Precinct 3: Clubs and Pubs

Two early 20th century commercial buildings, the Queensland Building (1912-13) and Scottish House (1907-8), lead to the grey stucco façade of the Australian Club. To the north, past Bourke Street, is the Supreme Court, centre of Melbourne’s legal community. This was the gentlemanly world of legal chambers, clubs and pubs, where money spoke softly but powerfully.

You enter Little Collins Street, formally known as ‘Chancery Lane’ after the traditional London legal precinct. Famous barristers like Alfred Deakin, later Australian Prime Minister, once hurried along this street on their way from chambers to the Law Courts. But with the opening of the new Supremem Court (1878) the centre of the legal precinct gradually moved north. Only two of the old legal chambers — Normanby Chambers (1883) and Stalbridge Chambers (1891) — now remain standing. Turn right into Bank Place, a quiet backwater where Melbourne imitates the clubby atmostphere of London’s famous Inns of Court.

Stop 6
Turning from Collins Street, we follow the east side of William Street to Little Collins. Melbourne is a city of big and little streets, of busy thoroughfares and quieter lanes, arcades and places. Robert Hoddle laid out the city grid with alternating ‘great’ (99 foot) and ‘little’ (33 foot) streets. Speculators later drove even narrower lanes and alleys between them. Designed as service lanes for deliveries and rubbish removal, the little streets were once despised as a refuge for ‘the lazy and disreputable classes’. But as the city has grown they have taken on a vibrant life of their own.

Stop 6
Where gentlemen prefer bonds
The Australian Club (founded in 1878) was originally ‘rich, Presbyterian and pastoral’, but lawyers and businessmen soon outnumbered squatters (sheep farmers). The building, designed by Lloyd Tayler, was twice extended in the buoyant 1880’s. Captains of industry, including the founders of the mining giant Broken Hill Proprietary (BHP), met here.

Stop 7 
Savages in suits
The Savage Club (founded in 1894), and named after English poet Richard Savage, inhabits 12-16 Bank Place. Australia’s first baronet, Sir William Clarke, built the house in 1884-5 and his son, Sir Rupert, whose mistress Connie Waugh reputedly lived here, sold it to the club in 1922. Inside, amidst shields, masks and other specimens of ‘savagery’, the club maintains a convivial tradition of ‘arguing and singing, eating and drinking and fraternising’. There are two rules: no talk of business and no women!

Stop 7
A tavern in town
The Mitre Tavern, long a favourite meeting place for Melbourne lawyers and sporting men, has occupied this site since the 1860’s, although the present façade is more recent. Sir Redmond Barry, the judge who sentenced bushranger Ned Kelly to death, rubbed shoulders here with members of the Melbourne Polo Club, who played Australia’s first game at Werribee Park. It is still a popular haunt for young lawyers and stockbrokers.