CITY LIFE
The greatest treasures in Victoria’s capital lie down dark lanes and behind hidden doors. Small businesses and creatives are revitalising these forgotten spaces — but to find them, you might need to ask a local
An Aboriginal healer, dressed as a Jedi and wielding a glowing blue boomerang like a lightsaber, beckons to me. Inching my way along the shadowy corridor of Flinders Street Station’s third floor, I find twisted tree roots carved into haunting sculptures, ancient spirits cast in red neon lights, and an ochre termite mound rising from the centre of a cavernous ballroom. A woman’s mournful singing floats in the darkness.
The art installations are captivating, but each room I pass is also a time capsule, preserving small moments from a 113-year-old building — Australia’s oldest railway station. Errant brushstrokes left by painters. Scrawled phone numbers from trespassers. Antique vaults anchored to the floor of former offices.
With its arresting French Renaissance architecture and turquoise copper dome, Flinders Street Station in central Melbourne has become a recurring icon on postcards and T-shirts. But few know about the building’s past as the epicentre of the city’s social life.
In its heyday, the 11 rooms that make up the station’s top floor — which included a gymnasium, smoking room and library — were a hive of activity. At its centre was the ballroom, which hosted boxing and, in the aftermath of the First World War, jubilant dance parties. Tired with age and falling into disrepair, the ballroom saw its last dance in 1983. Locked shut, it fell out of public memory and into urban legend.
But nearly 40 years on, the space has been restored and reopened to host evocative shows that are part of Rising, Melbourne’s annual contemporary art festival.
Curator of the event’s Shadow Spirit exhibition, Kimberley Moulton is a Yorta Yorta woman, whose ancestors came from the Murray River area of Victoria and New South Wales. Her show is an exploration of the Aboriginal spiritual world that melds traditional knowledge with elements of pop culture.
Kimberley’s boots click on the floorboards as she guides me from room to room, explaining the layers of meaning in each artwork: “I believe spaces and objects hold energy, and you can really feel that in this building.”
She jumped at the opportunity to present her people’s culture in one of Melbourne’s most revered colonial buildings: “I’m interested in seeing art outside institutional spaces like museums. By exhibiting here, we’re leaning into the architecture of the space as well as its history.
“The land we’re standing on was, and still is, an important meeting place for Aboriginal people before a train station was built on it.”
The revival of Flinders Street Station’s third floor is a high-profile examp
