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Robert Hoddle, the surveyor who laid out the grid of early Melbourne, tells us in his journal how However Governor Bourke came to his tent one morning with names of the streets.
Edmund Finn came to Melbourne in the early days of European settlement and worked as a journalist under the name of Garryowen. Here is what he tells of the city street names.
Dunkeld is a small rural town of some 450 people located at the foot of the Grampians and at the southern tip of Grampians National Park.
It is 259 km west of Melbourne via the Glenelg Highway. The surrounding landscape is dominated by Mt Abrupt (827 m) and Mt Sturgeon (548 m) which were both named by Major Mitchell who was the first known European in the area. Mitchell camped for three days at the foot of Mt Sturgeon in 1836, during his Australia Felix expedition.
The first pastoralists took up properties here in the late 1830s. A small township developed which was initially known as Mt Sturgeon but, as the early settlers were predominantly Scottish, it was renamed Dunkeld after a Scottish town which was the principal locality of the Caledonian picts in Roman times.
The picturesque setting has drawn a number of artists over the years, including Louis Buvelot, Eugene von Guerard and Nicholas Chevalier who all rendered paintings of the district. The area is known principally for the production of superfine wool.
The Dunkeld Cup is held every year in November and the Dunkeld Festival in December.
After another kilometre Silverband Rd ends at a T-intersection with Grampians Rd. Opposite is a picnic and swimming area at the western edge of Lake Bellfield which is a popular spot to dangle a line for redfin and trout. A guesthouse was built here at the end of the 19th century but the valley was flooded in the 1960s to create the reservoir. Petrol-driven motor boats are not permitted although electric-powered boats and rowing are okay.
If you turn left, back towards Halls Gap, Lake Bellfield will be to the right. 2.3 km north of the intersection is the north-western corner of the lake where there is a caravan park, a picnic area and Observation Point. It is another 2 km to the National Park Visitors’ Centre and 4.5 km to the Halls Gap shops.
Just beyond the Jimmy Creek Picnic Area, on the other side of the road, the unsealed Jimmy Creek Rd turns off to the left. It leads to Mafeking.
Some small sawmilling companies worked this area for timber in the 19th century but the area is of interest today because of a short-lived goldrush which occurred in 1900. The landscape was devastated by the goldminers who removed the wattle, tea-tree and bracken fern in the search for gold. The stringybark forests were lopped to supply bark and timber for miner’s huts, mining stays and fuel. Some old trees remain, along with fern gullies and regenerating forest.
There is an attractive picnic area, a campground and an information board but this area is definitely unsuitable for children as there are a number of dangerous mineshafts.
Brownings Walk (one hour return) takes in some remaining historic features. A pamphlet is available from the Grampians National Park Visitors’ Centre at Halls Gap. It identifies various features of the walk, including an old-growth stringybark, a regenerated gully, the site of the first claim, tail races, old shafts, a dam embankment used for water storage and open-cut minesites which were worked by means of hydraulic sluicing. A jet of water was directed onto the face of a cutting to dislodge material. The earth was then shovelled into a contraption known as a ‘Tom’ which consisted of two boxes laid atop one another. Water was directed into the upper box where a grate trapped the coarser gravels, stones and rocks while the finer particles of gravel, sand and gold fell through to the second box. There a series of bars or ripples at the bottom of the box helped trap fine gold particles while the water and lighter material ran off as overflow.
South of this point there are a number of attractions associated with the Grampians Tourist Road and Victoria Valley Road (which branches off the Grampians Tourist Road).
Halls Gap is located on the floor of the picturesque Fyans Valley, 250 metres above sea-level. By road it is 251 km north-west of Melbourne via Ararat.
It is essentially a tourist village at the eastern edge of Grampians National Park – one of the state’s most outstanding natural features and a major destination for holidaymakers and bushwalkers. The main approaches are from the south (throught the heart of the Grampians from Dunkeld on the Glenelg Highway), from the south-east (i.e., Ararat), from the east (via Stawell) and from the north (access is along a clearly signposted road which heads west off the Western Highway south of Horsham).
