Time Rone Melbourne – & Ruins Porn & Chernobyl

Thursday, 10 November 2022

In the abandoned ballroom level of the Flinders St Train Station in the centre of Melbourne, Australia-renowned street artist Rone has created Time-Rone an exhibition running until 23 April 2023. It’s not just Rone, he corralled a team of creators with a big budget – A$1.86 million from the government’s Post-Covid arts funding project RISE (Restart Investment to Sustain & Expand) – to put this snapshot of ‘50s Melbourne together.

▲ Melbourne rag trade

This could easily have been the sewing room in a Richmond rag trade factory. The inner city suburb was a clothing manufacturing centre and Greek and Italian women from the post-war Mediterranean immigration boom would have been bent over these sewing machines. In a series of rooms Rone has brought to life scenes of Melbourne in the post-World War II era. And then it appears as if they were abandoned and have been quietly decaying for the past 70 years.

▲ typing pool

They’re vintage Remington typewriters in the typing pool, but if you check what’s been typed on the pages from the ‘Australian Transport Group’ on the typewriter platens it underlines that this is all a creation. I was fascinated how that creative group clearly included teams of spiders to spin their webs across the dusty machinery. The ‘books’ in the library room are an even bigger giveaway, in fact they’re not books at all and a large proportion of them are titled ‘Time – Rone.’

▲ telephone switchboard

The telephone switchboard room looks equally realistic, but the whole exhibition is a wonderful example of ‘ruins-porn,’ something you can find in, for example, Havana in Cuba or Detroit in the USA. In Mark Binelli’s book The Last Days of Detroit there’s a great line about using Detroit as a movie set, because it was ‘after all, not merely a set designed to resemble a ruined American city but an actual ruined American city.’

▲ Classroom

The classroom captured school life from 70 years ago, but also reminded me of another slightly newer frozen-in-time classroom. In 2016 I visited Chernobyl in Ukraine where this Pripyat schoolroom hasn’t been touched since that critical nuclear disaster day in 1986. ▼