Melbourne

• 1. Introduction

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  Melbourne spent 262 days under lockdown, the longest total of any city in the world over the course of its six lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. That figure tells you something about a place that, at almost every other moment in its history, has been a story of growth. The southernmost city on Earth with more than a million people sits on the northern and eastern shores of Port Phillip Bay. As of June 2025 it held 5.435 million people, about 19% of all Australians. Its inhabitants call themselves Melburnians, and the land beneath them has been home to Aboriginal Victorians for over 40,000 years. How did a short-lived penal outpost become, for a time, the richest city in the world? Why did its founders sign a treaty none of them could read? And what makes a place where the weather can deliver four seasons in a single day? The answers run through gold, gardens, a fragile boom, and a culture that calls itself Australia's capital of sport, music, and the arts.

• 2. The Kulin Lands

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  Up to 20,000 Kulin people from three language groups, the Wurundjeri, Bunurong and Wathaurong, lived in the Melbourne area when British colonists arrived in the 19th century. The place was an important meeting ground for the clans of the Kulin nation alliance, and a vital source of food and water. The traditional custodians of the land are the Boonwurrung, Woiwurrung and Wurundjeri peoples, three of the five peoples of the Kulin nation. Names carry the older geography. The Port Phillip area is known as Narrm in the Boonwurrung and Woiwurrung languages, while the wider bay is called Naarm, meaning "the Bay" in Boonwurrung. In Eastern Kulin languages Narrm means scrub, a word tied to a Creation Story. Before the Bay was filled by the creation of the Birrarung, the Yarra River, the dry Melbourne region extended out into it, covered with teatree scrub where boorrimul, the emu, and marram, the kangaroo, were hunted. Different districts kept their own names. The city area near the cathedrals was called Geeburr, Fitzroy was Ngár-go, and Collingwood was Yálla-birr-ang in the Woiwurrung language. The boundaries between two of the traditional owner groups were agreed in June 2021, drawn by the Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Council, with the CBD, Richmond and Hawthorn placed on Wurundjeri land and Albert Park, St Kilda and Caulfield on Bunurong land. That change remains disputed by people on both sides, including N'arweet Carolyn Briggs.

• 3. A Village By The Yarra

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  Colonel David Collins established the first British settlement in Victoria in October 1803, at Sullivan Bay near present-day Sorrento, then part of the penal colony of New South Wales. Judging the place short of resources, the settlers left the following year for Van Diemen's Land, modern-day Tasmania, where they founded Hobart. Thirty years would pass before anyone tried again. In May and June 1835, John Batman, a leading member of the Port Phillip Association, explored the area and later claimed to have bought 600,000 acres from eight Wurundjeri elders. The nature of that treaty has been heavily disputed. None of the parties spoke the same language, and the elders likely understood it as a tanderrum ceremony, part of the gift exchanges of previous days, granting only temporary access to the land. Batman picked a site on the northern bank of the Yarra and declared, "this will be the place for a village," before sailing home. Another group of Vandemonian settlers had already arrived in August 1835 at the site of today's Melbourne Immigration Museum. When Batman's party returned the next month, the two groups agreed to share the settlement, first known by the native name Dootigala. Richard Bourke, the Governor of New South Wales, annulled Batman's treaty and paid compensation to members of the association. In 1836 Bourke made the settlement the administrative capital of the Port Phillip District, and in 1837 commissioned the Hoddle Grid as its first urban plan. The name Melbourne was bestowed on the 10th of April 1837, after the British Prime Minister William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, whose seat was Melbourne Hall in Melbourne, Derbyshire.

• 4. Dispossession

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  Between 1836 and 1842, Victorian Aboriginal groups were largely dispossessed of their land by British colonists. In 1840 Charles La Trobe, Superintendent of the Port Phillip District, ordered Aboriginal people banished from the immediate vicinity of Melbourne. That directive was enforced through the Lettsom raid, the mass-arrest and imprisonment of hundreds of Indigenous people. People still managed to live near the settlement, and by January 1844 some 675 were said to be living in squalid camps around Melbourne. The British Colonial Office had appointed five Aboriginal Protectors for Victoria in 1839, but a land policy favouring squatters undid their work. By 1845, fewer than 240 wealthy Europeans held all the pastoral licences issued in Victoria, becoming a powerful political and economic force for generations. The toll deepened as the colony grew. The Aboriginal population fell by an estimated 80% by 1863, due chiefly to introduced diseases, especially smallpox, alongside frontier violence and the loss of land. The legal status of the settlement, meanwhile, kept rising. Letters patent of Queen Victoria, issued on the 25th of June 1847, declared Melbourne a city, and on the 1st of July 1851 the Port Phillip District separated from New South Wales to become the Colony of Victoria, with Melbourne as its capital.