Aborigines have been living on the land hereabouts for at least 5000 years. The first Europeans to traverse the area were the exploratory party of Thomas Mitchell. They camped atop the highest peak in 1836 and Mitchell named it Mt William after William IV, then King of England. He named the range after the Grampians in his native Scotland.
Edward Eyre and Robert Briggs followed in Mitchell’s footsteps in the late 1830s but the first settler was Charles Browning Hall who set out in search of a suitable grazing run when he found the cattle market at Port Phillip Bay overstocked in 1841. He followed Mitchell’s route northwards, establishing a station just east of the Grampians in a spot known as ‘Mokepilli’ to the indigenous inhabitants (probably the Tjapwurong tribe) with whom he shared cordial relations. They acted as his stockmen and showed him their bush skills.
By following Aboriginal tracks he came upon the gap which now bears his name and there met members of either the Jardwa or Buandik tribe. Both occupied the Grampians (which they knew as ‘Cowa’), using the rock shelters for sacred ceremonies and as a canvas for paintings and etchings.
Hall also explored Roses Gap which is named after Philip Rose who took over the run in 1842. The Halls Gap area was later used by cattle duffers until being converted into a sheep run.
People began to frequent the area more regularly in the 1860s with the discovery of gold at Stawell, the commencement of saw-milling and the opening of the Heatherlie Quarry. A timber and bark hut known as Delley’s Inn was established in 1870.
In the 1870s the growing population at Stawell led to the demand for a reliable water supply. John D’Alton devised a system to bring water from the Grampians via a tunnel hewn through the Mt Williams range. The project (completed in 1881) bought workers into the area and a small township developed at Borough Huts. Halls Gap’s first store was built nearby in 1876. Holiday homes and a mill were also built, along with the workers’ cottages and a school operated in the 1890s.
A tramline to Stawell was established in 1881-82 to aid shipment of the Grampians sandstone which was used in Stawell for the courthouse and St Patrick’s Church and, in Melbourne, for the new Government House, the Melbourne Town Hall, the law courts, the public library, the museum and a number of banks and churches. The opening of the tramline also enabled the transportation of timber and of passengers who began to frequent the Grampians for recreational purposes. In 1890 the growing tourist trade was recognised and encouraged when the first facilities were provided for a recreational camping reserve. The Grampians were declared a reserved forest in 1907.
In 1887 alluvial gold was found in Stony Creek. Despite the appearance of 300 prospectors, little gold was uncovered. Somewhat more substantial was the Mafeking goldrush which took place at Mt William between 1900 and 1912. At the foot of the mountain, businesses, hotels and tents quickly appeared although returns proved disappointing. Today there is a memorial stone, a picnic area and some abandoned mineshafts.
In 1923 naturalist and beekeeper Walter Zumstein opened a tourist park. That same year, Mt Victory Rd from Halls Gap to Zumstein’s was opened and the road south to Dunkeld was commenced.
School lessons commenced in 1921 at Halls Gap Public Hall (built in 1899) and a school building was erected in 1928. In the ensuing years tourism has gradually increased, particularly with the development of the highways. Today Halls Gap consists largely of accommodation possibilities, a pub, restaurants, cafes, a supermarket and a number of stores. There are caravan parks at Halls Gap, Wartook and Dunkeld. Jazz is regularly played at the Mountain Grand Guest House on the Main Rd.
This question is often asked in reference to early events in the Stawell area which show Pleasant Creek as the place where the event took place i.e. birth, deaths, marriages or residence.
Pleasant Creek is a small creek which rises in the Black Ranges a few miles south west of Stawell. The creek flows through Stawell West at the Caravan Camping Park, crossing Seaby Street near the racecourse; continuing along the Halls Gap Road, through the Illawarra forest and finally to Lake Lonsdale. A small quantity of gold was discovered in this
creek in May 1853 by a hut keeper who, with two shepherds were
shepherding Concongella Station sheep. They were occupying a bark
hut, known as Pleasant Creek Hut, on the eastern side of Pleasant
Creek not far from the present racecourse. This gold find was
described as at Pleasant Creek.
