Arthur Stace (“Mr Eternity”) and Yakka: A Timeless Work Ethic for Australia’s Modern Labour App

A city, a mystery, a word

In the small hours between last night and dawn, a slight figure once moved through Sydney’s streets carrying nothing more than a stick of chalk. He bent, wrote a single word in a graceful copperplate hand—Eternity—then disappeared into the dark. For more than three decades, that word confronted commuters at the curb, market-goers at the steps, and late-shift workers at the kerb edge. Who wrote it? Why that word? And how did a private devotion become a public ritual so potent it eventually lit the Harbour Bridge at the turn of the millennium and found its way into the Sydney Olympics?

This is the story of Arthur Malcolm Stace—the man Sydney came to know as “Mr Eternity.”

A hard start: poverty, addiction, and a wartime interlude

Arthur Stace was born in Redfern on 9 February 1885. His childhood was marked by poverty and instability. He left school early, began drinking as a teenager, and drifted into casual labour and petty crime. Like many men of his generation, he found a brief counter-rhythm in uniform: in 1916 he enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force and served on the Western Front with the 19th Battalion. He returned to Sydney in 1919, medically unfit, and slid back into alcoholism—police cells, shelters, and odd jobs forming a dispiriting cycle.

These early decades matter, not for melodrama, but because they make sense of what followed. Stace’s later discipline—the quiet routine, the early starts, the refusal of fanfare—reads as an answer to the chaos of his youth.

The turn: conversion at St Barnabas’ Broadway

Everything changed in 1930. On 6 August, Stace attended a “tea and rock bun” meeting for the destitute at St Barnabas’ Church, Broadway, part of Archdeacon R. B. Hammond’s city mission. There, amid practical charity and straightforward preaching, he experienced a religious conversion. He later described it as a sobering moment—an end to the bottle and the start of a life spent in evangelism and service among Sydney’s poor.

It was a shift of both belief and habit. Stace joined street ministries, handed out invitations to services, and adopted a disciplined routine that would become his hallmark.

“I wish I could shout ‘Eternity’…” — the Ridley sermon

Two years later, in November 1932, Stace heard evangelist Reverend John G. Ridley preach at the Burton Street Baptist Tabernacle in Darlinghurst. Ridley’s appeal—“I wish I could shout ‘Eternity’ through the streets of Sydney!”—lodged in Stace’s imagination. As the story goes, Stace walked out of the church, found a piece of chalk in his pocket, bent down, and wrote Eternity on the pavement in a hand he had never practised but which flowed perfectly in copperplate. He took that act onto the streets the next morning, and nearly every morning after that.

One word, endless echoes: a sermon not shouted, but scripted—softly, everywhere.

Dawn rounds and copperplate: how the practice worked

From the early 1930s into the 1960s, Stace walked the city before sunrise, inscribing Eternity “at least 50 times a day” on kerbs, steps, and doorways—from Martin Place and Circular Quay to inner-suburban streets and further afield. He preferred freshly rained-on bitumen, where yellow chalk popped against dark pavement. He sometimes experimented with other messages—“Obey God”—but always returned to the one word that, as he put it, “made them think.”

He kept odd hours to avoid attention; he viewed the writing as a calling, not a performance. Office workers traded rumours. Street sweepers learned to let the elegant cursive be. For roughly two decades, Sydney had a genuine mystery on its hands: a single word, everywhere, by no one in particular.

Unmasking Mr Eternity: the 1956 reveal

By the mid-1950s, speculation reached fever pitch. False confessors emerged; reporters chased leads. The mystery ended in June 1956, when the minister of the Burton Street Tabernacle, Rev. Lisle M. Thompson, witnessed his church’s janitor—Arthur Stace—quietly chalking the word on a nearby pavement. Thompson wrote up Stace’s story, and a Sunday newspaper ran a feature revealing the author of Sydney’s most famous one-word sermon.

Even after the reveal, Stace slipped back to his routine: dawn rounds, street-corner testimonies, quiet conversations. A short radio interview and a handful of photographs captured him at work in the 1960s, but fame never interested him. He considered the writing an act of obedience.

