At almost sixty, he’s scarcely a boy anymore. But he’s loose on the streets of Sydney, Devonshire and Riley Streets, Surry Hills, to be exact, and ready to smile his way into your heart.

It’s Osamu Tezuka’s original manga character Astro Boy. And he’s on the wall of Orson & Blake. Who knows what he’s doing?

This bizarre object is on a bus stop on Crown Street, Surry Hills. At first I guessed it was this guy.

But I spotted an unmolested version on Devonshire Street, on the other side of Surry Hills, today.

It’s a promo for Richard In Your Mind‘s new record, My Volcano. Look we’re not usually partial to this kind of guerilla advertising. But it is a brilliant record.

I often spot curious things in this window as I walk down Devonshire Street in Surry Hills.

It’s the shopfront of a design firm called Ascender, and this time it’s stocked with odd little felt patches bearing phrases related to Bjork’s old group, the Sugarcubes, like the songs ‘Mama’ and ‘Fucking In Rhythm and Sorrow’, ‘Blue Eyed Pop’, ‘Motor Crash’ and ‘Birthday’.

They blogged about it – you can see their back catalogue of window dressing there, too – though there’s not much by way of explanation.

These characters are on the back entrance to a Little Riley Street terrace, just up from Devonshire Street in Surry Hills.

A bird, a skater, a man holding a child, a cat. Simple stencils, painted in black on a yellow wall. More ‘house proud’ than ‘street art’.

The back fence in this neighbourhood typically faces dirt, rubbish and needles – which makes it an unexpected site for personal expression. But it’s also where people park their cars, have backyard barbecues and and handball matches.

The ultimate aspirational Surry Hills pad: home, family and… a good looking back fence.

Planting a green wall needn’t be as complicated as it sounds.

True, this is no ‘vertical garden’. There won’t be any eating from this bio-wall. If anything, it’s most likely eating into the walls of its host, the old Brackenbury & Austin warehouse on the corner of Wilshire and Devonshire Streets, Surry Hills, just up from the Bourke Street Bakery.

This is far from technologically based solutions to greening the city. It’s old school, the paint’s decomposing a rusty orange, the walls are sprouting all manner of ivy and even small trees. There are mandalas and Nepalese prayer flags, even a squiggly painted ‘Respect’ on the wall. And at some point in the distant past, it looks as though some of the plants may have sprouted from pots at the front door.

Looks like they’re struggling to fill the front space, too. There’s a sign out the front advertising it as a potential pop-up shop.

This little bit of alpine art is on the loading dock of a Surry Hills warehouse, just behind the Bourke Street Bakery and around the corner from the Brett Whiteley Studio.

It’s a series of craggy mountain tops, set in pink – each mountain seems to have a letter, but I can’t make sense of it – it’s out the back of Gineico Marine‘s Devonshire Street warehouse, on Esther Street and Esther Lane.

There are quite a few other bits of street art on the block – see local blog Acid Midget for more. Little stencil galleries like this are tucked away across Darlinghurst and Surry Hills, I wonder whether the work tends to cluster because of a lack of monitoring, support from residents and local businesses, or just that once one person’s done a stencil at a spot, others want to join them.