I spotted these photocopied pictures on Liverpool Lane, down near Crown Street, East Sydney – but they’ve been appearing on walls around the neighbourhood.

I assumed it was street art. But the more I think about it, the more I think it could be a kind of guerrilla cigarette advertising. They all feature these hip looking inner city people smoking, and the cigarettes are really the focus.

I love that street artists have immediately colonised them anyway. And whoever customised the second picture makes the same inference, turning the cigarette into a gun: “Bang!”

I do love a good stoop.

Stoop is actually a Dutch word, meaning “small porch.”

East Sydney and Surry Hills have many a great example.

These are along Foveaux Street, between Crown and Bourke Streets.

These stoops are on Crown Street, between Stanley and Liverpool Streets.

Our apartment building lacks a stoop. I think I would enjoy sitting on the stoop, if we had one.

This picture was taken from the fourth floor of the new wing at the Australian Museum, which we visited last weekend.

And this one is from the top of William Street two Sundays ago, just before a massive storm broke.

There’s a small crowd milling around on the block opposite the Old Fitzroy pub in Woolloomooloo. But although it’s one of the few unrenovated, unreconstructed parts of East Sydney, this is strictly wholesome.

Wholesome in the true sense of the word: bound by Dowling Street, Reid Avenue and McElhone Street, it’s a community garden, and it’s been interesting to watch it develop over the last couple of years.

The garden is run by local neighbours and friends through the voluntary Greening Woolloomooloo. They’re good at applying for grants, and since first pitching the project in late 2004, have developed the garden into a moderately stable thing.

You can imagine a face off between the gardeners and the usual denizens of a spot like this, tucked between inner city apartments, highway overpasses, and dark lanes. But graffiti is a big part of this garden.

The garden is divided into roughly four quadrants: upper and lower food production terraces, an art area and nursery, and a lower decorative terrace. It uses water harvesting at various points, and a water storage tank.

It’s a garden that makes me want to walk through the area just to see how it’s growing.

Woman’s Day circa ’99/last year’s Harpers are fine for most surgeries, but East Sydney Doctors, across the road from the National Art School on Burton Street in Darlinghurst, takes a different approach.

The current show’s by Emerald Fitzgerald and Andy Hopkins. Adam Cullen and Cash Brown have shown here, too, among others.

They blog too.

I love this time of year.

In September, there is the sweet smell of jasmine in the air. Come November, exquisite peonies make a fleeting appearance in the florists, and the purple flowers of jacarandas cover the streets. This one’s in Cathedral Street, East Sydney.