Melbourne: History

Pre-20th-Century History

Although mystery surrounds many aspects of Australian prehistory, it seems certain that the first humans came here across the sea from southeast Asia around 50,000 to 70,000 years ago. There were about 38 tribal groups living around Victoria when white people arrived. Aborigines were traditionally tribal people living in extended family groups and using the environment sustainably. It is believed that Aboriginal people were the first to make polished, edge-ground, stone tools, to cremate their dead and to engrave and paint representations of themselves and animals. Although their society was technologically simple, it was culturally sophisticated, using complex ceremonies which integrated religion, history, law, art and codes of behaviour.

Aboriginal people around Victoria resisted white settlement (which began in 1803), and although some settlements had to be abandoned, the original inhabitants were really just postponing the inevitable. Soon after white settlement, the Aboriginal people were dispossessed of their lands, struck down by introduced diseases and massacred in their thousands. Estimates suggest that the pre-contact Victorian Aboriginal population was between 60,000 and 100,000. Between 1834 and 1860, this figure dropped from 15,000 to 2000, and by the 1880s there were just over 800 Aborigines left in the state.

Melbourne was established in 1835 by a group of Tasmanian entrepreneurs, and is the youngest city of its size in the world. Although the settlement was not named until 1837, its characteristic grid layout was imposed by military surveyor Robert Hoddle the same year, and by 1840 over 10,000 people had been attracted to the area. The colony of Victoria was formed in 1851, with Melbourne as its capital, neatly coinciding with the discovery of gold, which swiftly and inexorably transformed them both.

The gold-rush brought a huge influx of immigrants from around the world, and the wealth it generated created a city of extravagant proportions. In 30 years the designs of the city's architects, the skills of its many European tradespeople and the designation of large areas of the city for public parkland had established what was known as 'Marvellous Melbourne - the Paris of the Antipodes'. This progress was, however, temporarily halted in 1889 by the first of the many devastating financial crashes that have afflicted the city. On 1 January 1901, a united Australia was proclaimed with Melbourne as its capital. In 1927 the title moved to Canberra.

Modern History

The ethnic mix of Melbourne's population has always been an important influence on the city's character: the Chinese and Irish diggers attracted by gold in the 19th century and the postwar wave of refugees and migrants from all over Europe (particularly Greece, Italy, Yugoslavia, Turkey and Poland), and more recently from Vietnam and Cambodia, have all contributed elements of their cultures to what could otherwise have been a conservative, passionless English society. These influences are witnessed in Melbourne's robust and varied architecture, restaurants, festivals and entertainment.

After WWII, Melbourne went into a long period of stable, occasionally complacent, conservative government. Although the city's political establishment liked to think it was the centre of national gravity, in fact Sydney gradually took precedence on the national scale until it became clear, by the 1960s, that Melbourne's star had been eclipsed. A strong rivalry between the two cities still occasionally surfaces.

Conservative dominance continued until the '80s, when the Labor party took office and the city hit boom times. Land prices just kept going up, and so did buildings, until 1990 when the whole thing fell in a heap. In 1992 radical conservative autocrat Jeff Kennett took the reins, provoking ire and admiration in seemingly equal doses. Under Kennett, Melbourne waved goodbye to social services and healthcare, and hello to the Grand Prix and the Crown Casino.

Recent History

Kennett's Liberal government was comprehensively ousted in 1999's state election, and a refurbished Labor party is now busily reinventing Victoria in the Blairite mould of moderately progressive, strongly pro-business centre-left government. Large construction projects have continued unabated, fuelling another one of those regular property booms that have created and decimated fortunes ever since the city was established. Many of the holes in the inner city business district are being redeveloped; one of the newest developments is Federation Square, an architecturally innovative if controversial use of public cultural space. Southern Cross Station (formerly Spencer Street Station) was recently revamped and expanded, and former docks have been converted into a commercial, retail and residential space.

The city continues to support a healthy cultural scene, especially in the fields of cinema and contemporary music.

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