• 5. Gold And Marvellous Melbourne

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  Gold discovered in Victoria in mid-1851 sparked a rush, and the colony's major port grew with extraordinary speed. Within months Melbourne's population nearly doubled, from 25,000 to 40,000, and by 1865 it had overtaken Sydney as Australia's most populous city. Migrants poured in from Europe and China, and slums appeared, including Chinatown and a temporary "tent city" on the southern banks of the Yarra. After the 1854 Eureka Rebellion, in which at least twenty nationalities took part, public support for the miners drove major political change and improved working conditions. Wealth demanded grand buildings. The 1850s and 1860s saw work begin on Parliament House, the Treasury Building, the Old Melbourne Gaol, the State Library, the University of Melbourne, the Melbourne Town Hall and St Patrick's cathedral. Melbourne became a finance centre, home to the Royal Mint and, in 1861, Australia's first stock exchange. The Melbourne Cricket Club secured the MCG in 1855, members of the Melbourne Football Club codified Australian football in 1859, and the first Melbourne Cup ran in 1861. The 1880s brought a frenzy. During this land boom Melbourne reputedly became the richest city in the world, and the second-largest in the British Empire after London. In 1885 visiting English journalist George Augustus Henry Sala coined the phrase "Marvellous Melbourne," which stuck for decades. The Melbourne cable tramway opened that year, and the Melbourne Hydraulic Power Company, formed in 1886, brought high-pressure piped water that powered elevators and the city's first high-rise buildings. The boom peaked in 1888, the year of the Centennial Exhibition. Then the bubble burst. Sixteen small land banks and building societies collapsed, 133 limited companies went into liquidation, and the Melbourne financial crisis fed the Australian banking crisis of 1893. Almost no significant construction followed until the late 1890s.

• 6. Capital, War, And Reinvention

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  At Australia's federation on the 1st of January 1901, Melbourne became the seat of government of the new Commonwealth. The first federal parliament convened on the 9th of May 1901 in the Royal Exhibition Building, before moving to the Victorian Parliament House, where it sat until the move to Canberra in 1927. The Governor-General resided at Government House in Melbourne until 1930. During World War II the city hosted American forces fighting the Empire of Japan, and the government requisitioned the Melbourne Cricket Ground for military use. After the war the city expanded rapidly, fed by immigration from Southern Europe and the Mediterranean. The "Paris End" of Collins Street grew its cafe culture, while the painter John Brack captured the office-worker grey of the centre in Collins St., 5 pm in 1955. Height limits in the CBD were lifted in 1958 after ICI House, bringing skyscrapers, and Chadstone Shopping Centre opened the era of indoor malls. The Bolte government pushed modernisation hard, remodelling St Kilda Junction and producing the 1969 Melbourne Transportation Plan that made the city car-dominated. Melbourne stayed Australia's main business and financial centre until the late 1970s, when it began losing primacy to Sydney. After a downturn between 1989 and 1992, the Kennett government launched an aggressive public works campaign, drawing the Australian Grand Prix from Adelaide and building Federation Square, Crown Casino and the CityLink tollway.

• 7. Sport, Stage, And Street

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  The Melbourne Cricket Ground, established in 1853, hosted the first Test match in 1877 and the first One Day International in 1971, both between Australia and England. With a capacity of 100,000, it is one of the world's largest stadiums and the traditional home of the AFL Grand Final, the highest attended club championship event in the world. Australian rules football traces to matches played in parklands next to the MCG in 1858, with its first laws codified the following year by the Melbourne Football Club. The city now holds 27 professional sports teams at national level, the most of any Australian city, and in 2016 was named Sports City of the Decade at the Ultimate Sports City Awards in Switzerland. It hosted the 1956 Summer Olympics, the first held outside Europe and the United States, and the 2006 Commonwealth Games. The Melbourne Cup, first run in 1861 and a public holiday from 1873, is the world's richest handicap horse race, known as "the race that stops a nation." Music runs just as deep. Opera singer Nellie Melba, Australia's first global music star, took her stage name from her hometown. In 1967 an estimated 200,000 people saw the band The Seekers at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, the largest crowd ever for a music concert in Australia. The television show Countdown, airing between 1974 and 1987, helped launch acts from AC/DC to Kylie Minogue, while St Kilda's Crystal Ballroom scene gave rise to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. The Heidelberg School of impressionists took its name from the suburb where the painters camped to work outdoors in the 1880s. The oldest film in Australia's National Film and Sound Archive is of the 1896 Melbourne Cup, and The Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906 is recognised as the world's first feature-length narrative film. In the 2000s the street artist Banksy said Melbourne's graffiti scene "leads the world," and Hosier Lane became a destination drawing more attention than the Melbourne Zoo.

• 8. Garden City And Its Future

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  Melbourne's urban area covers roughly 2,704 square kilometres, the largest in Australia and the 33rd largest in the world, divided into hundreds of suburbs and 31 metropolitan local government areas. The Hoddle Grid, measuring about one mile by half a mile, forms the nucleus of the CBD, fronting the Yarra River, with a byproduct network of lanes and arcades such as Block Arcade and Royal Arcade. The CBD is the most densely populated area in Australia, with more than 43,000 residents per square kilometre, and its tallest building is Australia 108 in Southbank. Often called Australia's garden city, Melbourne is ringed by national parks including Mornington Peninsula, Dandenong Ranges and Organ Pipes. Its temperate oceanic climate, sitting between hot inland areas and the cool southern ocean, gives the city its reputation for "four seasons in one day." The lowest temperature on record is -2.8 C, on the 21st of July 1869, and the highest in the city was 46.4 C, on the 7th of February 2009. The transport that knits it together is its own superlative. Melbourne's tram network, dating from the 1880s land boom, is the largest in the world, with 250 km of double track and 475 trams as of 2021, and Flinders Street station was the world's busiest passenger station in 1927. The newest leap came in late 2025, when the $15 billion Metro Tunnel opened, with full services beginning in February 2026, adding five stations and twin nine-kilometre tunnels under the CBD. Melbourne added an estimated 105,000 people in 2024-25, and is projected to overtake Sydney as Australia's most populous city sometime between 2032 and 2046.