Religion, conscience, and the modern city

Eternity is a sermon in a syllable. For Stace, it announced the Christian horizon that had sobered him—a reminder of judgement and hope. For city workers and late-night walkers, it was an interruption: an ethical speed bump in a metropolis otherwise obsessed with deadlines and deals. The word’s power lay partly in its ambiguity: theology for some, poetry for others; a call to consider the long view in a city built for the quick turnaround.

Its form mattered too. Stace’s copperplate projected authority without officiousness; it looked like a signature from another era laid delicately over modern concrete. The timing—pre-dawn—added to the mystique. Habit created ubiquity; ubiquity created rumour; rumour created myth.

From pavement to icon: art, film, and public memory

Artists adopt the word

By the 1970s and ’80s, contemporary artists had appropriated and reinterpreted Eternity. Screenprints, photographs, and installations placed the script in galleries and on posters. The word’s elasticity—half hymn, half haiku—made it a favourite among artists exploring Sydney’s shifting identity.

On screen and on stage

Filmmakers and composers also found a muse. A celebrated documentary in the mid-1990s traced the man and the myth, while a chamber opera, The Eternity Man, brought Stace to the stage and later to the screen. These works extend his legacy beyond faith communities to broader audiences, asking how a single word can function as both evangel and urban poetry.

The millennium and the Olympics

At the stroke of midnight on 1 January 2000, Sydney welcomed the new millennium by blazing Eternity across the Harbour Bridge in Stace’s familiar hand—an image broadcast worldwide. Later that year, the word echoed through the ceremonies of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. In those moments, a private devotion completed its journey into civic ritual: from chalk on kerb to light on steel, from marginal practice to mainstream symbol.

Places, plaques, and preservation

Stace died on 30 July 1967 at Hammondville. In the decades since, the city has folded Eternity into its heritage. In 1977, the word—rendered in Stace’s script—was set into stone at Sydney Square between Town Hall and St Andrew’s Cathedral, marking a quasi-official adoption. The old Burton Street Tabernacle, where Stace heard Ridley’s sermon, was restored and reopened in 2013 as the Eternity Playhouse, with the marquee bearing his flowing hand.

Only a couple of Stace-made inscriptions are known to survive in original form—one on cardboard kept as a keepsake, and another reportedly inside the Sydney GPO clock-tower bell—fragile traces that underline how ephemeral his practice was meant to be. More lasting is the gallery of echoes: plaques, curated exhibitions, and public programs that keep the story alive.

Timeline at a glance

• 1885 — Arthur Stace born in Redfern.
• 1916–1919 — Serves overseas with the Australian Imperial Force; discharged medically unfit.
• 6 Aug 1930 — Conversion at St Barnabas’ Broadway.
• Nov 1932 — Inspired by John G. Ridley’s sermon; begins writing Eternity.
• 21 Jun 1956 — Identity revealed in a Sunday newspaper after Rev. Lisle Thompson’s account.
• 30 Jul 1967 — Dies at Hammondville, aged 82.
• 1977 — Eternity set into the paving at Sydney Square.
• 1 Jan 2000 — Eternity illuminates the Harbour Bridge for the millennium; later echoed at the Sydney 2000 Olympics.

Why “Eternity” endures

Several features explain the inscription’s durability in public memory:

• Form—the hand: Stace’s copperplate defied his limited schooling. Its precise loops and flourishes felt authoritative and recognisable, like a handwritten signature laid over the city.
• Routine—the timing: Executed before dawn, the word appeared as if by magic. Habit produced ubiquity; ubiquity bred rumour; rumour matured into myth.
• Meaning—the address: “Eternity” is a horizon rather than a lecture. It invites reflection—religious for some, philosophical for others—turning the public footpath into a place for private thought.

In a city that reinvents itself with every building cycle, Eternity insists on continuity: that what we choose, build, and repair matters beyond the next quarter. Stace never campaigned for a plaque or a bridge in lights. He simply rose before dawn and did his rounds. The mark he left is less the word itself than the habit behind it—the steady, unglamorous work of reminding a busy city that it owns a soul.