Gold-Rush Melbourne: The Hidden Laneways and the Boom City

Melbourne was laid out as a plain rectangular grid, wide and rational and public, on the Country of the Wurundjeri of the Kulin nations, and then gold changed everything. When gold was found in Victoria in the eighteen fifties, the colony grew rich almost overnight, and that fortune did two things at once. It filled the gaps between the grand official streets with a secret second city of narrow service lanes and glass-roofed arcades, and it raised, along the eastern edge of the grid on Spring Street, a civic quarter of parliament, treasury, theatre and cathedral to match the new wealth, beside the bluestone gaol where the bushranger Ned Kelly went to the gallows in eighteen eighty. To read Melbourne is to read those two answers to the same windfall: the hidden layer below and the grand quarter above. Both are best walked slowly, at your own pace.

The fortune that built a second city inside the grid

The gold did not just make Melbourne bigger. It made it double. The official plan was a confident colonial grid of wide streets, but the money overflowed into the spaces between them. Those service alleys behind the grand thoroughfares became the soul of the town. On the Historic Center: Gold-Rush Melbourne and its Laneways walk, the first reveal is Hosier Lane, a bluestone-cobbled service lane launched as a Street Art Gallery under the City Lights Initiative in nineteen ninety-eight. Because it needs no permit to paint, the walls change weekly and sometimes daily, so you are looking at a gallery you can never see twice. A single twenty thirteen paint-up brought over one hundred local street artists to these walls at once. This street-art culture grew straight out of the unglamorous gaps in the grid.

A few steps on, the same fortune shows its other face. The Block Arcade, built between eighteen ninety-one and eighteen ninety-three by the firm Twentyman and Askew, was modelled on Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele the Second, an interior street of mosaic-tiled floor, glass canopy on cast and wrought iron, and an octagonal rotunda. Its name records a lost social ritual: "doing the Block," the fashionable Victorian promenade along Collins Street, compared as early as the eighteen eighties to London's Bond Street and the boulevards of Paris. Nearby, the Royal Arcade opened in eighteen seventy to a design by Charles Webb and is the oldest surviving shopping arcade in Australia. Its carved wooden giants, Gog and Magog, were added in eighteen ninety-three, and their arms are triggered by Gaunt's clock to strike the bells on the hour. Wait a few minutes before the hour and you will hear a Victorian machine keep time exactly as it has for well over a century.

Chinatown, as old as the gold itself

The hidden Melbourne is not only architecture. The same eighteen fifty-one strike that filled the arcades drew Chinese immigrants on a large scale to what they called the New Gold Mountain. By eighteen fifty-five Chinese houses and businesses lined Little Bourke Street, and by the late eighteen fifties the colony of Victoria's Chinese population had reached about forty-five thousand. From the eighteen sixties, Chinese district associations bought land along the street for their clubrooms, and the community put down roots that never lifted. It is described as the longest continuous Chinese settlement in the Western world, held without a break for over a century and a half. That continuity was hard-won: after the colonies federated, the Immigration Restriction Act of nineteen oh one, the law behind the White Australia policy, restricted Chinese immigration for decades, and the community here endured through it. The quarter the gold brought into being has outlasted every boom since.

Up the hill, the gold colony's grand end

If the laneways are what the fortune whispered, Spring Street is what it announced. The Spring Street: The Gold Colony's Grand End walk reads the civic quarter at the top of the town, where grandeur and the gallows stand only a few blocks apart. It begins at the Old Melbourne Gaol, the oldest surviving penal establishment in Victoria, whose earliest cellblock opened on the first of January, eighteen forty-five, with a new bluestone wing rising between eighteen fifty-two and eighteen fifty-four in the first flush of gold. Well over one hundred and thirty people were hanged here. The most famous was Ned Kelly, hanged on the eleventh of November, eighteen eighty, recorded by the gaol as the one hundred and first person executed there. The place asks for a quiet, sober kind of attention, not a thrill.

A short walk away, the same wealth turned to spectacle. The Princess Theatre was rebuilt in its ornate Second Empire form in eighteen eighty-six by the architect William Pitt, in the years the city liked to call Marvellous Melbourne, and it is described as the oldest surviving entertainment site on mainland Australia. Its treasured ghost story, told as legend and not fact, holds that the baritone Frederick Federici died onstage in eighteen eighty-eight during Faust, after which a dress-circle seat was kept vacant for years in his honour.

Where a nation borrowed a house

The grandest claim on Spring Street is quieter than its columns. Parliament House, begun in the mid eighteen fifties to designs by Knight and Kerr, first sat on the twenty-fifth of November, eighteen fifty-six, and its planned crowning dome was never built, which makes it one of Melbourne's most famous unbuilt features. When the Australian colonies federated in nineteen oh one, there was no national capital yet, so the new federal parliament met right here until nineteen twenty-seven, when it left for Canberra and the Victorian parliament officially returned on the sixth of July that year. For the first quarter-century of the nation, the laws of all Australia were debated behind this colonnade. Across the road, the Hotel Windsor, Melbourne's only surviving purpose-built grand Victorian-era hotel, housed delegates finalising the constitution during the federal convention session of January eighteen ninety-eight.

The gold theme reaches its plainest statement at the Old Treasury Building, designed by John James Clark when he was just nineteen and built between eighteen fifty-eight and eighteen sixty-two. Its basement bluestone vaults were built to hold gold bullion, but by the time they were finished the first wild rush had passed, so they held government documents instead, a fortune already slowing written into empty cellars. The same confidence poured, patiently, into stone at Saint Patrick's Cathedral, begun in eighteen fifty-eight and not finished until its spires were completed in nineteen thirty-nine, the best part of a century of work. The walk ends among the roughly two hundred and seventy English elms of the Fitzroy Gardens, where Cooks' Cottage, shipped from Yorkshire in two hundred and fifty-three cases and forty barrels, reopened in nineteen thirty-four, the old world rebuilt in the new.

Two answers, one windfall

Read together, the laneways and Spring Street are a single story told twice. Gold gave Melbourne a hidden layer of lanes and arcades and a grand quarter of power and spectacle, both laid over far older Country. You can walk each at your own pace, with no group and no schedule. For the full set of routes through the gold-rush city, see our Melbourne walking tours.

Sources

• Old Melbourne Gaol, National Trust of Australia (Victoria): history of the gaol, executions, and Ned Kelly.
• Victorian Heritage Register / Heritage Victoria: listings for Flinders Street Station, the Block Arcade, the Royal Arcade, Parliament House, the Princess Theatre, and the Old Treasury Building.
• Old Treasury Building Museum: John James Clark, the bluestone vaults, and the Victorian gold rush.
• Parliament of Victoria: federal parliament in Melbourne, nineteen oh one to nineteen twenty-seven, and the return to Spring Street.
• City of Melbourne / Chinese Museum (Museum of Chinese Australian History): Chinatown and Little Bourke Street history.