Apocalypse near you

It used to be called the top. It was literally the end of the line for the tram service that snaked its way through the inner city to the northern Melbourne suburb of Preston. The culmination of this journey was a terminus lined with shops, a place of conclusion and waiting, of browsing and purchasing. In 'Northern Void', a representative stretch of Plenty Road, Preston is imagined as a vague, anachronistic time warp spanning a thousand years, where people still hang around the street outside empty and derelict shops, waiting for trams that never seem to arrive.