Former Mt Barker top cop Dave Johnson shares his love of sign painting and mural art

For Mt Barker’s former top cop, Dave Johnson, a lifelong passion for sign painting is one to be shared. Known to many in town simply as ‘Sarge’, Johnson stepped away from his decorated 25-year career with WA Police earlier this year, taking on a new position within the Shire of Plantagenet as community and recreation services manager. The change of job has also allowed Johnson to give more attention to his love for sign painting. Growing up with his step-father, who was a speedway driver, Johnson said his childhood ambition was to paint the speedway cars. “I got involved in that when I was probably 12, just touching up the old man’s race cars, and I never wanted to do anything other than that,” he said. “During school holidays I would work with another speedway fellow who owned a sign shop. “I left halfway through Year 10 because I wanted to be a sign painter, and I had got myself an apprenticeship and away I went.” By the time he was 18, Johnson was running a sign painting business, hand painting billboards along the railway lines of Perth. He worked in the business until the mid-1990s, when hand-painted signs began to “die away” in favour of stickers and posters. After some of his friends joined the police force in the early 1990s, Johnson decided to sign up too in 1997 at the age of 29. Throughout a 25-year career as a police officer, Johnson kept up his skills as a signwriter. “It’s a bit like golf, you’ve got to keep your eye in,” he said. “But there were a lot of periods where I didn’t do it. “I went to Boddington as a probationary constable, and I painted every building in town there, most of them still are the same today, all hand-painted.” Johnson continued his practice by travelling several times to the US where he joined in with a mural painting group known as the Walldogs. The Walldogs are, according to Johnson, “the most unorganised, organised group in the world”. “There’s no headquarters, there’s no boss, there’s no phone number,” he said. A collective of former sign painters and other artists, the Walldogs painted their first mural in the town of Allerton, Iowa in 1993, at a painting event hosted by the group’s founder Nancy Bennett. They now hold several festivals each year throughout the US, and other parts of the world, where they converge on a town for several days to paint murals inspired by local history. Johnson first became involved in the Walldogs after his wife discovered the group and bought him a book about them as a present. Inside the pages she had hidden two plane tickets for the couple to go over to take part in their first Walldogs festival in Illinois. The first mural he ever worked on was significant for Johnson, as it depicted one of his heroes, late speedcar racing champion Bob Tattersall, an American driver who spent time racing in Australia in the 1960s. Adding to his connections to the piece, a photo of Claremont Speedway — a place where Johnson had spent a lot of time — was used as part of the design’s inspiration. “It just started to rekindle my love for the brush,” Johnson said of the experience. Johnson has travelled to the US to work with the Walldogs several times and invited members of the group to Mt Barker in 2019 for the town’s inaugural Mountains and Murals festival. This November, the Walldogs are returning to Mt Barker for the second iteration of the festival. “They will complete phase two of our mural trail,” Johnson said. Exactly where the murals will be painted and what they will feature is being kept under wraps until two weeks before the festival begins, when the planned designs will be unveiled at the Mt Barker Town Hall along with a video by the Walldogs artists. “No one has any input into the murals other than he designer themselves, so we just give them all the information and the Walldogs come up with it,” Johnson said. “There’s no public consultation in regards to the actual murals, and that’s part of the Walldogs, that’s how they always are and that’s how they always will be. “I think that’s what creates a bit of the magic around the festival.” The Walldogs will start painting in Mt Barker on November 16 and spend four days completing the murals which the community can get involved in. “It’s not about hiring an artist to come and paint,” Johnson said. “People can come along and paint for one hour, or they can paint for four days. It’s about getting the community involved and the community having some buy into the murals in town.” The Walldogs will also be working with Mt Barker Community College to paint a mural at the school and will create a “major visual entry statement” billboard that will sit over the northern entrance to the town. Johnson, the driving force behind Mountains and Murals, expects the festival to bring more than 5000 people to Mt Barker to take part in the painting and enjoy the markets and other events. “I think when I was running the police station, no one called the police for the whole week of the festival, not one call to the cops,” Johnson said. “The town was in a really good place, it creates a magic and a feeling because everyone can be involved and that’s the difference between Walldogs painting murals, and general mural artwork, is that everyone can paint, everyone’s involved. To express interest in volunteering at the festival contact mountainsmurals@gmail.com.