photos by Karen Trist

photos by Karen Trist

"the hit of Festival Melbourne 2006"
- The International News (Jang Group of newspapers) 27 March 2006

"the W11 tram... puts the ‘festivities’ in the Festival Melbourne 2006"
- The Post (Pakistan national newspaper), The Post 27 March 2006

"moving (in more ways than one) testimony to the Pakistani spirit"
- The Post (Pakistan national newspaper), The Post 20 March 2006

I wish every tram in Melbourne was like this forever. It breaks down barriers between people making them smile and chat with fellow passengers. It shows something about what life in a non-arab Muslim majority country is like. Not at a all austere!!!. The only details missing were the 9 year old conductors hanging on the back with one hand and taking fares with the other, whilst spruiking for passengers. Also there were no chai or peanut vendors on board, or peanut shells all over the floor and no one was spitting paan juice out the window. There were also no infants vomiting in the row in front of you. One thing I don't miss here is the segregated 'ladies at the front' business that is maintained in much of Pakistan. In India no one cares who you sit next to.

The cards with Urdu verse on them were a nice touch, very Pakistani!
W 11 zindabad! Pyar zindagi hai, be' shak!.
- Taariq M.Hassan

Ideas for its use have been bouncing around the inside of the tram. How about a mulit-culti street-food & music tram, serving hawker style street food, with live and recorded music, and a spontaneous opportunity to meet, greet and eat whilst trundling a 50minute lap of the city? Who wants to get onboard?

Join the discussion with your comments:

A team of Karachi vehicle decorators have transformed a Melbourne tram to bring the experience of a journey on a W-11 Karachi mini-bus to the streets of Melbourne.

Let the Melbourne “W-11” tram take you for a ride with its passionate displays of vibrant dancing colour in hand-cut sticker collage, sparkling reflection of sculpted stainless steel panels and dazzling flashing lights. The tram is complete with conductors from Karachi & Melbourne, the music that you would hear on the Karachi W-11, and a special edition of collectable tickets that feature popular Urdu poetry seen on the side of buses and trucks in Karachi.

In an increasingly homogenising and homogenised world, the W-11 is a claim for the human spirit to not be overlooked. A spirit of generosity and lust for life is transported by the W-11 as it temporarily encircles the city of Melbourne with its sides emblazoned in Urdu and English “ pyar zindagi hai’ / “love is life”, as if to radiate an aura of honour and goodwill outward and onward. The Karachi decorators have built a vehicle reminding us of our simple human capacity to move, and be moved.

Travellers in Karachi, Melbourne and anywhere between can read and contribute stories of how the ride on W-11 moves you by visiting a special interactive blog section of this website in the "passengers talk" section. Click your chosen ticket and lets go!

WHEN: every 50minutes, 10am to 9pm daily on the City Circle route, Wed 15 March to Sunday 26 March

WHERE: The City Circle route Melbourne (Flinders st, Spring st, Latrobe st & Harbour Esplanade)

It is the first time that Nusrat Iqbal and his team of vehicle decorators have moved outside Pakistan. They are more likely to be found in a workshop at one end of the longest mini-bus route that traverses the city of Karachi, from the Port in the south-west to New Karachi in the north-east. The large fleet of buses that ply this route are known beyond the city for their passionate and decorative displays, often featuring the image of a peacock amongst a vibrant dance of colour, sparkling reflection and flashing light. The name of the route appears differently in stylised letters on the front windscreen of each privately owned W-11 bus.

In the contemporary connected metropolis, the advertising industry knows very well that road vehicles have a profitable capacity to attract public attention. The globally affected consumer may expect to see the branding of well-known corporations and products clad to the sides of the vehicles that shuttle our urban landscapes. Thankfully, the decorated vehicles plying the W-11 route are a contemporary anomaly. Words on the side of one W-11 mini-bus without logo or brand, translated from Urdu, read: “love is life”.

Iqbal’s small workshop is itself without decoration. It holds only a few hand tools and is scattered with cuttings of multi-coloured self-adhesive vinyl. A couple of loose photographic prints are stuck to one wall. Iqbal and his workshop partner are pictured on folding chairs on a Karachi beach, cooling their feet in the shallows of the Arabian Sea, facing southward.

