Precinct 9: Little Bourke and Little Lonsdale

The first immigrants from southern China established boarding houses and provision stores in Little Bourke Street for their countrymen making their way to the diggings. But by 1900, Chinese furniture workshops, fruit import businesses and laundries occupied much of the north-east quarter of the city.

Today this area remains identifiably Chinese and is the centre of fashionable restaurants, boutique hotels and shops. A little further down Little Bourke Street will take you to the heart of Chinatown and the Chinese Museum, which presents exhibits on early Chinese life in Australia.

Following Punch Lane we turn into Lonsdale and down to Exhibition Street. Here you will find the Comedy Theatre built by theatrical impresario J.C. Williamson in 1928 and Her Majesty’s Theatre across Exhibition Street, built in 1886 as the Alexandra and renamed by Williamson in 1900.

Stop 26
Turn down the narrow side-street beside the Princess Theatre to Little Bourke. Chinese immigrants settled here in the 1850’s, creating the oldest continuing China-town in the Western world. Bars and hotels behind the Bourke Street theatres were also pick-up places for prostitutes who operated out of the hotels and brothels in Little Bourke and Lonsdale Streets, Melbourne’s most notorious streets. Contemporaries may have exaggerated the criminality of the ‘back slums’, stigmatising residents who were more poor than vicious.

Stop 26 
A philanthropic failure
Oakford Gordon Place occupies the former Gordon House at 22-34 Little Bourke Street. Philanthropists influenced by English slum reformers built it in 1885 as a model tenement for working class families. But even poor Australian families disliked tenements and the scheme failed. So it was turned into a lodging house for homeless men and named in memory of imperial hero General Gordon.

Stop 27 
The madam and the mace
Diagonally opposite Punch Lane, one of the alleys which once honeycombed the area, at 32-34 Lonsdale Street is the site of the brothel run by Melbourne's most fashionable madam, German-born Caroline Pohl, or ‘Madame Brussels’. In 1891 the gold-plated Mace of the Legislative Assembly mysteriously disappeared — the rumour, never confirmed, was that it had been left in a Lonsdale Street brothel by drunken parliamentarians.

Stop 28
The tides of change
Walk to the corner of Exhibition and Lonsdale Streets, turn right at the Comedy Theatre and on to Little Lonsdale Street. Here two buildings illustrate the colourful history of the area. Cooper's Inn (1853) was in turn a lodging house, Chinese factory and Melbourne City Mission. Opposite Lim's Garden occupies the Mickvah Yisrael Jewish Synagogue (1859), later a Salvation Army Labour Bureau and from 1909 one of Melbourne’s first free kindergartens.