Melbourne is Australia's cultural capital: a city of laneways covered in street art and specialty coffee shops, trams running down art deco avenues, historic markets, a food and bar scene known around the world, and an obsession with sport that comes alive at the legendary MCG. Named for years as one of the most liveable cities on the planet, it has that rare balance between sophisticated metropolis and laid-back vibe.
On the banks of the Yarra River and Port Phillip Bay, Melbourne combines the best of many worlds: the high culture of the National Gallery of Victoria and its theatres, the multicultural energy of neighbourhoods like Carlton (Little Italy), Richmond (Little Saigon) or Brunswick, the botanic gardens, the beach and colourful bathing boxes of St Kilda, and a nightlife and café culture that set trends. It's the city of brunch, the flat white and rooftop bars.
With a history that runs from the Kulin Nation and the Wurundjeri people to the gold rush that turned it into Victorian-era 'Marvellous Melbourne' —one of the richest cities in the world in the 19th century—, Melbourne is ideal for walking, discovering hidden laneways, sitting down in a café and using as a base to explore the Great Ocean Road, the Mornington Peninsula or the Yarra Valley vineyards.
Melbourne's land is Country of the Kulin Nation, particularly the Wurundjeri (Woi Wurrung) people, who lived here for tens of thousands of years around the river they called Birrarung (the Yarra). In 1835, settler John Batman signed a 'treaty' for the land with Aboriginal elders, which the British authorities declared void, but which marked the start of European occupation; the city was founded that year and named Melbourne in 1837. The Victorian gold rush, from 1851, suddenly transformed it into one of the richest cities in the world, the 'Marvellous Melbourne' of grand Victorian buildings. It was even the first capital of federated Australia (1901-1927). The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The smallest state on the mainland and the richest during the gold rush: land of the Kulin nations, colonised from 1835 around Melbourne, transformed by the gold of Ballarat and Bendigo and by the Eureka rebellion of 1854, seen as the cradle of Australian democracy.
Read the history of Victoria →Some places make no sense on your own; with someone explaining them, they change completely. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 14 activities in Melbourne. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Three are below so you get the idea: tap any of them and they all open.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before the trams and skyscrapers, the valley where Melbourne now spreads out was home to the Kulin nation, an alliance of several Aboriginal peoples who lived in this region of south-eastern Australia. Estimates suggest their ancestors had been living here for between 31,000 and 40,000 years. The area of present-day Melbourne was shared mainly by the Wurundjeri people (Woi Wurrung), along with the Boonwurrung (Bunurong) and the Wathaurong, each with its own territory, its own language and its own responsibilities for the land.
The heart of Wurundjeri life was the river we now call the Yarra, which they knew as Birrarung, 'the river of mists and shadows'. They fished in its waters, camped on its banks and held ceremonies along its bends to honour the land and the ancestors. The river, the wetlands of Port Phillip Bay and the surrounding plains provided plenty of eels, fish, birds, plants and roots. As everywhere in Australia, this was not simply a landscape but Country: a living web of sacred sites, Dreaming stories, laws and kinship ties.
The Kulin nation had a complex social and territorial organisation, with large intertribal gatherings for trade, ceremonies and settling disputes. The Wurundjeri, custodians of the Yarra lands, had recognised figures of authority among the Wurundjeri-willam clan. That whole world, woven together over thousands of years, was about to be turned upside down by the arrival of European settlers in the 1830s. Today the Wurundjeri are still recognised as the Traditional Custodians of the land, and their presence is honoured in every 'Welcome to Country' held in the city.
The European arrival in Melbourne has a date and an episode that are as specific as they are controversial. On 6 June 1835, John Batman, a member of a Tasmanian business syndicate called the Port Phillip Association, signed a 'treaty' with eight Wurundjeri elders under which he claimed to have 'bought' some 600,000 acres of land around present-day Melbourne (and another 100,000 near Geelong) in exchange for blankets, axes, knives, flour and other goods. Batman even wrote the line in his diary that would become famous: 'This will be the place for a village'.