Some three years later, about 1856, miners were pegging out claims on the quartz reefs around Big Hill
in present Stawell. This would be about 2 kms from the original
gold find in Pleasant Creek. This quartz goldfield was called
Quartz Reefs, Pleasant Creek or The Reefs, Pleasant Creek. In
August 1857, a large alluvial gold find caused a big rush to what
we now know as the Illawarra/Deep Lead area some 6 kms north west
of the original gold find. This goldfield was described as at
Pleasant Creek and was distinguished by the names of its streets –
High Street, Broadway, Commercial road, Oxford Street. High Street
was situated about where the Western Highway passes through Deep
Lead today while Oxford Street runs off the highway past the Deep
Lead Cemetery. Commercial Road runs off the Halls Gap Road at
Illawarra and is signposted. Shortly after this big gold rush, in
June 1858, a Township called Stawell was proclaimed. This Township
was an area of 640 acres and was surveyed around the site of the
original 1853 gold find in Pleasant Creek.
Stawell is a former goldmining town of some 6700 people located just off the Western Highway, 32 km north-west of Ararat, 235 km north-west of Melbourne and 231 m above sea-level.
It is a service centre to the surrounding district and supports a number of industries such as brick-production, goldmining, a substantial and very successful fabric upholstery concern and an abattoir, as well as more traditional grazing and farming pursuits. With the Grampians close by Stawell has a growing tourism sector. Just south of town are the wineries of Great Western.
The Mukjarawaint Aborigines occupied the area prior to white settlement. The first European to pass through the town site was explorer Thomas Mitchell in 1836. The first station was ‘Concongella’ in 1841. Gold was discovered on Pleasant Creek by shepherd William McLachlan in May 1853.
The original settlement of Stawell was at Pleasant Creek and consisted of Cooper, Longfield, Leslie, Burgh Streets running east west and Austin, Griffiths, Seaby and Foster Streets running north south, according to a map of the area dated 1858.ÂÂ
It is interesting to note that Burgh Street has a dog leg in it and this was because the Pleasant Creek Hotel already existed and the road was formed around it
Longfield Street being the main road from Melbourne to Adelaide was the centre of the settlement and housed the Camp and the Constitution Hotel (left of photograph above). On the right of the photograph are the Pleasant Creek Court House and Gaol, Shire Office and the Literary Institute. The Telegraph Office and the Police Superintendent’s Residence were situated in Leslie Street and behind this were the Police Stables in Griffiths Street.
On the corner of Griffiths Street and Leslie Street was the One Tree Hill Cemetery
On the right in Seaby Street is the home of John Yabsley Wakeham, Mr Wakeham was a pioneer of Stawell, Whilst a merchant originally he amassed his fortune as a share holder in a number of mines in Stawell.
Pleasant Creek was part of Concongella Station before the discovery of gold. The only residents around at the time were two shepherds and a hutkeeper who lived on the “Western slopes of One Tree Hill” in a bark hut.
William McLachlan discovered gold at Pleasant Creek in May 1853 while fossicking in Pleasant Creek in his spare time found some gold. It only was a small amount of gold – some pennyweights – and although the find was made known, not many people came here then. This was then a very isolated area, water was scarce and there were no supplies of food while the goldfields of Ballarat, Bendigo, Clunes etc. were operating with stores already established. Some people did come and there were also people passing through here from South Australia to the Victorian goldfields who stopped and washed small quantities of gold.
Apparently some gold diggers came and went during the next four years – finding some small quantities – and in August 1857 – the big rush occurred at what became known as Commercial Street, Pleasant Creek – off the Halls Gap Road.
This rush spread across to Deep Lead and the Warden reported at the height of the rush, said that there were 25,000 to 30,000 people there.
At the same time, shafts were being sunk around Big Hill and gold was found in the quartz there. That Big Hill area was called Quartz Reefs, Pleasant Creek.
The government proclaimed and renamed the settlement ‘Stawell’ in 1858 after Sir William Foster Stawell, an attorney-general in Victoria’s first legislative assembly (1856) who became the chief justice of Victoria in 1857.
Much alluvial gold was found in the Illawarra/Deep Lead area but how much and who found it is not known. The diggers took their gold and left and the field had petered out by 1859 – only lasting less then two years with a very diminishing numbers of diggers.
