Nick Cave Railway Bridge Mural

A large mural of Nick Cave -- the musician, writer, and cultural figure who grew up in Wangaratta -- is painted on the side of the railway bridge on Tone Road near the Wangaratta railway station. The mural is one of the more striking examples of regional Australian public art: a portrait of Cave rendered at a scale that commands attention in the flat agricultural landscape, a reminder that the country towns that produce exceptional artists sometimes choose, eventually, to celebrate what they made. Cave's face on the bridge has become a focal point for fans making the pilgrimage to his hometown.

Cave has a complicated relationship with the regional Australia of his childhood, as most people do with the places they fled. His music is full of landscapes that feel like the Victoria he grew up in -- the heat, the dust, the particular violence of rural life, the churches, the pubs -- even when the songs are set nominally elsewhere. Songs like 'The Mercy Seat', 'Tupelo', and much of the Murder Ballads owe something to the gothic undertow of the Australian country town as much as they do to the American gothic tradition Cave consciously drew from.

The railway bridge mural is freely visible from Tone Road and from the area around Wangaratta railway station. It can be seen from passing trains. It is not accompanied by a formal interpretive installation; it simply exists, large and undeniable, on the side of a bridge in a country town in northeast Victoria, as Cave himself once simply existed there before he became who he became.