Introduction to Melbourne

That was how many immigrants imagined Melbourne during the gold rushes of the 1850s.

In 1851 a shepherd stumbled on a nugget of gold near Ballarat. Excited colonists downed tools and rushed to the new goldfields. Soon word of the discovery had passed from Victoria back to Europe.

Thousands of eager fortune-hunters poured into Melbourne, transforming it overnight from a sleepy port into a madcap metropolis. The population more than quadrupled from 29,000 in 1851 to 123,000 in 1854. Lucky diggers rode through the streets drinking champagne and lighting their cigars with pound notes while canny shopkeepers and bankers grew rich on their good luck.

Even before gold, Melbourne had been a boomtown — it was the only Australian capital city founded unofficially by free settlers rather than convicts, before the British government made it official.

In 1835, a party of sheep farmers from Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), led by John Batman, crossed Bass Strait in search of new pastures. Batman claimed to have made a ‘treaty’ with the Aboriginal people, acquiring 200,000 hectares of land in exchange for a few blankets, tomahawks and knives. But it was another syndicate, led by John Pascoe Fawkner, which established the first permanent settlement beside the Yarra a few weeks later.

New South Wales Governor Richard Bourke declared Batman’s ‘treaty’ illegal and sent a contingent of police to impose order. But he was too late. Squatters (illegal settlers who became sheep farmers) were already turning the surrounding grasslands into Australia’s richest wool-growing pastures.

Bourke officially named the town ‘Melbourne’ after the British Prime Minister instructed surveyor Robert Hoddle to draw up a street plan and peg out the first allotments for sale. Hoddle aligned the city grid with the Yarra, but the suburbs beyond were later orientated, in the traditional way, to the points of the compass. Along Victoria Parade where the two grids meet, city blocks suddenly become triangles.

Over the past 150 years ‘the Golden Mile’, as the city grid became known, has witnessed many other rushes for wealth and fortune, from the mining and land booms of the 1880s to the stock exchange boom of the 1980s.

It is a story of good luck and bad, of soaring hopes and crushing disappointments. Behind the graceful Victorian facades of the Golden Mile are human stories as marvellous and surprising as the rise of the city itself.

In walking the Golden Mile, you will trace the story of the people who made Melbourne, from 1835 when the first European settlers camped beside the Yarra, to 1901 when Melbourne became the first capital of Australia.