Melbourne is getting a 13-storey mural opposite Flinders Street Station

The 13-storey artwork is going up on Clement House at 238–242 Flinders Street, with Adnate suspended on a swing stage over one of the busiest corners in the city. Juddy Roller is commissioning, curating and producing the piece for Mushroom Creative House, and the whole thing has been pulled together in roughly 21 days from the first phone call to the intended finish line.

That timeline gets even sharper when you clock where it started. The original pitch was a modest two-storey mural, and there wasn’t even a wall locked in for it. A drive through town shifted the plan, attention landed on the towering blank facade of Clement House, and a small commission became a 13-storey proposition with the clock already running.

The Melbourne Flinders Street mural

• Who: Adnate, produced by Juddy Roller for Mushroom Creative House
• Where: Clement House, 238–242 Flinders Street, Melbourne, opposite Flinders Street Station
• When: Underway now, with completion targeted for 20 September

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Getting Adnate onto the building took a lot more than a ladder and some paint. Engineering had to be finalised and signed off, permits secured, and a suspended swing stage designed, mobilised and installed before a single brushstroke could land. Michael Griffin and the crew at Rigid Scaffolding fast-tracked the swing-stage engineering, while the neighbouring Lendlease construction site proved crucial, with site manager Gavin Sheane-Smith craning the equipment into position and rescuing days nobody had to spare. Backing also came from the Victorian government, the Victorian Infrastructure Delivery Authority and the City of Melbourne.

Adnate’s Melbourne pedigree

This isn’t Adnate’s first vertigo-inducing job for Juddy Roller. Back in 2018 the pair covered a 20-storey tower at the Collingwood Housing Estate with portraits of four residents, at the time the tallest mural in the Southern Hemisphere. Clement House brings a fresh test, with thousands of commuters watching each field of colour appear in real time and precisely nowhere to hide a slip.

Juddy Roller founder and creative director Shaun Hossack has called the commission one of the most intense the studio has taken on, noting that work of this size would normally get months of planning rather than weeks, and that the weight has fallen especially hard on Adnate. As for the subject, the face at the centre of it all is still firmly under wraps, with the studio only confirming that it celebrates an Australian icon landing ahead of one of the most cherished weekends on the national calendar. Until those abstract blocks of colour resolve into something recognisable, the city will have to keep guessing.

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