History of Melbourne
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The history of Melbourne details the city's growth from a fledging settlement into a thriving colonial capital and finally a modern commercial and financial centre as Australia's second largest city.
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[edit] Early history
The area around Port Phillip and the Yarra valley, on which the city of Melbourne now stands, was the home of the Kulin nation, an alliance of several language groups of Indigenous Australians, whose ancestors had lived in the area for approximately 30,000 years. The Kulin lived by fishing, hunting and gathering, and made a good living from the rich food sources of Port Phillip and the surrounding grasslands. With the arrival of Europeans in the area, they were hard hit by introduced diseases, and their decline was hastened by mistreatment, alcohol and venereal disease. They had largely disappeared by the 1870s, and most of the Aboriginal people who live in Melbourne today are descended from immigrants from other parts of Victoria. Today there a few signs of the Aboriginal past in the Melbourne area. They include a tree near the Melbourne Cricket Ground from which bark was cut to make a canoe, and some middens (accumulations of seashells at feasting areas) around the shores of Port Phillip.
Bass Strait, the passage between the Australian mainland and Van Dieman's Land (Tasmania), was discovered by George Bass in 1797, who sailed as far west as Western Port. In 1802 John Murray in the Lady Nelson discovered Port Phillip, and he was followed shortly after by Matthew Flinders. In 1803 Charles Grimes found the mouth of the Yarra, and hiked as far inland as Keilor. Later in 1803 the British Governor of New South Wales, fearful that the French might try to occupy the Bass Strait area, sent Colonel David Collins with a party of 300 convicts to establish a settlement at Port Phillip. Collins arrived at the site of Sorrento, on the Mornington Peninsula, in October 1803, but was put off by the lack of fresh water. In May 1804 he decided to move the settlement to Tasmania, and thus became the founder of Hobart. Among the convicts at Sorrento was a boy called John Pascoe Fawkner.
The northern shores of Bass Strait were then left to a few whalers and sealers for another 20 years. In 1824 Hamilton Hume and William Hovell came overland from New South Wales, failing to find Western Port, their destination, but instead reaching Corio Bay, where they found good grazing land. But it was another ten years before Edward Henty, a Tasmanian grazier, established an illegal sheep-run on crown land at Portland, in what is now western Victoria, in 1834.
John Batman, a successful farmer in northern Tasmania, also desired more grazing land. In April 1835, he sailed across the Strait and up Port Phillip to the mouth of the Yarra. He explored a large area in what is now the northern suburbs of Melbourne. On 6 June Batman, as part of a Tasmanian business syndicate known as the Port Phillip Association signed a "treaty" with the local Aboriginal people, in which he purported to buy 2,000 km² of land around Melbourne and another 400 km² around Geelong, on Corio Bay to the south-west. On 8 June he wrote in his journal: "So the boat went up the large river... and... I am glad to state about six miles up found the River all good water and very deep. This will be the place for a village." This last sentence later became famous as the "founding charter" of Melbourne.
Batman returned to Launceston and began plans to mount a large expedition to establish a settlement on the Yarra. But John Pascoe Fawkner, by now a businessman in Launceston, had the same idea. He bought a ship, the schooner Enterprize, which sailed on 4 August, with a party of intending settlers. The acting commander of the expedition, John Lancey, chose a spot for the settlement, where, on 30 August 1835, the ship was anchored and the goods aboard unloaded. The spot was on the north bank of the Yarra, roughly between the present Spencer St Bridge and the Kings Bridge.
Meanwhile Batman had sailed from Launceston in the Rebecca, but when his party reached the Yarra on 2 September, where they were dismayed and angry to find Fawkner's people already in possession. The two groups decided that there was plenty of land for everybody, and when Fawkner arrived on 16 October with another party of settlers, he agreed that they should start parcelling out land and not dispute who was there first. Both Batman and Fawkner settled in the new town, which had several interim names, such as Batmania (in 1835), before being officially named Melbourne in honour of the British Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, in March 1837.
