Street Wise

Acacia Avenue is a fictitious street in Seaford, a Melbourne suburb rich in its beaches, bird life and wetlands.

 In the leafy luxuriance of this quiet neighbourhood, behind the banksia and wattle, immaculate lawns and decorative front doors, the whole gamut of human behaviour and experience is played out.

Susan Cartwright, artist and mother of two, witnessing these events, comes to the conclusion that a major street is a microcosm of human society,  in which  love and bitterness, birth and death, failure and success, youth and age, violence and murder, generosity and malice can occur.

When a neighbour is struck and killed by her drunken husband, Susan ponders the trauma in her apparently benign street. Are the residents, isolated in their individual houses, guilty of compliance in this violence because they do not care sufficiently about others to note the possibility of danger and intervene to avert it, and if so, what should be done about it?