“I watch a lot of ’70s-New-York movies, from [directors] Martin Scorsese and Sidney Lumet, and the way they capture the city is so perfectly New York … I want to make people feel about Melbourne the way New Yorkers feel about New York.”
Admittedly, there’s no short supply of Melburnians fiercely passionate about being Melburnians. But with his new Tiktok account Garden State Journal, 20-year-old north-side native Dylan Walsh wants to make your love for the city run a little deeper.
In the infinite black hole that is my (and likely your) Tiktok feed, Walsh’s videos – dished up by the often-cursed algorithm – ground all doomscrolling to a halt.
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SIGN UPDocumenting locals, their interactions and neighbourhoods across the city, his candid, lo-fi, atmospheric clips make modern-day Melbourne feel like the star of a nostalgic, of-another-time movie montage – their romance not rooted in either the male or female gaze, but perhaps just the Melbourne gaze. You can tell Walsh is proud of where he’s from. “It’s coming from a sincere place,” he says. “It’s genuinely how I see Melbourne.”
But what’s most remarkable is that what Walsh captures isn’t all that remarkable at all: a footpath embrace; a loved-up, arm-in-arm couple crossing the road; old friends perched on a bench, chatting like they might’ve done for decades.
It’s what you’d see – but not always see – when running errands, in the frenzy of your commute, or while grappling with that unrelenting feeling that there’s always somewhere else to be. Walsh loves a quick cut, but set to the soft, soothing sounds of Miles Davis, Carole King and others, his videos have an unlikely lingering power.
He says his only “formal” filmmaking training was studying media in high school, where his teacher instilled in him a great appreciation for film (and filmmaking). It grew. “I wanted this specific, special camera,” he says. “So, I worked for two years to afford this piece of equipment – doing the night shift at Macca’s, then at Koko Black and the MCG.”
When I ask about his pride and joy, he says, with a chuckle, “It’s a bit of a secret, and a chef never reveals his secrets! I put a lot of effort into finding this one old lens.”
Walsh knew what he wanted, equipment-wise, and he got it. Eventually. But developing his shooting style – and that of Garden State Journal – he had less of a one-track mind.
“For years I’ve been trying to crack the code of what makes a film Australian or what makes a piece of art Australian,” he says. And, as most creatives know, the only thing harder than actually making art is making a solid start. “My mate … challenged me to shoot a Tiktok a day [and] I didn’t make much progress until I started doing that.”
“It forced me to go out with my camera and [capture] people walking around in places near me like Brunswick and Coburg,” he says. Sharing the results on Tiktok and Instagram is something he’s been doing for 50 days now. “And every day I’m refining.”
Maybe that aforementioned code is an uncrackable one, but it’s clear Walsh is making inroads; what he creates is undeniably evocative and quintessentially Melbourne.
There’s a gritty ’70s-style sensibility to it, “But that’s not me putting that there ‘cause I’m trying to be cool or edgy,” he says. “That’s what Melbourne feels like to me – muted, understated and quite subtle … so I don’t manipulate or oversaturate with colour.”
His continually growing collection also paints a portrait of the multiculturalism that makes Melbourne’s fabric so rich – and so worth revelling in. “We should feel romantic[ally] about our city; we should feel pride in our identity. There’s a beauty about the way there’ll be so many different people interacting within the one shot.”
It’s not just more content to consume, though. In fact, it could be the polar opposite. At the risk of rehashing the final act of 2013 film About Time, Walsh’s videos are a reminder that, if we zoom out from the phones glued to our hands – and the vortex that is day-to-day life – finding romance in the regular isn’t all that hard to do.
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