Melbourne began as a collection of tents and huts on the banks of the Yarra, yet within ten years, because of its economic position as a centre of pastoralism and land speculation it had established many stone and brick public and financial buildings. From September 1836 it was the administrative centre of the Port Phillip District of New South Wales. Government was represented first by a police magistrate, William Lonsdale, and then from October 1839 by a Superintendent, Charles La Trobe, a gifted man with artistic and scientific interests who did much to lay the foundations of Melbourne as a real city. La Trobe's most lasting contribution to the city was to reserve large areas as public parks: today these are the Treasury Gardens, the Carlton Gardens, the Flagstaff Gardens, Royal Park and the Royal Botanic Gardens. Another important early figure was Robert Hoddle, who laid out the square grid on which the town was built, and which still marks the streets of Melbourne's central business district. On October 22nd, 1841, with the incorporation of the town of Melbourne, this area was divided into the four wards of Bourke, Gipps, La Trobe and Lonsdale.[1]
In 1851 the white population of the whole Port Phillip District was still only 77,000, although it had already become a centre of Australia's wool export trade, and only 23,000 people lived in Melbourne. Until the building boom which followed the gold rushes, most of Melbourne was built of timber, and almost nothing from this period survives. Two exceptions are St James Old Cathedral (1839) in Collins St (now relocated to the Flagstaff Gardens), and St Francis Catholic Church (1841) in Elizabeth St. Suburban development had already begun, with the wealthy building houses by the seashore at St Kilda, and a port developing at Williamstown. In 1848 Melbourne acquired an Anglican bishop.
In July 1851 the successful agitation of the Port Phillip settlers led to the establishment of Victoria as a separate colony, and La Trobe became its first Lieutenant-Governor. A few months later gold was discovered at several locations around the colony, most notably at Ballarat and Bendigo. The ensuing gold rush radically transformed Victoria, and particularly Melbourne.
[edit] Marvellous Melbourne
The discovery of gold led to a huge influx of people to Victoria, most of them arriving by sea at Melbourne. The town's population doubled within a year. In 1852 75,000 people arrived in the colony and this, combined with a very high birthrate, led to rapid population growth (as well as the equally rapid dispossession of the Aboriginal populations in those areas of inland Victoria which had not already been cleared for sheep runs). Victoria's population reached 400,000 in 1857 and 500,000 in 1860. As the easy gold ran out many of these people flooded into Melbourne or became a pool of unemployed in cities around Ballarat and Bendigo. There arose a huge wave of social unrest urging the opening of the lands in rural Victoria for small yeoman farming. In 1857 a 'Land Convention held in Melbourne. Later a provisional government was formed by land hungry miners demanding land reform.
This accelerated growth and the enormous wealth of the goldfields fuelled a boom which lasted for forty years, and ushered in the era known as "marvellous Melbourne." The city spread eastwards and northwards over the surrounding flat grasslands, and southwards down the eastern shore of Port Phillip. Wealthy new suburbs like South Yarra, Toorak, Kew and Malvern grew up, while the working classes settled in Richmond, Collingwood and Fitzroy. The influx of educated gold seekers from England led to rapid growth of schools, churches, learned societies, libraries and art galleries. The University of Melbourne was founded in 1855 and the State Library of Victoria in 1856. The foundation stone of St Patrick's Catholic Cathedral was laid in 1858 and that of St Paul's Anglican Cathedral in 1880. The Philosophical Institute of Victoria received a Royal Charter in 1859 and became the Royal Society of Victoria. In 1860 this Society assembled Victoria's only attempt at inland exploration, the Burke and Wills expedition.
A Melbourne Town Council had been created in 1847, and one by one the new suburbs also gained Town Councils, complete with mayors. In 1851 a party-elected Legislative Council dominated by squatter interests and it opposed the notion of universal sufferage and the role of the Legislative Assembly. In December 1854 discontent with the licensing system on the goldfields led to the rising at the Eureka Stockade, one of only two armed rebellions in Australian history (the other being the Castle Hill convict rebellion of 1804).
In November 1856 Victoria was given a constitution and in the following year full responsible government with a two house Parliament. For Melbourne, the major consequence was the magnificent edifice of Parliament House, Melbourne, which was started in December 1855 and completed in stages between 1856 and 1929. The boom fuelled by gold and wool lasted through the 1860s and '70s. Victoria suffered from an acute labour shortage despite its steady influx of migrants, and this pushed up wages until they were the highest in the world. Victoria was known as "the working man's paradise" in these years. The Stonemasons Union won the eight-hour day in 1856 and celebrated by building the enormous Melbourne Trades Hall in Carlton.
