Melbourne's Cultural Institutions: The Public Collections That Define a City

Melbourne's cultural institutions, concentrated in the Carlton Gardens and Swanston Street corridor, provide one of the finest concentrations of public museums, galleries, and libraries in the southern hemisphere. The State Library of Victoria, the National Gallery of Victoria (both the NGV International on St Kilda Road and NGV Australia at Federation Square), the Melbourne Museum in Carlton Gardens, and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) at Federation Square collectively provide cultural resources that serve the city's population, the state, and the millions of interstate and international visitors who include the institutions in their Melbourne visits.

The State Library of Victoria, opened in 1856 in a building that has been progressively extended to its current magnificent form, provides the heritage reading room and the comprehensive public collection that Melbourne's research community and the general public have used as the city's intellectual infrastructure for 170 years. The library's La Trobe Reading Room, with its spectacular octagonal dome, is one of the great library spaces in the world and has been used for public purposes ranging from examination supervision to community events that reflect the library's role as a public civic space as much as a research facility.

The National Gallery of Victoria, Australia's oldest public art museum and its most visited, holds the country's finest collection of international art spanning five millennia of human artistic production. The NGV International's great water wall entrance, iconic since the St Kilda Road building's opening in 1968, introduces visitors to a collection that includes works by Rembrandt, Monet, Picasso, and the full range of the western art tradition alongside Asian art collections of exceptional quality.

Melbourne Museum in the Carlton Gardens, adjacent to the Royal Exhibition Building, provides the natural history, cultural history, and science interpretation that the city's population and the school groups from across Victoria access for the comprehensive account of Australia's natural and human history. The museum's permanent collection includes the stuffed body of Phar Lap, Australia's most beloved racehorse, whose display consistently attracts the largest crowds of any exhibit in the collection.

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