The stencils are a little blurry at first, you might miss just one, but they keep coming. One after the other. You get an insight into the proposer: cute, into street art, fairly persistent.

Do you know Laura? Was the proposal a success?

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.