and professional services take up the bulk of the shop frontage but it's fairly quiet all around.

Since I had just spent an entire day walking around The Shire in 30 degree plus heat, I thought I would head to the nearby McDonald's for a frozen coke to reward my efforts. To get there, I took a turn down a laneway and immediately saw a giant mural of swans/geese/birbs,

and then more street art,

and even more.

So it turns out that around a year ago, street artists from across the land were invited to decorate Caringbah for a festival called "Walk the Walls." 

As such, for this post I will just focus on the fantastic artwork that still colours the backstreets of of the suburb. 

If you love street art, this is where to come. No matter which way I walked in the alleyways by the station, I ran into amazing colours. 

Here's a T-Rex messing Sydney up,

as well as an actual photograph of me procrastinating another blog post.

This suburb is exactly the reason that I love doing Completing Sydney. When you think you've seen everything in this stupid town, an unexpected suburb like Caringbah pops up out of the blue and is like "yo check this out." 

That's enough pictures of murals for now. Rather than looking at my rubbish photos, I'd encourage you to come take the train ride over and take a stroll too. The frozen coke is optional.

I was ready to head home after a long day of suburbsing but I thought to check whether there is anything interesting on the other side of the station (as an aside, I love the America-chic styling of this milk bar).

For what it's worth - the answer is not really,

apart from this retro Schweppes billboard, doing its faded best to join the street art scene. 

The station itself does have a little bit of a rainforesty feel somehow, due to being sunken into the ground and with plenty of foliage around. 45 minutes on the train took me back to Central.

Caringbah: Eat your heart out Melbourne.

So this was a shorter post than usual, in somewhat of a different format. I'm curious to know if you prefer the shorter posts, or my more usual in depth Completing of Sydney. Leave a comment to let me know your thoughts!