This is forgotten land, snaking its way through a maze of freeway overpasses, intersected by power-lines and crossed by the railway. It is a degraded landscape butting up against the steelworks, overgrown with lantana and brambles that hide industrial refuse, discarded bottles and bongs. Famous in the closed world of graffiti artists – ‘‘vandals’’ if you will – the Figtree drains are a forgotten world populated by crews of teenagers and misfit loners who spray walls. Along much of the almost twokilometres of concrete walls, the culvert is a chaotic miasma of rainbow paints and edgy tags. Some of the words are clear – ‘‘What becomes of the broken hearted?’’, or an arrow pointing to a hole, large enough for a teenage body to squeeze through to ain the Illawarra graffiti sub-culture – only about 20 in the hard core – and promises to put me in touch with three of them, anonymity guaranteed. They agree to an interview, but never turn up. Caruana is a refreshing presence, a Shellharbour youth worker who inhabits that strange space between the legal walls sanctioned by councils and the illegal tagging of trains, shops and public property. The abandoned mansion at Dunmore, half-finished then abandoned by failed developer John Kosseris, has been a favourite haunt in the south, just as the Bulli Brickworks has attracted artists with aerosols in the north. ‘‘I am here to put art on the streets,’’ she said. ‘‘I am here to get young people to creatively contribute to their community and turn abandoned