As the alluvial gold began to diminish in the 1860s, the population and economic activity began to shift north-east to the Big Hill area where a new settlement, known as Quartz Reefs, developed around the quartz gold found at the foot of the hill. Thus the original town site became known as Stawell West. The two areas were amalgamated into the borough of Stawell in 1869.
When mining activity at Ballarat diminished in the late 1860s it freed up a flow of capital and experienced hands to the Stawell fields, initiating a boom period during the 1870s which saw new administration buildings erected close by the Big Hill mines. The railway further boosted local economic and social activity upon its arrival in 1876.
Huge amounts of gold were found and fortunes made. Of the 14 richest mines in Victoria. Number 8 on that list was the Cross Reef at Stawell and number 10 was the Magdala at Stawell. Mining here slowed down in the late 1880’s with many mines closing from then to the 1890’s and the last mine closed in 1920. By which time around 58 tonnes of gold had been extracted. The settlement survived the slow inevitable decline of the goldfields due to (a) its role as a service centre to the farming community and (b) the emergence of local industries such as a flour mill, brickworks, tannery and woollen mills. Gold mining recommenced at Stawell in 1981.
Of some historical interest is the fact that Marcus Clarke worked as a jackeroo to the north-west of town in the 1860s. The settlement of Glenorchy was the ‘Bullocktown’ of his ‘Bullocktown Sketches’ which were published in the Australasian.
Burnley, River Yarra
River Yarra, Burnley, c.1911.
Image courtesy of Mr. Tony Davies, London, U.K.
Adjoining the eastern boundary of Carlton, 2 km. north-east of Melbourne’s centre, Fitzroy was Melbourne’s first suburb. The eastern boundary of Fitzroy adjoins Collingwood.
The name comes form Sir Charles Fitz Roy, Governor of New South Wales, 1846-1855. Alexandra Parade divides the former Fitzroy municipality into Fitzroy North and Fitzroy South.
In 1839 the area of Fitzroy south of Alexandra Parade was subdivided into lots of about 12 ha. and offered for sale. The area was called Newtown (which tended to extend eastwards into present-day Collingwood), and Newtown subsequently was called Collingwood. Present-day Collingwood was East Collingwood. In 1850 the area now known as Fitzroy was made the Fitzroy Ward of the Melbourne City Council. Three years after East Collingwood became a municipality, a separate Fitzroy municipality was created on 10 September, 1858, by severance of the ward from Melbourne. By then its population was about 10,000 persons.
The layout of streets was mostly in the lands of private subdividers: the government surveyor had prescribed only main arteries such as Nicholson, Brunswick, Smith, Gertrude and Johnston Streets. Building types were a mixture of masonry, timber and prefabricated, a few mansions and predominantly terraces after the gold rushes. Several terraces in Gore Street, Victoria Parade and Gertrude Street are registered buildings.
Early religion and education had a strong Wesleyan component. There were three Wesleyan/Methodist schools (1841,1858,1862) and a church at the corner of Brunswick and Moor Streets (1842). The earliest surviving church is St. Mark’s Anglican, Gore Street (1855), with the Christian Israelite church in Fitzroy Street being only six years younger. Fitzroy’s earliest surviving building is the delicensed Devonshire Arms hotel in Fitzroy Street (1850).
Brunswick Street became the main commercial sector, and Smith Street less so but lying on the route to Heidelberg. The route skirted Fitzroy North, which was laid out in the mid 1850s as a more gracious suburb.
Fitzroy (south) was well positioned for working men’s housing, as they could walk to work locally or in Collingwood, Carlton, North Melbourne or Melbourne. Local work site included flour mills, footwear factories, a brewery, joinery works and timber yards. There were cricket and bowling clubs, but in 1865 football was some time off.
