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Melbourne History
Although mystery surrounds many aspects of Australian prehistory, it seems
certain that the first humans came here across the sea from southeast Asia
around 50,000 to 70,000 years ago. There were about 38 tribal groups living
around Victoria when white people arrived. Aborigines were traditionally tribal
people living in extended family groups and using the environment sustainability.
It is believed that Aboriginal people were the first to make polished,
edge-ground, stone tools, to cremate their dead and to engrave and paint
representations of themselves and animals. Although their society was
technologically simple, it was culturally sophisticated, using complex
ceremonies which integrated religion, history, law, art and codes of behaviour.
Aboriginal people around Victoria resisted white settlement (which began in
1803), and although some settlements had to be abandoned, the original
inhabitants were really just postponing the inevitable. Soon after white
settlement, the Aboriginal people were dispossessed of their lands, struck down
by introduced diseases and massacred in their thousands. Estimates suggest that
the pre-contact Victorian Aboriginal population was between 60,000 and 100,000.
Between 1834 and 1860, this figure dropped from 15,000 to 2000, and by the 1880s
there were just over 800 Aborigines left in the state.
Melbourne was established in 1835 by a group of Tasmanian entrepreneurs, and is
the youngest city of its size in the world. Although the settlement was not
named until 1837, its characteristic grid layout was imposed by military
surveyor Robert Hoddle the same year, and by 1840 over 10,000 people had been
attracted to the area. The colony of Victoria was formed in 1851, with Melbourne
as its capital, neatly coinciding with the discovery of gold, which swiftly and
inexorably transformed them both.
The gold-rush brought a huge influx of immigrants from around the world, and the
wealth it generated created a city of extravagant proportions. In 30 years the
designs of the city's architects, the skills of its many European tradespeople
and the designation of large areas of the city for public parkland had
established what was known as 'Marvellous Melbourne - the Paris of the
Antipodes'. This progress was, however, temporarily halted in 1890 by the first
of the many devastating financial crashes that have afflicted the city.
The ethnic mix of Melbourne's population has always been an important influence
on the city's character: the Chinese and Irish diggers attracted by gold in the
19th century and the post war wave of refugees and migrants from all over Europe
(particularly Greece, Italy, Yugoslavia, Turkey and Poland), and more recently
from Vietnam and Cambodia, have all contributed elements of their cultures to
what could otherwise have been a conservative, passionless English society.
These influences are witnessed in Melbourne's robust and varied architecture,
restaurants, festivals and entertainment.
After WWII, Melbourne went into a long period of stable, occasionally
complacent, conservative government. Although the city's political establishment
liked to think it was the centre of national gravity, in fact Sydney gradually
took precedence on the national scale until it became clear, by the 1960s, that
Melbourne's star had been eclipsed. A strong rivalry between the two cities
still occasionally surfaces.
Conservative dominance continued until the '80s, when the Labor party took
office and the city hit boom times. Land prices just kept going up, and so did
buildings, until 1990 when the whole thing fell in a heap. In 1992 radical
conservative autocrat Jeff Kennett took the reins, provoking ire and admiration
in seemingly equal doses. Under Kennett, Melbourne waved goodbye to social
services and healthcare, and hello to the Grand Prix and the Crown Casino.
Kennett's Liberal government was comprehensively ousted in 1999's state
election, and a refurbished Labor party is now busily reinventing Victoria in
the Blairite mould of moderately progressive, strongly pro-business centre-left
government. Large construction projects have continued unabated, fuelling
another one of those regular property booms that have created and decimated
fortunes ever since the city was established. Many of the holes in the inner
city business district are being redeveloped; one of the newest developments is
Federation Square, an architecturally innovative if controversial use of public
cultural space.
The city continues to support a healthy cultural scene, especially in the fields
of cinema and contemporary music.
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