Melbourne's population reached 280,000 in 1880 and 490,000 in 1890. For a time it was the second-largest city in the British Empire, after London. In terms of area, Melbourne was already one of the largest cities in the world. Rather than building high-density apartment blocks like European cities, Melbourne expanded in all directions in the characteristic Australian suburban sprawl, with the middle classes living in detached villas on large blocks of land, while even the working class lived in reasonably comfortable cottages in the northern and western suburbs, although older areas like Fitzroy and Collingwood became slums. Most of the new heavy industry was concentrated in the western suburbs. The wealthy built huge mansions beside the sea or in the picturesque Yarra Valley. The new suburbs were serviced by networks of trains and trams which were among the largest and most modern in the world. Melbourne's civic pride was demonstrated by the huge edifice of the Royal Exhibition Building, built in 1880 to house the Melbourne International Exhibition.
In the 1880s the long boom culminated in a frenzy of speculation and rapid inflation of land prices known as the Land Boom. Governments shared in the wealth and ploughed money into urban infrastructure, particularly railways. Huge fortunes were built on speculation, and Victorian business and politics became notorious for corruption. English banks lent freely to colonial speculators, adding to the mountain of debt on which the boom was built. In 1891 the inevitable happened: a spectacular crash brought the boom to an abrupt end. Banks and other businesses failed in large numbers, thousands of shareholders lost their money, tens of thousands of workers were put out of work. Although there are no reliable statistics, there was probably 20 percent unemployment in Melbourne throughout the 1890s. The city's growth stalled, and by 1905 Sydney had resumed its place as Australia's largest city.
[edit] Australia's capital
Melbourne's status as Australia's largest city lasted long enough, however, for it to become the seat of government of the new Commonwealth of Australia when the six colonies federated in 1901. Parliament House in Spring St was lent to the Parliament of Australia, while Victoria's Parliament found temporary accommodation in the Royal Exhibition Building. Due to long delays in establishing permanent capital at Canberra, Melbourne remained Australia's capital until 1927. This had important long-term consequences. Melbourne became the centre of the Commonwealth Public Service, the defence forces, the diplomatic corps (admittedly very small until World War II), and also to a large extent of the legal profession, all of which reinforced the supremacy of Melbourne University and exclusive schools such as Melbourne Grammar School, Scotch College and Xavier College. Although Sydney gradually usurped Melbourne's position as a financial centre, Melbourne retained its intellectual and cultural dominance for many years. Conservative politics were also centred on Melbourne, with Alfred Deakin, William Irvine, Stanley Bruce, John Latham and Robert Menzies representing Melbourne's dominance.
Melbourne had 490,000 people in 1890, and this figure scarcely changed for the next 15 years as a result of the crash and subsequent long slump. Immigration dried up, emigration to the goldfields of Western Australia and South Africa increased, and the high birthrate of the mid 19th century fell sharply. Not until about 1910 did economic growth resume, and Melbourne's population reached 670,000 by 1914. But the boom years did not return, and the level of wages remained far lower than it had been in the 1880s. As a result urban poverty became a feature of city life, and the slum areas of the inner industrial suburbs spread. Organised crime was rife, with gang fights in the streets of Collingwood and underworld figures like Squizzy Taylor legendary. There was, however, surprisingly little successful revolutionary politics in response to these conditions. Even the Labor Party was much less successful in Melbourne than it was in Sydney and other Australian cities. Labor did not form a majority government in Victoria until 1952.
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Melbourne's mood was also darkened by the terrible sacrifices of World War I, in which 112,000 Victorians enlisted and 16,000 were killed. There were bitter political divisions during the war, with Melbourne's Irish-born Catholic Archbishop Daniel Mannix leading opposition to conscription for the war and the Labor Party suffering a traumatic split. Another 4,000 Victorians died in the Spanish flu epidemic which followed the war. There was a modest revival of prosperity in the 1920s, and the population reached 1 million in 1930, but in 1929 the Wall Sreet Crash ushered in another Depression, which lasted until World War II. During these years Melbourne acquired another great landmark, the Shrine of Remembrance in St Kilda Road, largely built by unemployed workers during the Depression. The population stagnated again, and was still only 1.1 million in 1940. During World War II, although Canberra was officially the capital, most of the military and civilian administration was centred in Melbourne, and the city's economy benefited from wartime full employment and the influx of American service personnel (including General Douglas MacArthur, who made his headquarters in Collins St).
