Sam Wallman - Just looks like the Sky Audio DescriptionSam Wallman - Just looks like the Sky Audio Description 

Just Looks Like the Sky by Sam Wallman
Large poster, print
Size – 85cm x 105cm approx.

Sam Wallman is an award winning writer and illustrator based in Naarm / Melbourne, on unceded Wurunderji country. He is a member of Workers Art Collective, the Maritime Union of Australia and is a committed unionist, having worked as an organiser for the United Workers Union. Sam co-founded the Workers Art Collective art studio at Victorian Trades Hall in 2014 and currently works out of an art studio there, in the oldest union hall in the world. Over the last fifteen years, he has drawn for hundreds of trade unions and worker organisations around the world.

He also works part-time as a wharfie / longshoreman.

Every year, over 5,000 container ships sail the world’s oceans, carrying over 11 billion tonnes of cargo. That cargo is carried in shipping containers, which have to withstand handling, sea waves, storms, and extreme temperatures.

This is a single-panel, pop-art style, comic print in a limited colour palette of red, blue, egg-yolk yellow, white, grey and black. Two waterside labourers (wharfies) stand angled toward one another at a commercial shipping dock. In front of them is a wide, night sky dotted with many stars. On the water is a loaded, container ship. The men wear hardhats and are gazing upwards. The wharfie on our left is saying ‘Look how beautiful the sky looks’ and the wharfie at right is responding ‘it just looks like the sky, mate’. The text is freehand, and each letter is neatly capitalised. It is written in in black text, in two round, white speech bubbles. The image, inclusive of the speech bubbles, is worn and gritty. The wharfie’ speech bubbles float between the men, one atop the other, joined by a yellow lemniscate (an entwined, figure-of-eight infinity symbol), suggesting the men are endlessly connected.

A crisp white gutter borders the image. The panel’s inner frame is coloured, and thinner. It is egg-yolk yellow at the top, shifting incrementally to black by the lower left and right corners and a black edge underscores the dock’s paving at the bottom.

The two wharfies are standing on grey paving at the water’s edge. The ground is pitted and marred. Their red, enclosed shoes stand out against the light grey beneath. Between them is a shin-high, flanged, battle-worn mooring, bolted to the concrete. Light hits the side of the mooring’s slim base, and this thin surface, the big floor bolts holding it down and the taut rope encircling it, are egg-yolk yellow. The rope is rising away to the top right.

Wharfie One, at left, is the taller and darker of the two. The men angle toward each other with their backs to us. Wharfie One’s white googly eye beneath his yellow hard hat bears a single grain of black, gazing upward, his neck tilting skyward. His thick hair lacks definition, hinting at curls and almost touching the blue collar of his yellow work shirt. He has a thin sideburn, a large ear and a short nose. His mouth is open, above a small chin.

Below his collar, over the top of his work shirt. a diagonal blue sash, derivative of a working harness, crosses his back from left shoulder to right hip. There are two horizontal grey stripes, one across his shoulders, the other across his back. His yellow sleeves, also grey striped, are rolled up to his elbow, revealing one hairy forearm. His right hand is sheathed in a red glove that stops at the wrist, palm to us.

In the lefthand back pocket of his long pants is a squat little bottle with a red lid and a red label. A card credential hangs from a belt loop near his red, right hand. At the knees and shins of his black work pants are yellow horizontal stripes. The cut of his boots is caricature. Clomping, great, square, red heels and a rounded, red enclosed toe. From collar to boots both men are crumpled lines and comfortable practicality.

At right, Wharfie Two is slightly shorter, and stockier. Wharfie Two has a round eyeball with a pupil dot directed searchingly upwards. This wharfie’s large nose is prominent in his paler face. The back of his black hair is smoother and longer, it touches his rumpled collar. He has a black moustache and his mouth is closed.

He wears a long sleeve yellow shirt rolled up at the elbow. There are a smattering of hairs on his arm. His yellow shirt is without reflector stripes. He wears black bib and brace overalls with a blue sash slung diagonally across his back. His overalls have thick over-the-shoulder straps and cover his back, below his shoulder blades. Wharfie Two’s left hand is flexed backward, tucked against his hip where his red gloves hang on a yellow clip from a thin grey belt. There is a small red tool tucked into a belt loop. His black, overall-clad legs are yellow-striped at the knees and shins, and his low heeled boots are red.

Neither man is Anglo-Celtic. Both have a careworn, round-shouldered-and-hairily capable demeanour. Both wharfie’s stand with their knees bent.

A container ship is moored out in the deep water in front of them. It looms large, high on the squiggly blue and black water. Shadow and moonlight undulate across the centre of the image.

Brightly stacked containers pack the deck of the container ship, against a soupy-black, star-cluttered sky. At right, beyond Wharfie Two’s right shoulder, is a scrap of city skyline silhouetted against a segment of night sky. Above the tiny, far-off buildings is a slender crescent moon and two streaking stars.

The gargantuan, container-carrying convex hull has a black section until just above the waterline. The rest of the hull is red, rough and flaking, heavily streaked with vertical fillets of dark grey corrosion.

At the front of the container ship’s deck is a high yellow, crow’s nest lookout. Around and behind the crow’s nest are light grey, flat rooved buildings. The desk is laden with six rows of approximately 65 stacked red, white, yellow and blue containers. Their narrow ends are facing us. The top row of containers is sparser than those below it, Lego -like coloured container blocks neatly distributed down the length of the ship in sets of two and three.

Two identical, parallel yellow ropes pass diagonally across the top left of the night’s sky. These ropes pass high above the men on the dock. The taut rope lines are disappearing into the top right corner.

Framed by the parallel diagonal ropes, in the top left of the sky is a small, white C-shape with one, white, orbiting ring.

This is the end of the audio description.