“This will be the greatest tram ever seen”, beams Iqbal, imagining the transformation of a tram that will circle the city of Melbourne in March 2006. It is a strange turn. Trams have not been seen in Karachi since the 1970s, when the diesel engine-driven trams were laid to rest. Tramways systems were spawned throughout cities of the British Empire at the turn of the 19th century, including in Karachi, Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney. Tramways were then a symbolic display, for better or worse, of what the Empire could bring to its colonies. Initially horse-drawn, some systems then went to elaborate underground cable-driven systems, and later moved to electrified systems – as in the case of Melbourne’s trams; or from horse-drawn to engine-driven – as in the case of Karachi. Melbourne is one of the few cities of the Commonwealth to have retained and expanded the tramways system, along with Calcutta. In spite of the worldwide closures of tramways in the 1960s and 70s, this mode of public transport now enjoys a worldwide return, with numerous new systems having been built in the last decade.

Decorating transport is an ancient practice in many cultures, including the Indus valley. Camels, ox carts, river-boats and horses have long been personalised with decorative devices. Modern transport in Pakistan remained unadorned until the 1960s when ownership moved away from the elite to the working classes. The services of court painters who migrated from Kutch Bhuj in the Gujarat were then sought to adorn motorised vehicles. There are also influences from domestic traditions of decorating what is valued, from shrines to brides, which has come to be transferred to modern possessions like ghetto blasters. As new materials have arrived in the market – radium colours, reflective tape, LCD light displays, and even the woodcarving and inlay crafts of Kashmir – they have found their way into truck décor. Even poetry, the pastime of Pakistani people, has been incorporated to reflect personal philosophies. The exterior and interior of the trucks have became moving palaces for the new “kings of the road”; an ongoing competitive spirit of embellishment developing into what is now a sophisticated art form.

A new style of vehicle decorating came about in the 1970s with the advent of city buses able to service flexible routes to meet the needs of fast growing urban centres. Unlike other countries where vehicles are decorated mostly by spray-painting images on the surface, the structures of Pakistani trucks and now buses are actually designed with decoration in mind. Trucks originally had larger panels made of wood, and so were suited to decoration with painted images, while buses of steel with more contours prompted the development of a decorative style of repousse stainless steel, coloured acrylic plastic and reflective tape filigree with its own distinctive language.

Owners of the W-11 route buses, mostly Muhajirs, Punjabis or migrants from India at Partition, spend an enormous amount on decoration, motivated in part by rivalry with one another, and by the love of colour, splendour and display. Yet vehicle decoration has no economic benefit. A key to understanding why so much effort and expense goes into decoration, in spite of the obvious poverty faced by these very people, may lie in the aesthetics of shrines and the role of superstition in the spiritual temperament of Pakistani people. A commonly held belief is that unless the source of one’s livelihood is properly honoured, it will not prosper. Amongst profane imagery and poetry, the decoration of the buses incorporates prayers, cloths from shrines tied to rails and every bus has a child’s shoe hidden in its decoration for good luck! The presence of these spectacularly decorated buses in otherwise seemingly drab and messy roads is indeed a charming enigma.

The exuberant display of the vehicle, the energy of the conductor and the beat of resonating music all conspire to move people aboard the W-11. Perhaps it is a claim for the human spirit to not be overlooked in an increasingly homogenising and homogenised world. A spirit of generosity and lust for life is transported by the W-11 as it temporarily encircles the city of Melbourne, as if to radiate an aura of honour and goodwill outward and onward. The Karachi decorators have built a vehicle reminding us of our simple human capacity to move, and be moved.

Mick Douglas & Durriya Kazi, 2006

ABC Radio National interview on Peter Mares program National Interest with Mick Douglas & Roberto D'Andrea (broadcast 30 April 2006)
Listen at abc.net.au/rn

"a cacophany of colour, flashing lights and pulsating Pakistani music..."
Harbant Gill, HERALD SUN March 6, 2006

ABC radio interview by Glen Bartholomew with Mick Douglas, Nusrat Iqbal & Wajid Ali.
(broadcast by 774 3LO on drivetime 14 March 2006, and by Radio National breakfast 15 March 2006)
Listen at abc.net.au/ra

SBS Radio, Urdu program interview with the W-11 chamak patti team, broadcast nationally 19 March 2006. Listen at SBS Radio Urdu Watch video at SBS Radio Urdu 'What's Happening?'

ABC Radio interview by Helen Razer for the 'Overnights' program with Mick Douglas, broadcast nationally on all ABC radio regional stations Wed 5 April 2006. See the story and listen at abc.net.au/overnights

ABC Radio interview by Jon Faine with Mick Douglas, broadcast on 774 3LO on 28 March 2006.

"I was so sorry to miss the tram launch, but went looking for it on Saturday and it was FANTASTIC. It truly is wonderful. And people here are saying it is the best thing of the Cultural Festival."
- Alison Carroll, Director of Asialink Arts Program