The Presbyterian church opened in 1851, moving along Napier Street to a new building in 1871, and the Mercy Sisters Convent in Nicholson Street was formed around Bishop Goold’s house (1850). Non-church schools began in 1855. The present primary school in George Street dates from 1855. A town hall was built in Napier Street in the early 1870s. In 1875 The Australian Handbook described Fitzroy as –
During the 1880s Fitzroy (south) became increasingly working class. Mansions became boarding houses, and the single men in them attracted prostitution as a local industry. Other local industries included sly-grogging, cocaine dealing and internecine activities between pushes of under-employed larrikans. Coinciding with the descent into unlawful activity the Churches increased the charitable activities, focusing on ragged children, facilities for single women and the relief of distress. Much of the philanthropic initiatives, though, came from organisations outside Fitzroy.
In 1883 the Fitzroy Football Club was formed from the remnants of the local Normanby club. It joined the Victorian Football Association and was one of the break-away clubs which formed he Victorian Football League in 1896. Like the Collingwood club, Fitzroy’s best years were its early ones, winning five premierships before 1914.
In 1886-7 three tramlines were opened through Fitzroy – Nicholson Street, Brunswick Street and Smith Street. The Smith Street route extended beyond Fitzroy’s borders by 1890 and had retail catchments in Collingwood and Northcote. It became a regional shopping strip. Foy and Gibsons, beginning as a drapery business in the 1870s, later became a landmark department store. In 1884 the Fitzroy side of Smith Street had several large furniture emporia. Names lasting until the next century included Clauscens furniture, Treadways drapery and Moran and Cato’s grocery chain. Gertrude, Brunswick and Smith Street were nearly all retail, commercial or licensed premises. Railways, on the other hand, were in Fitzroy North, with a spur line running southwards to near the Brunswick Street oval but not reaching beyond Alexandra Parade.
The Fitzroy council opened a pioneering free public library in 1877. The following year Fitzroy was proclaimed a city and in 1888 it substantially added to the town hall building to provide for the library and a court house. Fitzroy was described in 1893 in The Australian Handbook as –
At about that time Fitzroy’s pre-eminent entrepreneur MacPherson Robertson returned from America to introduce new kinds of confectionery to the boiled-lolly business he had begun in 1880 in the bathroom of his family’s Fitzroy home. The “Great White City” factory for MacRobertson’s confectionery in Smith Street occupied half a hectare by the 1920s. Robertson became a renowned philanthropist, particularly during the Melbourne centenary celebrations in 1934.
In Victoria Parade in 1893 the Irish Sisters of Charity began St. Vincent’s Hospital, which within twenty years became the second busiest in metropolitan Melbourne. One hundred years later it remained in inner Melbourne while several others had been closed or moved to outer suburbs, although the prospect of removal was canvassed in 1997. The Free Kindergarten Union (1908), began with a kindergarten in Fitzroy, and the Salvation army and the Presbyterian church established refuges for women. The impoverishment of the inner suburbs drew philanthropy, and the depression of the 1930s kept it there. The Methodist church’s Frederick Cato, a Fitzroy boy who established his grocery chain’s main warehouse in Brunswick Street, supported the Methodist Mission. The Aboriginal community had support from Pastor Doug Nicholls, who played for Fitzroy Football Club, 1932-37. The Brotherhood of St. Laurence, founded by Gerald Tucker in Newcastle in 1930, began in Fitzroy in 1933 when Tucker took over the Anglican Mission Church of St. Mary. He organised for the relief of distress and declared war on slums.
Tucker’s activity coincided with F. Oswald Barnett’s Slum Study Group, which led to the establishment of the Housing Commission in 1938. Fitzroy’s slum reputation was accompanied by the decline in the shopping areas as central Melbourne (Bourke Street) grew stronger and modern strips were built in newer suburbs.
When the Housing Commission built modern estates in outer suburbs in the postwar years some of Fitzroy’s population took advantage of the new houses. Their places were often taken by postwar immigrants. By 1954 about 12% of Fitzroy’s population was Italian-born; in 1966 33% were Italian or Greek-born, and Australian-born had fallen from two-thirds to one-half. The Italian-born and the population with an Irish background constituted a strong Catholic body. Within ten years, however, the numbers of Italian-born and Greek-born residents had halved and within another ten years they had halved again.
