Inside Melbourne’s ‘graffiti war’ and the crew that took police 20 years to crack

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Inside Melbourne’s ‘graffiti war’ and the crew that took police 20 years to crack

To some, it’s art. To others, a blight on the city. Decades after “Stan”, “Meow”, “Renks”, “Karl” and “Bonez” tagged trains and landmarks around Melbourne, the law has caught up with one of the 70K crew’s chiefs.

By David Estcourt

James Scott-Howarth faced court over his involvement in the 70k graffiti crew.

James Scott-Howarth faced court over his involvement in the 70k graffiti crew.Credit: Eddie Jim

Almost 20 years after James Scott-Howarth’s house and parents’ business were raided over links to secretive graffiti crew 70K, he sat in court and watched footage of himself, in his early 20s, illegally spraying his moniker, “Stan”, throughout the city.

In the early 2000s, Scott-Howarth was one of the most prolific graffiti artists in Melbourne. Footage in a documentary posted on YouTube and played to the court, entitled 70K, shows daring acts of vandalism.

Crew members dangled off the back of moving trains, darted out over tracks to paint stationary carriages and ran through the shadows to hide from transport guards in train lots. In one scene captured on video, a train bearing the 70K name departs after two masked people paint the carriage, making it a moving billboard to display their tag around the city.

Scott-Howarth’s story came to a head in the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on Monday as the 46-year-old admitted to 14 counts of criminal damage and theft during his time with the 70K crew, whose tags in public places became notorious in the CBD between 2001 and 2005.

The vision played in court and Scott-Howarth’s prosecution offered a rare glimpse into the crew central to Melbourne’s deeply secretive illegal street art scene at the height of the city’s war on graffiti. It also reignited the decades-long debate between admirers of graffiti and law enforcement’s duty to prosecute its practitioners.

The graffiti war, the Commonwealth Games and the 70K taskforce

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Police said that Scott-Howarth and the 70K crew were prolific vandals between 2001 and 2005. Scott-Howarth took massive risks to paint prominent infrastructure – trains and other public property – alongside fellow crew members “Bonez”, “Bald”, “Karl”, “Renks” and “Meow”, whose work endures throughout Melbourne decades later. If you take the train to work, there’s a chance you’ve absent-mindedly taken in their tags under a bridge or on the side of a concrete wall.

“They’re highly regarded,” said University of Melbourne academic Chris Parkinson, who teaches art theory, which includes graffiti. He said people who observed and understood street art saw the crew’s work as part of a broader cultural conversation.

“It was explicitly creative and explicitly within an artistic dialogue,” he said. “A couple of 70K [members] were [Victorian College of the Arts] graduates … they were steeped in theory and they came up through theory, and they weren’t just out absent-mindedly creating works. They were composing works within the systems structures of the city.”

It was this prolific work that drew the attention of law enforcement in 2005 and, in particular, the ire of Detective Sergeant Sam Greenham. Reports of 70K were piling up at a time when graffiti and property damage were in the headlines.

The city was undergoing a beautification project for the 2006 Commonwealth Games, when Melbourne would be on display to thousands of international travellers, and how to scrub the city of graffiti was front-page news. In response, Greenham and his police colleagues established a taskforce targeting 70K.

“I think that was in light of the upcoming Comm Games and the war on graffiti,” Greenham said. “At the time ... it was highly publicised.”

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Asked whether he thought what 70K and Scott-Howarth had created was art, Greenham had a frank assessment: “I disagree with that totally ... in this circumstance, it’s just blatant criminal damage to public property at the expense of the public transport network and other people’s private property.”

Greenham compiled a brief on the crew, putting together an intricate picture of all their graffiti, and spoke to witnesses.

70K’s undoing began one night in 2005. Scott-Howarth and a crew member were out painting in Collingwood when they were rumbled by police and pinched with a bag of paint. That led to a warrant and raid on Scott-Howarth’s house and parents’ business, where police discovered a treasure trove of photos and footage documenting the exploits of 70K concealed inside a false ceiling panel.

“Through analysis of that evidence, in particular the evidence that Scott-Howarth had on his devices, we were able to identify and locate a number of other offenders,” Greenham said.

