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\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\tHenry Burn painted this view of Melbourne from Princes Bridge in 1862. At left is the just-completed Princes Bridge Hotel (today Young & Jackson’s). The twin-towered structure in the middle of the picture was St Paul’s School, opened in 1857. It adjoined St Paul’s Church, predecessor of today’s St Paul’s Cathedral. The square building in front of St Paul’s was the original City Morgue.<\/p>\n
Reproduced courtesy State Library Victoria<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t Collins Street became the city’s, and indeed the nation’s, ‘financial heart’. Just visible at the end of Collins Street is the elegant Treasury Building, built between 1858 and 1862.<\/p>\n\t The gold decade (1851-61) was a period of spectacular growth. Timber buildings in the city were rebuilt in solid stone and brick and work commenced on important public institutions \u2015the State Library and the University of Melbourne in 1854, Parliament House in 1856, and the Treasury Building in 1858. Houses were built for thousands of new immigrants and by 1853 large-scale subdivisions mushroomed in the city fringes. Better roads and the development of a rail network accelerated the suburban boom.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The demand for housing sent land prices skyrocketing. The poor, displaced from the centre of the city by commercial and industrial development, clustered in tiny ‘gimcrack’ housing in Fitzroy, Collingwood and North Melbourne, while the wealthy built villas in Toorak, Hawthorn, and Kew. The ‘poor west vs affluent east’ pattern was established early.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t Large numbers of subdivisional sales were held during the 1850s. Private owners, who had bought broad acres during earlier slumps, reaped large profits.<\/p>\n\t Historian, Graeme Davison, describes Gold Rush Melbourne as an ‘instant’ city, with all the problems associated with rapid urban growth \u2015 providing clean food and water, sufficient housing, help for the poor and public order.<\/p>\n Hygiene and sanitation were inadequate, undermining the city’s claims to greatness. Visitors complained of the filth that littered the city’s streets. There was no drainage or sewerage, and house blocks were often contaminated with sewage. City Inspectors found one yard covered ‘with twelve inches of green stagnant water’. Inside the dwelling, all five children were lying ill, some dying.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t The first railway line was built in 1854, linking the town centre and Sandridge (Port Melbourne). Other lines soon followed, linking the city and its fast-growing suburbs. Country areas, including Geelong and Ballarat, were among the first to be connected to the city, and in the 1860s a large central station at Spencer Street was built to service these routes.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t It is hard to over-estimate the impact of the telegraph in a society accustomed to the leisurely pace of communication by letter. The telegraph, transmitting signals over an electric cable, offered what appeared to be almost instantaneous communication. News, business affairs and personal messages could be transmitted and answered in hours, not weeks.<\/p>\n The first telegraph line linked Melbourne and Williamstown in 1854 and by 1867 almost all Victorian towns were linked by telegraph.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t The Melbourne Public Library (now State Library Victoria) was established in 1853 by Lieutenant-Governor Charles Joseph La Trobe and Supreme Court judge Redmond Barry \u2015 ‘one of a group of institutions intended to counteract the upheaval of the gold rush.’ The library was secular, democratic and enlightened, offering free access to self-improvement through learning, providing people had clean hands!<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t Medical care in the gold city was rudimentary at best. Most patients were treated at home by visiting doctors or were simply left to die. Paupers were sometimes admitted to Melbourne Hospital, the only public hospital, but demands for medical services in the early 1850s overwhelmed the hospital’s facilities. The death rate of patients was as high as one in four.<\/p>\n Women’s health services commenced in 1856 with the opening of the Lying-in Hospital, later the Royal Women’s Hospital. Before this, poor women, widowed or deserted by partners, or pregnant out of wedlock, were largely excluded from access to care.<\/p>\n\t By the mid-1850s gold surpassed wool as Victoria’s chief export. Profits were channelled into public projects, and with private investment Melbourne became a thriving commercial centre.<\/p>\n Local manufacturing for building supplies \u2015 lumber and bricks, in particular \u2015 boomed as did agricultural production. Tens of thousands of acres were cleared for wheat, cereals, market gardens, and orchards.<\/p>\n With population growth came a new consumer market. Before the Gold Rush, 50 merchants operated in Melbourne: by the peak of the gold boom there were more than 300. This new merchant class challenged the previously-unrivalled power of the pastoral generation. As E. Carlton Booth recalled: ‘Every shopkeeper became a merchant and every merchant a prince’.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t A booming economy needed credit, and a place for savings. By 1860 eight of Australia’s 15 trading banks were headquartered in Melbourne.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t New warehouses appeared near cargo discharge points on the Yarra River and railway termini. Most warehouses were built in bluestone, as security against thieves and fire.<\/p>\n\t Retail activity in the city settled into a pattern, one maintained to this day. Bourke Street became the preferred ‘strip’, while Collins Street had smaller, specialty stores. The first of Melbourne’s shopping arcades, Queen’s Arcade, opened in 1853.