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Last week we went to see a house in a shopping centre. Weird, eh? I usually would not go across the city to Chadstone Shopping Centre but for one of Rone's charming nostalgic installations, I would cross the country. He is a master of creating spaces that make the familiar feel beautiful and emotionally charged. Rone is so skilled at making shabby chic from nothing, to create decay and timeworn at its most perfect. In reality, this moment does not last but in his artwork it seems eternal and enduring.
We arrive just before our booking and join the group of others who have booked for 2pm. The staff give us the rules : only go one way through the house to avoid bottlenecks, no touching the installations because everything - even the dust and cobwebs - have been meticulously created. Then we enter as a group into a charming Australian home of yesteryear.
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In the hall is an old seat that incorporates a table where you can sit while you chat on your landline phone. It is from the time when phones were anchored to a cord. I notice the wooden dado that comes halfway up the sides of the walls. A dado and an archway make the hallway special.
Let me stop here to tell you that this was a difficult exhibition to photograph. The rooms are small and seven or eight people in a bedroom that is built for two people feels crowded. The lights are in constant but gentle transition between dim and even dimmer. The eyes adjust. The camera struggles. It is like shooting at a moving target . As soon as the light is finally right, the view is blocked out by a fellow visitor walking into the shot!
However the dim rosy lights and the gentle haunting music add to the air of nostalgia for a lost time. I had the sensation of the owners having lived in the house for a long time and just left. This is like a viewing of a deceased estate sale. Although the shopping mall lights are always bright, in this house it is always evening with darkness having descended on the back yard.
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The first room is the bedroom dominated by the double bed. This is the room of a couple who are honest salt-of-the-earth workers with not much money to spare.
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The age of the house is not clear. On a calendar in the kitchen the year is 1992. If that were so, this couple might have moved as newly weds and lived there a long happy but simple life. The fireplaces are a sign that it is an older 20th Century house. Perhaps 1920s or 1930s.
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In the corner of the bedroom is a an old wooden desk with a desktop that can be folded up to save space. Inside are lots of drawers for letter, accounts and stationery. Someone behind me has family with a desk like this with a hidden compartment.
The one item that really stood out in the bedroom was the tub of Ponds cream with a thick layer of dust on top. Did the woman stop using it? Is it a sign that she no longer felt young and pretty. My mum used to have ponds cream. I remember it was used to remove make up.
Also in the above photo collage are a pile of old books in the bedroom, vinyl records in the loungeroom, kitsch cobwebbed cat figurines on the mantelpiece, an old candelabra and tools neatly hung in the back shed.
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This is the lounge room with a saggy old lounge suit. The winged armchairs have antimacassars over the back of them, that protected the chairs from the bryl cream combed into the hair. On the floor is a pile of World War magazines that a chap might have enjoyed reading in the evenings. There are too many to fit into the small magazine holder and there is no coffee table, just an ottoman where the newspaper has been placed. The wooden gramophone and its speakers are huge in today's terms when we have this function inside a phone that will fit into our hand. In front of the fire is an embroidered screen.
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To the other side of the mantelpiece is a glass cabinet where good china and figurines can be displayed. This is a place for wedding gifts and holiday souvenirs.
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The phone on the wall in the kitchen is so evocative for my generation that remember the curly cord and the rotary dial on the phone. It sits by the bench where the woman could easily reach it to gossip while she was working in the kitchen. The letter holders and canisters were a familiar sight in kitchens of my youth. I even spy the familiar blue, white and red stripes at the edge of an airmail envelope. Did they have family overseas? Were they were migrants?
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The kitchen was difficult to photograph because other people compelled to walk in among the cupboards to look at the familiar items. I wanted to take photos because I dream of having green cupboards and a green oven. The bench opposite the kitchen reminds me of how both my childhood home and our current home had a bench separating the kitchen from the living and dining, a bench that had glass windows on the cupboards overhead so crockery could be displayed. (Our windowed cupboards and bench have been moved against the wall now.)
