Waterlines a wonder for Port Phillip City Collection

Located in Kirrip Park, Waterlines is a large glass-fibre reinforced concrete sculpture created by renowned Australian artist Ian Strange and funded and donated to our City by Wonderment Walk Victoria.

The artwork is valued at $300,000 and resembles a local roof peak reflecting the residential and industrial heritage of the Montague area.

Waterlines explores the long and complex history of flooding and water management that has shaped the Fishermans Bend precinct and sparks an important conversation on the threat of a rising water table.

Strange, a multi-disciplinary artist, explained the bottom portion of the sculpture is marked in black to depict exactly where water levels reached in a historical ‘one-in-100-year’ flooding event.

“One of my favourite things from the research was finding the photos of the floods and seeing kids floating down the street on doors and playing in the floods,” Strange said.

“It was always really polluted and covered in this sort of black coal. And then during these floods the waterlines would rise up and leave these black markings on houses and buildings.”

“The sculpture itself is based on a series of cuts taken out of timber-framed homes and so really replicates a lot of the tropes of those early workers’ homes in the area,” Strange said.

Strange collaborated with science educators to produce a free primary education resource for South Melbourne Primary School, which sits adjacent to Kirrip Park. The resource encourages students to think and respond to the artwork through multiple lenses including visual art, science, humanities, and mathematics.

The sculpture was installed in April 2020, shortly after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The artwork was celebrated with an official launch event in July to acknowledge its donation to the Port Phillip City Collection.

Wonderment Walk Victoria is a philanthropic initiative which develops and installs public art across Melbourne with a scientific and environmental focus. For more information about Waterlines, visit the Wonderment Walk Victoria website.

For more information about artwork in Port Phillip, visit our Port Phillip City Collection webpage.

Did you know?

The Port Phillip City Collection dates back to 1855 and celebrates the social, cultural, political and artistic development of Port Phillip. The Collection includes over 4,500 catalogued photographs from the three former cities of South Melbourne, St Kilda and Port Melbourne.