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.

This almost radioactively green tree popped up on Hayden Place, Surry Hills.

It’s winter, so an obvious time for a small but well proportioned green tree to appear on the street. The colour and consistency of the colour, as well as the shape, suggests a mushroom cloud, too. So not just winter, but a nuclear winter.

Riding down Bloomfield Street, in the back streets of Surry Hills, it would be easy to miss this man.

Stencilled on a boarded up fence, there’s something sinister about him. Could be the paucity of details.

This jaunty chap was spotted on Wade Place, Surry Hills.

He looks like some kind of top heavy, new breed of future robot. Harvesting energy from his gait, solar panel for a hat, he’s all head and arms. And he’s not alone.

Two red robots and a black one. Some kind of metaphor?

It’s Valentine’s Day on the weekend, so it’s no surprise to see people breaking out their best romantic moves in the neighbourhood.

These two are walking home via a bollard on Macdonald Street, Paddington – just over the bridge from Darlinghurst, after it stops being Burton Street.

It’s a paste-up, with Mini Graff‘s distinctively clean, pop style, though it’s the first of her cute characters I’ve seen about in a while.

The girl whistles a song to pass the time. The boy’s peaked hat gives him a bit of a Boys Own vibe as he teaches their pet to heel (is that a squirrel or a dog?).

You can find these inner city kids on Fitzroy Lane, Surry Hills.

Reminds me of this man, who appeared on Clarkson’s Mill Way, Darlinghurst, in March last year.

This farm yard animal appeared on Liverpool Street this week.

It’s just down from the crossing with Palmer Street, and diagonally across from East Village – but what it actually is, I’m far from certain. At the site, I had it picked for a cow. On photo, it seems obviously porcine.

This rabbit popped up down near the corner of Hardie and Burton Streets, Darlinghurst, this week.

It’s a cute bunny, but it’s a bit early for Easter decorations, right?

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.

There’s a person with a cute animal trio on the wall in Hanslow Street, Surry Hills.

It’s hard to tell exactly, but I think there’s a rhinoceros (could be a hippopotamus), one giraffe and one elephant, and a person.

UPDATE (26/9/09): The paint stuck to the wall a bit better when this stencil appeared on Williams Lane, Paddington.

It’s definitely a rhino, with a giraffe, an elephant and a fairly stocky person.