Melbourne history and heritage: from Kulin country to world city

Melbourne's history is Australia's most dramatic arc of fortune — from the Kulin Nations' country at the Port Phillip Bay settlement of 1835, through the 1850s gold rush that made Melbourne briefly the wealthiest city in the world, to the 1890s depression that created the ghost suburbs and the heritage streetscapes that the boom left behind, to the multicultural transformation of the post-WWII decades that made Melbourne the most diverse city in Australia.

State Library of Victoria — rediscovery of the golden age — the 1856 State Library and its 1913 domed La Trobe Reading Room provide the most architecturally magnificent heritage interior in Melbourne and a working public library that has served the city continuously for 170 years. The Ned Kelly armour, the Burke and Wills Dig Tree, and the Gutenberg Bible are the headline artefacts in the heritage collection.

Eureka Stockade site, Ballarat (day trip) — while Ballarat is a separate city, the Eureka Stockade rebellion of 1854 — where gold miners under Peter Lalor raised the Southern Cross flag and fought government troops over the iniquitous gold licence system — is so central to Melbourne and Victorian history that the MADE at Eureka museum is essential for understanding what Victoria's gold rush era meant politically as well as economically.

Carlton and the Italian-Australian heritage — the Lygon Street precinct, the Italian community clubs, and the migration museum documentation of the post-WWII Italian migration that transformed Carlton from a working-class Irish neighbourhood to the Italian café and restaurant culture it became provide the most visible evidence of the multicultural transformation that has made Melbourne what it is today.

The Royal Exhibition Building and Carlton Gardens — the 1880 Royal Exhibition Building (the only 19th century exhibition building surviving in its original form in the world) hosted the first Australian Parliament in 1901 and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Carlton Gardens surrounding it provide the most complete surviving Victorian-era civic landscape in Australia.

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