[edit] Post-war Melbourne
After World War II, a new era of increasing prosperity arrived, fuelled by high prices for Victoria's wool, increased government spending on transport and education, and the stimulus of renewed high immigration. Unlike prewar immigration, which had been mostly from the British Isles, the postwar program brought an influx of Europeans, at first mostly refugees from eastern and central Europe. A large proportion of these immigrants were Jews, and the Jewish population of Melbourne became the largest population proportionally of any Australian city. (at about 1.4% in 1970 [2]) They were followed by migrants from Italy, Greece and the Netherlands. Later, in the 1960s, migrants came from Yugoslavia, Turkey and Lebanon. These inflows rapidly transformed the city's demographic profile and many aspects of its life. This new growth required new spending on infrastructure such as roads, schools and hospitals, which had been neglected during the long decades of recession and low growth between 1890 and 1940. Sir Henry Bolte, Premier from 1955 to 1972, was responsible for much of this rapid development of infrastructure. Under Bolte, some of the old inner-city slums were bulldozed and the dislocated poor were put into high-rise blocks of state-owned apartments.
Since the 1970s, the pace of change in Melbourne has been increasingly rapid. The end of the White Australia Policy brought the first significant Asian migration to Melbourne since the gold rushes, with large numbers of people from Vietnam, Cambodia and China arriving. For the first time, Melbourne acquired a large Muslim population, and the official policy of multiculturalism encouraged Melbourne's various ethnic and religious minorities to maintain and celebrate their identities. At the same time, the practice of mainstream Christianity largely declined, leading to a secularisation of public life. State patronage of the arts led to a boom in festivals, theatre, music and the visual arts. Tourism became a major industry, bringing still more foreign faces to Melbourne's streets. Two new universities opened, Monash University in 1961 and La Trobe University in 1967, followed by others in the 1980s, maintaining Melbourne's place as a leader in tertiary education.
By the end of the 20th century Melbourne had 3.8 million people, inhabiting an urban sprawl from Werribee in the south-west to Healesville in the north-east and encompassing the whole of the Mornington Peninsula and Dandenong Ranges to the south and east. The growth of private car use and lack of further expansion of rail and tram networks by successive governments, led to a program of freeway building in the 1970s and 1980s, solving some problems but creating others. Partly as a result of the increasing difficulty of travelling across the city, the old business centre declined, and satellite suburbs such as Frankston, Dandenong and Ringwood, and further out Melton, Sunbury and Werribee, became centres of manufacturing, retailing and administration. As a result, industrial employment in the old working class inner suburbs declined, with these areas rapidly gentrifying in the 1990s and 2000s.
These trends, along with cyclical recession and poor governance contributed to a financial crash in 1989, leading to the forced sale of one of Victoria's best-known symbols, the State Bank of Victoria. This was followed by a deep recession. Melbourne's population growth slowed during the early 1990s as employment contracted, with a rise in migration to other states such as Queensland. In turn this recession contributed to the fall of Joan Kirner's Labor government and the election in 1992 of a radical free-market Liberal government under Jeff Kennett. Kennett's team restored Victoria's finances by making sweeping cuts to public expenditure, closing many schools, privatising the tramways and electricity production, and reducing the size of the public service. These reforms came at a high social cost, but ultimately restored confidence in Melbourne's economy and led to a resumption of growth. By 1999 Kennett was voted out, but key landmarks that his government commissioned, such as the Crown Casino, the Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre and the new Melbourne Museum, remain.
In the early years of the 21st century, Melbourne entered a new period of high economic and population growth under the more cautious Labor government of Steve Bracks, which restored public expenditure on health and education. As the city's suburbs continued to sprawl outwards, the Bracks government sought to restrict new suburban growth to designated growth corridors and encourage higher-density apartment living in the city's main transport hubs. The city's Central Business District experienced a major resurgence in the 2000s, aided by a large increase in inner-city apartment living, the opening of new public spaces such as Federation Square and the new Southern Cross railway station, a determined marketing campaign by Lord Mayor John So's City Council and continuing development of the Southbank and Docklands precincts.