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t The Royal Arcade, the longest-standing arcade in Australia, opened in Bourke Street in 1870. This new style of shopping ‘centre’ used expensive city land efficiently and offered respite from the noise and grime of city streets.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t Many families returned to Melbourne from the diggings and established businesses. Hundreds put their savings into small shops, becoming known as ‘the shopocracy of Melbourne’.<\/p>\n A typical shop in Gold Rush Melbourne had a small street frontage with the tenant and his family living upstairs. Opening hours were from early morning until late at night, six days a week, with the wife often taking charge.<\/p>\n The most successful of Gold Rush retailers was Irish-born Mars Buckley, who with his wife Elizabeth and partner C. J. Nunn, started a drapery business in Bourke Street in 1852. By 1861 the store was making an extraordinary \u00a340,000 per year profit.<\/p>\n\t Merchant, William Westgarth, marveled in 1857: ‘Business is on a great scale, with great works of all kinds going on, and high wages to the labouring classes.’ Wages may have been high, but men laboured hard to earn them. No sickness entitlements were available or compensation for work-related death or injury.<\/p>\n Local manufacturing expanded, helped by protective tariffs. By 1871 more than 30 per cent of wage-earners worked in manufacturing. Factories and workshops lined the Yarra River and other waterways, their smells mingling with the stench of drains and untreated sewage.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t Gold Rush Melbourne offered a dizzying array of entertainment, catering for every taste.<\/p>\n Bourke Street attracted the bachelor, with its brightly-lit bars, bowling alleys and billiard saloons. Promenading along Collins Street between Swanston and Elizabeth, or ‘Doing the Block’, became a favourite pastime of the wealthy.<\/p>\n There were excursions by railway to the beach at St Kilda, parks and gardens were created and sport as a spectacle emerged. Several new theatres were built, the most popular being George Coppin’s Theatre Royal, where stars such as the notorious Lola Montez performed.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t By the late 1850s some 300,000 people visited the Botanic Gardens each year. Ferdinand von Mueller, Director from 1857, aroused curiosity with his constant introduction of new plant species and an aviary.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t Some Gold Rush amusements were less restrained. At Cremorne Gardens, established in 1853, unmarried men and women socialised and danced late into the night \u2015 much to the ire of moralists.<\/p>\n\t Melburnians’ passion for sport emerged in the gold decade. Richard Horne wrote of cricket in 1859: ‘The mania for bats and balls in the broiling sun during the last summer exceeded all rational excitements.’<\/p>\n Australian Rules Football also emerged in the 1850s. By 1859 it was codified. Teams, based on suburbs, gained members and ‘barrackers’ and a distinctly-Melbourne winter leisure pattern was established.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t The first English cricket team arrived in Melbourne in 1861. The long tradition of a series played between England and Australia for ‘The Ashes’ (of the first ball) began.<\/p>\n\t\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t‘Collins Street’, by Francois Cogn\u00e9, artist, 1864
\nCourtesy\u00a0State Library Victoria<\/a><\/em>\nStreets paved with gold?<\/h1>\n
The suburban divide<\/h3>\n
\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\tProvident diggers in Melbourne 1853, by S.T. Gill, artist, 1872
\nReproduced courtesy State Library Victoria<\/a><\/em>\nAn ‘instant city’<\/h3>\n
\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t‘The City Terminus of the M. & H. B. Railway Compy. 1854’, by S. T. Gill, artist, 1854
\nReproduced courtesy State Library Victoria<\/a><\/em>\n\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\tTelegraph Station, Melbourne, by Thomas Ham, lithographer, c.1854
\nReproduced courtesy State Library Victoria<\/a><\/em>\n\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t‘The Public Library’, by Nicholas Chevalier, 1860
\n<\/em>Reproduced courtesy State Library Victoria<\/a><\/em>\n\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\tMelbourne Lying-In Hospital, by Charles Nettleton, c. 1868
\nReproduced courtesy Medical History Museum, University of Melbourne (MHMA1309.1)\nA commercial city<\/h2>\n
\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\tBank of Victoria, Collins Street East, Melbourne, by Samuel Calvert, engraver, c.1863
\nReproduced courtesy State Library Victoria<\/a><\/em>\n\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\tWarehouse on the corner of King and Lonsdale streets, by Cox and Luckin, photographer, 1861
\nReproduced courtesy State Library Victoria<\/a><\/em>\nRetail economy<\/h3>\n
\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\tRoyal Arcade, by S. T. Gill, artist, c.1871
\nReproduced courtesy National Library of Australia <\/em>\n\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\tBuckley & Nunn, 27 Bourke Street East, Melbourne, by Davies & Co., photographer, c.1865
\nReproduced courtesy State Library Victoria<\/a><\/em>\nWorking life<\/h3>\n
\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t‘The Weaving Room’, by C.T. Winter, engraver, 1868
\nReproduced courtesy\u00a0State Library Victoria<\/a><\/em>\n\tA cultured city<\/h2>\n
\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\tBotanical Gardens by Fran\u00e7ois Cogn\u00e9, artist and lithographer, 1863
\nReproduced courtesy State Library Victoria<\/a><\/em>\n\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\tCremorne Gardens broadsheet for the season 1860-61
\nReproduced courtesy Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne<\/em>\nA sporting public<\/h3>\n
\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\tMelbourne Cricket Ground, published by Charles Troedel, 1864
\nReproduced courtesy State Library Victoria<\/a><\/em>\n