Famous Landmarks in Melbourne
Gold-boom wealth raised a grand hall, then a rebuilt station and a granite war memorial.
Melbourne's built landmarks span barely sixty years but three distinct booms. The Royal Exhibition Building, raised in the Carlton Gardens on the north-eastern edge of the central business district in 1879–1880, reflects a colony grown rich on gold, built in stone to a neoclassical design meant to rival Europe's own exhibition halls. Flinders Street station, where the city centre meets the Yarra River, replaced an 1854 terminus with an Edwardian-era building of curling Art Nouveau detail as rail traffic multiplied. Further south on St Kilda Road, the granite Shrine of Remembrance, finished in 1934, answers the losses of the First World War with a deliberately ancient vocabulary: a stepped roof and a classical portico rather than anything colonial.
Royal Exhibition Building
1879–1880 · Joseph Reed
A long neoclassical exhibition hall, some 150 metres end to end, set within formal gardens and flanked by streets on every side, its Great Hall wing the only original section still standing after later fires and demolitions.
Designed by Joseph Reed and built in 1879–1880 in the Carlton Gardens, it was raised to host the Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880–81 and went on to hold the larger Centennial International Exhibition in 1888. In 1901 its Great Hall was chosen as the site for the ceremony founding the Commonwealth of Australia. Wings were lost to fire and demolition through the twentieth century, but the Great Hall survived, was restored in the 1990s, and in 2004 became the first building in Australia awarded UNESCO World Heritage status.
- Its Great Hall was the site chosen for the ceremony that founded the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901.
- Queen Elizabeth II granted it the title "Royal" in 1980.
- In 2004 it became the first building in Australia to receive UNESCO World Heritage status.
Photo: Photograph taken by Diliff and straightened by Ian Fieggen (CC BY 2.5)
Flinders Street railway station
1909
An Art Nouveau passenger building with an ornamented, curved street frontage on a corner site above a river, fronting a much larger complex of thirteen platforms that stretches over more than two city blocks.
A railway terminus first opened in 1854 by the Melbourne and Hobson's Bay Railway Company, though the building standing today is not that original structure. It was the terminus of the first railway line built in Australia and, reputedly, the world's busiest passenger station in the 1920s. Patronage fell after the Second World War and further declined once additional city stations on the City Loop opened in the 1980s to relieve it. It now has thirteen platforms and remains the busiest station on the metropolitan network.
- It was reputedly the world's busiest passenger station in the 1920s.
- It was the terminus of the first railway line built in Australia.
- The building standing today is not the one that opened on the site in 1854.
Photo: Adam.J.W.C. (CC BY-SA 2.5)
Shrine of Remembrance
1934 · Hudson and Wardrop
A stone block built of grey Tynong granite in a severe classical style, its stepped, ziggurat-like roof capped by a small tiered element referencing the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, fronted by a colonnade recalling the Parthenon.
Designed by Phillip Hudson and James Wardrop, both First World War veterans, and completed in 1934, it was built to honour Victorians who served in that war and now commemorates all Australians who have served in any conflict. Built of Tynong granite in a classical style drawing on the Tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus and the Parthenon, its sanctuary holds the Stone of Remembrance, and a crypt beneath it contains a bronze statue of a soldier and his son with panels listing every unit of the Australian Imperial Force.
- Once a year, at 11 a.m. on Remembrance Day, sunlight through a roof aperture lights up the word "Love" in the crypt's inscription.
- Both of its architects were First World War veterans themselves.
- Its roof's crowning element references the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens.
Photo: Bernard Gagnon (CC BY-SA 4.0)
History
The land now built over has been used by Aboriginal Victorians, the Boonwurrung, Woiwurrung and Wurundjeri peoples of the Kulin nation, for over 40,000 years. A British penal settlement attempted at Port Phillip in 1803 was abandoned within a year; permanent colonial settlement followed only in 1835, when free settlers arrived from Van Diemen's Land and founded the town that became Melbourne. Within decades the young settlement was wealthy enough from the Victorian goldfields to fund the 1879–1880 Royal Exhibition Building, a hall grand enough to host two international exhibitions. It was later prosperous enough to rebuild its main railway terminus in 1909, replacing an 1854 station and coping with a rail network that briefly made it, by some counts, the world's busiest. By 1934 the same civic ambition produced the granite Shrine of Remembrance, commemorating a war that had reshaped the city's sense of itself.