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In the corner of the kitchen is a dusty collection of kitchen paraphernalia: a teapot, a toast rack, a transistor radio, a glass mug and a jug. My eye is drawn to the folded newspaper where someone is mid crossword and the headline reads "Norths may shift camp to Coburg". The story relates to plans to move the home ground of North Melbourne's Aussie rules football club to Coburg in 1965.
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This was my last photo I took in the house. As I went into the gift shop at the end I saw in the postcards that I had missed the iconic Rone female face on the kitchen wall. I went back to see it with my own eyes. No regrets that I ignored the instructions that we were not to backtrack. On the other side of the wall is the lounge room with the piano.
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This is another view of the dining room with the lace tablecloth on the table and a dresser filled with glasses and crockery. On top of the dresser is the good silver including the candelabra.
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I was fascinated by the back yard for a number of reasons. This was the most spacious part of the exhibition and it evoked a past where back yards were much bigger. There was before the time when everyone renovated their home to build a large backroom with French windows looking out to the new wooden deck and left very little room for the garden. (I checked and the garden is not real. The tree trunk felt like foam. (Ssh don't tell!)
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Speaking to a friend about the exhibition, she loved the garden with the mix of healthy plants and some struggling plants. She was also excited that the bottles in the crates were the same brand she had. They were not Noddys which is the brand of lemonade that we used to buy and leave out empty bottles to be collected. I felt nostalgic for the old round metal garbage bins. They weren't practical - it was always a drama if one of these bin was knocked over and the lid fell off and all the contents were strewn about the garden. But in our age of multiple plastic wheelie bins for recycling, these small bins seem so simple.
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This sort of yard with lots of grass and a tree in the middle of it, is the sort of yard I grew up with. There was always grass to mow and the wheelbarrow out for gardening at the side. On the left of the above photo you can see the light of the little back shed where the man of the house would be fixing and creating while listening to his team's footy match on his trannie. Beside the shed is a little lemon tree. No self respecting garden would have been without one.
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The brick path through the back garden was charming with its slight unevenness to show that it was put down by the owners, just like my dad made brick paths in our backyard. There was always room for the rotary Hills Hoist clothes line that was utilitarian unless you were a small child who dared to swing on it. (And who didn't?) By the clothes line is the washing basket on the trolley so it could be wheeled from the laundry.
Actually there was no laundry in sight, nor a bathroom. They would be small in a humble home like this. Rone must have had to make hard decisions when considering groups of people and flow through in the tour, as well as what he could fit into this small space in Chadstone. It was a reminder us that it was not as real as it felt.
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There was an old car parked at the end of the driveway. This is the sort of driveway that my parents have down one side of their house with the two strips of concrete for the wheels and grass all around. My parents don't use it much but a driveway is great for washing a car. We walked down the driveway toward the front gate. Just before we left the installation, we were lured into look at the brightly lit gift shop.
Then we were out the gate and back into the bright lights of the shopping centre. When I first heard about the house in the shopping centre I imagined it to be freestanding. It was not, as you can see in the above photo. It sits between a mega make up and skin care store and an outdoor clothing and adventure store. Above it the sign for the lego store is light up with a neon sign.
Chadstone is shocking after such an immersive experience in an era when stuff was simple and made to last. The shabby aged house sits meekly in the busy shopping centre where every store is bright and bold and fun and begging for attention and money. Rone's Home exhibition is a charming oasis, a rest from the modern assault on the senses, a reminder that we don't need much. The irony of it being in a a loud sleek shrine to commerce is not lost on either Chadstone nor Rone. It is part of the appeal that draws people in for a moment of quiet beauty before they go shopping!
HOME – An Exhibition by Rone
Light to Night Festival
Chadstone Shopping Centre
1341 Dandenong Road, Chadstone, Melbourne
11 June to 12 July 2026
Chadstone exhibition webpage
https://rone.art/
More Rone artwork can be seen on Green Gourmet Giraffe at:
Time by Rone, Art installations
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