‘Crafty and cunning’

After the raid, Scott-Howarth left Australia for Britain, and didn’t return for nearly 20 years. Police suspect that Scott-Howarth, in part, went on a “spraycation”, where graffiti artists travel abroad and illegally tag the walls and infrastructure of other jurisdictions.

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Throughout this period, Greenham never lost interest in the case. Other members of 70K were charged and punished, and moved on with their lives. Scott-Howarth remained at large.

“Over the last 18 years, I would sort of regularly, on a 12-month ... basis, make contact with his family to ascertain any movements,” Greenham said. “I haven’t got ... much information back from them.”

Every three months over those 18 years, Greenham renewed a border alert in case Scott-Howarth tried to come back to Australia, so border police could pick him up. He never did.

In March 2023, a solicitor contacted police saying that Scott-Howarth was returning to Australia from Hawaii the following month. Greenham arrested him on his return and charged him with hundreds of counts of property damage. The court later heard Scott-Howarth had come back to see a sick family member.

This week, prosecutor Joshua Sheppard withdrew all but 14 charges against Scott-Howarth. Ten of those were standalone charges, while four were composed of multiple instances of criminal damage.

Police told the court that Scott-Howarth’s graffiti had cost about $37,674 in damage.

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“In my opinion, you were crafty, and you were cunning, and you knew that the police were going to be looking for you and left the territory, left the country, in advance of being found,” magistrate David Starvaggi told Scott-Howarth.

Starvaggi, who sentenced Scott-Howarth to a two-year community corrections order and 300 hours of community work, also assessed that his work did not amount to art, suggesting instead that, with age, Scott-Howarth’s view on the practice should have changed.

“You have to understand … that graffiti is nothing other than criminal damage committed or perpetrated upon either public [or private] property,” Starvaggi said.

“This sort of offending is an absolute scourge and blight on society. And there’s got to be zero tolerance and an absolute message sent that it won’t be tolerated by the courts.”

Scott-Howarth declined to comment.

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The crew’s role in the evolution of Melbourne street art has been a matter of academic examination, including by Professor Lachlan MacDowall, the director of art school MIECAT, who praised 70K’s innovative role in developing Melbourne’s specific graffiti aesthetic.

“Within the history of graffiti, the ‘primitive’ forms revived by 70K are vital to the development of the highly aestheticised graffiti style that is now seeking formal recognition,” MacDowall wrote in an academic article, In Praise of 70K: Cultural Heritage and Graffiti Style, in 2006.

MacDowall argued that 70K had a unique style defined by unusual colour schemes; that the crew’s work appeared in unusual places at the time, including CBD rooftops and over advertising billboards; and that the crew would use paint directly from tins for large-scale tags.

The crew also incorporated self-deprecating humour into their work, he said, using graffiti slang terms such as “Toy”, “Wak” and “70K Dogs”, as well as statements such as “Graffiti is boring”.

MacDowall declined to comment for this story.

Often the only public information about graffiti crews is released by them. It’s one reason police have such difficulty penetrating the scene. Posts on carefully choreographed social media pages with obscured faces and identities are shared by enthusiasts and followed by police.

The war continues

Police still work hand in glove with the City of Melbourne to clamp down on graffiti artists, and have analysts who conduct specialist intelligence and investigations in graffiti matters.

Using a single tag, police say they can identify repeat offenders and track their work all over the city. In the past 10 years, the number of graffiti offences investigators have recorded in the City of Melbourne has more than quadrupled.

Reflecting on the prosecution, Greenham said: “What made me stick with the case [of Scott-Howarth] was the amount of effort put into the investigation by myself, colleagues and specialist support units in building the case against the accused, who at the time was the most prolific graffiti offender the state had seen.

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“I didn’t want that work to be made redundant just because the accused had fled and gone into hiding overseas and was refusing to return.”

The University of Melbourne’s Chris Parkinson said: “It [graffiti] is not what everyone desires necessarily. But it’s also a really interesting reflection on the current state of the world and why it happens, and why people choose walls to make marks upon.”

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