Brunswick Street Cowboy (poet) : Grant Alexander McCracken
Like thousands of people before and after me, I met Grant Alexander McCracken on Brunswick Street. Grant was impossible to ignore — a self-made hybrid of urban cowboy, punk, drunk, flamboyant performance poet and gentle giant. For years, he would sit on the corner of Brunswick and Rose streets every Saturday morning, advertising the Rose Street Artist’s Market, holding a Rose Street Markets placard in one hand and a longneck of Abbotsford Stout, housed in a silver tube, in the other. He would happily talk to anyone and everyone, and come into the Evelyn’s bottle shop to grab another longneck. Between longnecks and swigs of whiskey, his poetic performances were often eye-openingly powerful. In fact, he was one of the founders of Dan Poets, which took over the Dan O’Connell hotel in Carlton every Saturday afternoon for over 25 years. His on-stage performances, bellowing, theatrical, passionate and alcohol-fuelled, were the stuff of local legend. Grant was truly one of a kind — as Hunter S. Thompson said of his character in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Grant was “one of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production”. I’m grateful that I had the opportunity of capturing him on canvas.
