Sydney-based artist Jane Bennett works en plein air (artists’ practice of painting outdoors), targeting sites that are marked for change before and during demolition or redevelopment. 

This work has been painted from the Stamford on Kent overlooking Barangaroo. Known famously as The Hungry Mile during the 1930s and 1940s when, following the collapse of the wheat trade, men queued looking for work along the wharves. 

Bennett has recorded the wharves and warehouses dating from the 1830s, and Victorian-era cottages built as housing for waterfront workers when the area was the centre of Sydney’s maritime activity. Recent changes to the coastline and landscape additions along the Barangaroo foreshore have transformed one of Sydney’s oldest industrial sites.