The so-called 'Batman's Treaty' is unique in Australian colonial history: it was the only documented attempt by a settler to formally negotiate for land with Aboriginal people instead of simply taking it. But it was a deeply unequal agreement and, for the Wurundjeri, an incomprehensible one: in their worldview land could not be bought or sold, and they probably understood the ceremony as a temporary welcome rite (tanderrum), not a transfer of ownership. The government of New South Wales, which then governed the whole east of the continent, annulled the treaty on 26 August 1835, declaring that all the land belonged to the Crown.
The annulment, however, did not stop colonisation: it only brought it under official control. The settlement on the banks of the Yarra grew quickly, and in 1837 it was named Melbourne in honour of William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne, the British prime minister at the time. For the Kulin peoples, on the other hand, the founding of the city marked the start of a catastrophe: the rapid loss of their lands, the breakdown of their way of life and the devastation caused by introduced diseases. The Aboriginal population of what is now Victoria, estimated at fewer than 20,000 people at the time of colonisation, would collapse over the following decades.
Melbourne's fate changed forever in 1851. In July that year, after pressure from the Port Phillip settlers, Victoria separated from New South Wales and became a colony in its own right. Just weeks later, gold was discovered at nearby Ballarat and Bendigo, setting off one of the biggest gold rushes in world history. The news spread around the globe and unleashed a human avalanche: fortune seekers from Britain, Ireland, continental Europe, the United States and China arrived in their tens of thousands through the port of Melbourne.
The effect on the city was explosive. In 1850 the colony of Victoria had around 23,000 people; by 1860 that figure had climbed to around 700,000. Almost overnight, Melbourne turned into a vibrant, multicultural city, the gateway and supply base for the goldfields. Gold wealth paid for an enormous urban expansion: up went grand commercial buildings, banks, lavish hotels, the famous 'coffee palaces', mansions and kilometres of Victorian houses with wrought-iron lacework, along with parks, universities and a tram network.
In 1885 the English journalist George Augustus Sala coined the phrase that would define the city: 'Marvellous Melbourne'. During the 1880s Melbourne became one of the richest cities in the world, compared with the great European capitals for its opulence, energy and modernity. Much of the historic centre that visitors admire today — the grand arcades, the ornate buildings, the theatres — dates from that golden age. The boom came to an abrupt end with the financial crash of the 1890s, but 'Marvellous Melbourne' left the scale and style of the city permanently stamped on it.
The prestige built up during the gold era gave Melbourne a leading role in the birth of modern Australia. When the six Australian colonies joined together in Federation on 1 January 1901 to form the Commonwealth of Australia, Melbourne was chosen as the temporary seat of the national government. The first federal parliament met on 9 May 1901 in the imposing Royal Exhibition Building — now a World Heritage Site — and then sat in Victoria's Parliament House. Melbourne was Australia's de facto capital until 1927, when the government moved to newly built Canberra, the compromise city between eternal rivals Melbourne and Sydney.
Throughout the 20th century, Melbourne kept reinventing itself. It received successive waves of immigrants who gave it its deeply multicultural character: Italians and Greeks after the Second World War (Melbourne came to have one of the largest Greek populations outside Greece), Vietnamese, Chinese, and people from the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. Each community left its mark on the neighbourhoods, the food and the life of the city: the Italian Lygon Street in Carlton, the Vietnamese Victoria Street in Richmond, Sydney Road in Brunswick. The 1956 Olympic Games, the first held in the southern hemisphere, were another milestone.
Out of all this came contemporary Melbourne: a city proud to be Australia's capital of culture, food and sport. The city of laneways and street art, of a coffee culture that has exported trends to the world, of the National Gallery of Victoria and major festivals, of the MCG and the Australian Open, ranked for years as one of the most liveable places on the planet. Exploring Melbourne means moving through all these layers at once: the Birrarung of the Kulin nation, Batman's controversial treaty, the Victorian splendour of the gold years, the federal capital and today's creative, multicultural metropolis, with the Yarra River — the old Birrarung — always flowing through its heart.
