In 1962, Robert Rooney came into possession of plaque proclaiming, ‘This is a War Savings Street’. During World War Two, these signs were common in Melbourne neighbourhoods, affixed to telegraph poles on streets that donated to the war effort. Rooney found a use for a picture of the sign in 1970 when he decided to map these streets, during his conscious move away from painting and towards photography. His approach was influenced by the serialised photographs of North American artist Ed Ruscha, whom Rooney has described as treating his camera like a ‘technical recorder’. He eventually decided upon a formula: 

I wanted to avoid having something that would simply look like Ruscha down-under, so I put off doing the work for a long time until I hit on the most obvious format with the road-map, the alphabet and the numbers down each side. A road-map in which you see the street you're going up ... I photographed both ends of the street.