FOLLOWING our report early in the week about the Braddon street art map, news has just come from the Braddon Art Collective of the businesses where members of the public can buy the map for a gold coin.

So far, Lonsdale Street Cyclery, The Italian Place and POP Canberra are selling the maps, as we found when we attended an official launch at the Assembly Bar in Lonsdale Street last Sunday, August 23.

On hand for the launch were organisers Hannah Minter, Shay McGarn and Susan Davidson, who explained the background of the collective, which aimed at preserving the vibe of the area, supporting traders, promoting inclusivity, creating a more people-friendly street environment and staging community events like the Braddon Busking Festival.

The map which is described as a guide to a “hidden outdoor art gallery”, outlines the street art in the lively Canberra social hub. Highlighting Braddon’s “eye-catching and thought-provoking artworks”, it would, they hoped, make possible a self-guided street art tour of about an hour through businesses featuring street art inside and exterior installations too.

One of the artists, Faith Kerehona, described her art as essentially semipermanent and sometimes “impermissible”. One of her works had been tagged and then painted over, she said, but since her work was largely to do with social equality, that kind of impermanence was not a problem, as her art was an ongoing process.

Greens MLA Shane Rattenbury, who said he’d moved to Braddon in 2009, described it as the “cool part of town” and talked up the recent international award given to the Rainbow Roundabout nearby. The map, he said would be “great for both locals and visitors”.

The launch took place in front of an artwork by Lachlan Taylor Grant, who told us that he’d been working at Assembly when they gave him the job of doing a mural on site – his octopus-like creation, he hoped, would not be his last mural for them.

Co-organiser Susan Davidson said that Braddon was an ideal place to bring the concept of a creative community to Canberra. While they had attended a formal meeting related to the Town Team Movement, the cross generational collective had now gone off on its own – “we bounce off each other,” she said. The hope was to hold a street art festival in late November, but last weekend’s launch had been designed to lift morale and relieve the cabin fever.

Updates on the street art map are on Facebook.