MARVELLOUS MELBOURNE
The city of Melbourne was founded by John Batman and John Pascoe Fawkner in 1835, with a collection of tents and wooden huts along the Yarra River. The settlement soon became a replica of a small English village.
Governor Bourke, of New South Wales, visited the new town on 10th April 1837 and named it Melbourne, after the then British Prime Minister, William Lamb 2nd Viscount Melbourne.
Hoddle was commissioned by Bourke, to design the new town. This became known as the Hoddle Grid, with major roads 30 meters wide and blocks 200 square metres. The surveys were intended to prepare the land sales for public auction. John Batman bought the property on the corner of Swanston and Flinders Streets, at the first public land auction. Now it is home to the Young and Jackson Hotel.
Most of the early town was built of timber, and almost nothing from this period survived. Two exceptions are St James Old Cathedral (1839) now in King Street, and St Francis Catholic Church (1841) in Elizabeth Street.
It was the first Anglican Cathedral in Melbourne. Built in 1847 on land bounded by Collins, William and Bourke Streets. The colonial Georgian style constructed with bluestone footings and locally quarried sandstone. It was moved in 1914 to King and Batman Streets, West Melbourne.
The oldest church in Victoria on its original site and the first Catholic Cathedral in Melbourne. The nave was completed in 1843 and the church opened for the first mass in 1845. It is built in stuccoed Puginian Gothic style and designed by Samuel Jackson. It is said to be the busiest church in Australia today. Mary MacKillop was baptised at St Francis in 1842 and later was confirmed.
The discovery of gold in the areas surrounding Ballarat and Bendigo, in 1850, changed the face of Melbourne. People came from all over the world wanting to get rich. The population increased enormously.
The largest nugget found was dubbed ‘Welcome Stranger’ weighing almost 70 kilograms. Unfortunately it was broken into pieces as the district lacked scales large enough to weigh the 60 by 30 centimetre nugget.
Gold brought prosperity to Melbourne. It changed the culture and economics of this city. Innovation flourished. Imposing tall buildings sprang up all over the city.
Omnibuses, hanom cabs and wagons swarmed the city. The rateable property in the city was valued at ten million pounds with a net annual value of a million.
Architects such as JJ Clark, Joseph Reed, Leonard Terry and Lloyd Tayler, were able to bring their artistic dreams to fruition. They showed the same devotion to Italian classicism as their contemporaries in Britain. Banks, offices and clubs were reinterpretations of villas, temples and palaces.
The expression Marvellous Melbourne’ is attributed to the Daily Telegraph journalist, George Augustus Sala (1828-1895), from his highly popular style of word-painting.
From an article written by George Augustus Sala dated Saturday 8th August 1885 in The Argus Newspaper.
But it is desirable for many reasons that I should explain why I have called Melbourne a marvellous city.
The Town Hall is gigantic and imposing, the General Post office vast, comely, and admirably arranged.
(photo supplied by State Library Victoria)
There is a splendid university. Government house is not perhaps architecturally a thing of beauty which should live for ever, still it affords a spacious and dignified residence for His Excellency Sir Henry Loch and his lady.
There are half a dozen theatres, more or less. There is a very grand permanent Exhibition building and a fine aquarium. When the new Houses of Parliament are finished they will form a sumptuous pile indeed. There is one thoroughly excellent and admirable hotel in Melbourne, Menzies’ and a few other far from uncomfortable caravanserais. There are asylums, markets, hospitals, coffee palaces, public and private schools, clubs, parks, gardens, racecourses and recreation-grounds in profusion in and about the city; and I need scarcely say that there are any number of big banks and insurance offices which in their architecture are more than palatial. The whole city, in short, teems with wealth, even as it does with humanity.
Well, you may say, what is there wonderful in all this? Melbourne is the prosperous capital of a prosperous British colony. What is there to marvel at in its possession of all or nearly all the features of the most advanced civilisation. But there is thus much that is marvellous in Melbourne. The city is not 50 years old.
But it was the gold fever of 1851 that made Melbourne marvellous. These were the days of alluvial deposits, of big nuggets looking at the diggers in the face, so to say. Large portions of the colony of Victoria were then a veritable Tom Tiddler’s ground, where gold was to be had for the picking up, for the scooping out, for the shovelling together. The consequence was that everybody, from all parts of the world, who had a little money and a great deal more energy and pluck, started for the diggings There was a proportion of weak kneed brethren whose pluck vanished as quickly as their money did, but it soon became a case of the survival of the fittest. There was left a residuum of real ” live men,” as the Americans say, and those live men and their sons have made Melbourne what she is, magnificent and marvellous.
And she continues to be a truly Marvellous city.
MARVELOUS MELBOURNE 