Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. There’s more to Matt Tervo than meets the eye – which in the most immediate sense is the thick mullet cascading down his back, resting just below his shoulder blades. “It’s the best haircut.
It lowers everybody’s expectations of you,” says Tervo, laughing. “I haven’t been smiled at by a cop in the last five years.” The scrutiny couldn’t be more at odds with who the high school teacher and local street artist really is.
“It’s funny. I’ll make fun of the kids at school’s haircuts, and they’re like, ‘But sir, you have a mullet’, and I say, ‘Yeah, and a master’s. You can criticise me when you’ve gone through this much higher education.
’” The man behind the audacious haircut is a mentor and passionate advocate for the city’s street art community. Credit: Markus Ravik It’s a Wednesday afternoon and Tervo is striding across the grounds of Kelvin Grove State College to teach his last class of the day: a street art group he established when he started at the school two years ago. “When I started here, the toilets were getting thrashed with [graffiti],” he says.
“An email went out about keeping an eye out for certain tags [the pseudonyms graffiti artists write] ...
I replied and said, ‘You’re never going to win that war, but I’m more than happy to chat about some alternatives.’” The college’s senior school principal, Matt McCarthy, was receptive. He proposed.