She started in Hunter Street Mall and King Street, and was then asked by Hamilton business owners to go "from one end of Beaumont Street to the other", mostly disguising telecommunications pillars with her bright designs. A graffiti attack on a pillar, which encase cabling for landline phones, was the beginning of Murray's foray into art on public infrastructure.

She'd moved to Lake Macquarie's Teralba, coming from inner-Sydney Waterloo, and was enchanted by the country-town feel. Some of the first locals she noticed were a man walking his goat and a girl crossing the street on horseback. Murray set about restoring an old shopfront in the main street, opening Flying Spanners Gallery, an eclectic cafe among art.

One morning she woke to discover a local telecommunications pillar had been 'tagged' with graffiti. She marched up the street with paints and brushes and transformed the metal cylinder with an image of an olden-day coalminer, referencing the town's history. The seed was sown, and Murray, whose background was in mural art, had soon also turned a dull-looking electrical post outside her gallery-cafe into a giant pencil.

A visiting businesswoman noticed and took up the idea, leading Murray to be commissioned to doll-up some less attractive elements in the Newcastle City streetscape. Her "pillar people" were born. She continued with the theme started in Teralba, using local history and close-by businesses to inspire her characters.

Now she's arrived in the city's largest suburb, Mayfield. When Murray first walked down the suburb's busy spine of Maitland Road she quickly realised the job was a big one. Within a block between traffic intersections she'd lost count of the contenders for her artistic attention. "My original vision was you look down the street and see all these animals," Murray says.

Chris Arnold, of the Mayfield Business Improvement Association, shared Murray's vision to start with native animals painted on rubbish bins.

She started mid-last year, before being stalled by lockdown. But come Christmas she'd completed two bins (one featuring a possum, the other a koala) and also painted a gladiator on a rusty post outside The Coliseum antique centre (it was there and she couldn't resist).

"The idea is to turn these ugly things into something interesting," Murray says.

Arnold, who is a local real estate agent and has lived in Mayfield for 11 years, says Murray has "ideas up her sleeve". And she'll need them, as "towards the busier end of Mayfield there's heaps more".

While Murray says she'll work with "anything that's sitting there being tagged and deteriorating," she particularly has her sights set on some older "triangular" model traffic-light signal boxes. They are coated in stickers and posters that she'll first have to scrape off, but to her, "they look like a little house".

Murray's work is just the beginning of an artsy transformation of the suburb, Arnold told Weekender. The business association has a two-year plan, he says, "working our way up" from street level to creating murals on large exposed walls. "We have got our ear to the ground working out potential contacts who own the buildings," Arnold says.

The association is also pooling a team of artists "so we've got a good mixture of styles as well".

"It's going to look good when it all stitches together," he says. "Just to start to beautify the area a bit and deal with the graffiti at the same time - it's always in your face and it never seems to get dealt with properly.

"I think that bringing the artwork into it is a good way of doing it, to show that we can tackle it head on."

In her early art-school graduate days, back in the late 1980s, Murray worked as an architectural renderer illustrating "very, very perfect streetscapes, slightly idealistic perhaps". As she squats beside rubbish bins scrubbing off grime before her artistic plans can come into play, there is still idealism in her mind.

"It gets a bit depressing if you walk around seeing stickers on things," Murray says. "You can clean them up, make them pleasing to people when they walk past. So much positivity comes out of it, so many positive comments, it's something people really want to have happen."

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