Short answers, pulled from the story.
As of June 2025, Melbourne had a population of 5.435 million, about 19% of Australia's population. It is the second most populous city in Australia and the southernmost city in the world with more than one million people. Melbourne added an estimated 105,000 people in 2024-25.
Melbourne was founded in 1835 with the arrival of free settlers from Van Diemen's Land, modern-day Tasmania. It was named Melbourne on the 10th of April 1837 by Governor Richard Bourke, after the British Prime Minister William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne. It was incorporated as a Crown settlement in 1837 and declared a city by Queen Victoria in 1847.
Melbourne became wealthy on the back of the Victorian gold rush that began in mid-1851 and the land boom of the 1880s. During the land boom it reputedly became the richest city in the world and the second-largest in the British Empire after London. English journalist George Augustus Henry Sala coined the phrase "Marvellous Melbourne" in 1885.
Melbourne served as the seat of government of the federated Commonwealth of Australia from federation on the 1st of January 1901 until Canberra became the permanent capital in 1927. The first federal parliament convened on the 9th of May 1901 in the Royal Exhibition Building.
Melbourne hosts the Australian Open, the Formula One Australian Grand Prix and the Melbourne Cup, the world's richest handicap horse race. It hosted the 1956 Summer Olympics, the first held outside Europe and the United States, and the 2006 Commonwealth Games. The city is home to 27 professional sports teams at national level, the most of any Australian city.
The traditional custodians of the land encompassing Melbourne are the Boonwurrung, Woiwurrung and Wurundjeri peoples, three of the five peoples of the Kulin nation. Aboriginal Australians have lived in the Melbourne area for at least 40,000 years. In June 2021 boundaries between Wurundjeri and Bunurong land were agreed, a change that remains disputed.
Melbourne has a temperate oceanic climate and sits on the boundary between hot inland areas and the cool southern ocean, which produces strong cold fronts and rapid changes. This earns it a reputation for "four seasons in one day." Its recorded extremes range from -2.8 C on the 21st of July 1869 to 46.4 C on the 7th of February 2009.