Another popular signpost photo is the "remote-place-many-cities" signpost, an artefact designed, really, as a parody of a signpost (which more usually provides information used to orient oneself on a journey) to identify one's current location relative to the rest of the world. Again, this picture has a whiff of that - it's in Marrickville - but the orientation for Edinburgh & Victoria aren't quite right, and again, that's not why I took the picture.
I noticed when I first arrived in Sydney that no-one gave directions with street names. All Sydney navigation is done with landmarks. After a while I realised this is because Sydney street signs are pretty hit-and-miss; if they exist at all, they're quite likely to be covered by tree. Another popular technique is to allow the sign to rust to the same colour as the surrounding brickwork so that a forensic X-ray is required to distinguish one from the other. Well, rust is inescapable in Sydney. Another feature of the Sydney street sign is the bewildering array of styles; it's not possible - OK, I really mean not sensible - to train one's eye to pick out - say - white writing on a green background. That would give less than a 1 in 10 chance of identification. Black on white, maybe another 10%. It just makes more sense to use landmarks. Or GPS.
Another feature of the Sydney streetscape that renders street names not as useful as might be expected is the propensity streets have to either change their name halfway along for no apparent reason, or alternatively retain the same name through right-angle turns and reverse hairpins. I've been told Sydney's road system makes sense if you think like a bullock; it certainly doesn't make sense to me. I wonder if a bullock is cheaper than a GPS? Maybe I could get a cow instead of a new car.
This street sign marks the point where Enmore Rd., having taken a right angle (left) at the Warren View Hotel and swept down the hill into Marrickville from Enmore, transforms into Victoria Rd. I've known about this name change for years, but I only recently noticed this memorial to the point where it happens. I had assumed it was a gradual metamorphosis, lost in folklore. Not so.
And there's more. You might think this sign marks a three-way intersection, but what it really does is conceal the fact that the fourth road "in play", as it were, is the continuation of Victoria Rd, turned into a one-way blind turn local traffic back street by some significant engineering of gutters & pavements. Once, it turns out, Enmore Rd was a minor little offshoot leading up to the minor settlement of Enmore, and Victoria Rd was the main road, sweeping from Marrickville to - well, if aerial photography holds the answer, absolutely nowhere. Nowhere, being, in this case, the Marrickville Metro, which is (no actual research done to support this) a much more recent development than either Victoria Rd or it's re-engineered intersection with Enmore Rd.
Not a street sign at all, then, more a signpost to a puzzle. Two puzzles; why was Victoria Rd built, and when did it lose its prestige?
Marrickville Metro is on the site of Vicar's Woollen Mills, which survived from 1893 to 1979. From that, you could hypothesis that Victoria Rd served as some kind of access to the mills, but the other end terminates in a 270 degree dogleg, nowhere in particular. Well, nowhere now, anyway. It's true the termination is close to a railway, but Vicar's itself is closer to the railway nearer to the city (i.e. on a section more likely to have been opened early). That strange dogleg termination is halfway between the current Marrickville and former Marrickville (now Sydenham) stations. I suppose it might have been a freight siding.
In an aerial photo from 1943 the intersection of Enmore and Victoria roads is a very handsome triangular intersection, with central grass plot. Equal weight is given to both legs of Victoria, as well as Enmore. So at least I can say that the "localisation" of Victoria Rd at the Metro end is post-1943, and the integration with Enmore Rd pre-1943.
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