The first Commission estate was the mid 1950s St. Laurence Estate, off Hanover Street. The second was the high-rise block at Brunswick and Gertrude Streets, obliterating several streets of small cottages, mostly built before the more substantial terraces further east, but which would have been acceptable to gentry renovators in ten years time. The high-rise estate’s corner touches a Conservation Area which is on the National Estate Register. Moving up Brunswick Street from the estate there is the number-one store of the Cox Brothers retail empire which failed after the 1960s credit squeeze. Moran and Cato’s massive warehouses remain, but much else of Brunswick Street has been remodelled and redecorated to become an eateries and entertainment strip, picking up from Lygon Street, Carlton, where rents had forced out the zany and the esoteric.
Between 1947 and 1991 Fitzroy’s population fell by 44%, to 17,885. The non-Australian born component, however, moved from 42% in 1947, to a high of 49% in 1966 and back to 40% in 1976 and 1986. The ethnic composition moved from noticeably Italian/Greek to a wider range, with nearly 9% from Asia.
Fitzroy (south) has Catholic primary and secondary schools and a State primary school. Post-primary schooling is confined to the William Angliss College of TAFE.
In 1987 the median house price was 125% of the Melbourne median, and in 1996 it had moved to 175%. In 1997, however, it was reported that 49% of children in Fitzroy were in families on a welfare benefit or classified as working poor. This statistic reflects the long-term existence of people in Fitzroy who are on low incomes and who have experienced social inequality. In the 1970s secular welfare organisations were created – the Fitzroy Legal Service (Australia’s first independent free community legal service), the Aboriginal Legal Service, the Aboriginal Health Service and the Aboriginal Child Care Agency.
Fitzroy has class and ethnic diversity, the Brunswick Street retail and entertainment strip and housing stock ranging from solid bluestone foundations to high-rise estates on concrete columns.
Fitzroy municipality’s census populations were 11,807 (1861), 23,118 (1881), 34,938 (1921), 29,399 (1961) and 17,885 (1991).
On 22 June, 1994, Fitzroy city was united with Collingwood and Richmond cities to form Yarra city. On 18 November, 1993, part of Carlton North had been transferred from Melbourne city to Fitzroy.
Port Melbourne, a residential and industrial suburb, is 4 km. south-west of Melbourne. It is bounded on its north and west by the Yarra River, on the south by Hobsons Bay and on the east Bay South Melbourne. The residential part adjoins South Melbourne.
In 1839, four years after the first permanent settlement of Melbourne, Wilbraham Liardet settled at Port Melbourne, building a hotel and jetty on Hobsons Bay and operating a mail service to Melbourne. The area became known as Liardet’s Beach, although the official district name was Sandridge. Land sales were delayed until 1850. The gold rush immigration brought passengers and freight which made use of a government pier on Hobsons Bay, served by Australia’s first railway line from Melbourne to Hobsons Bay.
The first allotments surveyed in Sandridge were between Stokes Street and a linear lagoon on the east, now Esplanade East. (The lagoon was probably an ancient course of the Yarra River.) With the railway, the township was enlarged, westwards to the railway line and northwards to Raglan Street.
A Wesleyan church was opened in 1853, and a Wesleyan school in the following year. By 1860 there were also Anglican, Catholic and Presbyterian churches, a Catholic school and a National school (1857). On 13 July, 1860, the Sandridge borough was created by severance from Melbourne City Council, its boundaries being the railway line and the lagoon, but further north to Bourndary Street. In addition to the Railway Pier there were the Sandridge Pier and the Town Pier at the end of Bay Street. The Swallow and Ariell Steam Biscuit manufactory was opened in Rouse Street in 1854, beginning with ships biscuits and expanding to become a major industry by 1880. Thomas Swallow was the Council’s second mayor and was influential in several of its community activities.
The borough remained confined between the railway line and the lagoon because of a planned canal between the Yarra River and the bay and the increasingly noxious condition of the lagoon, contributed to by the run-off from Emerald Hill, South Melbourne. Ideas to make the lagoon a dock did not materialsie, and it remained a harbour for small craft.
The coast west of the railway Pier was Sandridge Beach or Fishermens Bend, which was added to the borough in 1863. Its sand was extracted for Melbourne’s building trade, and in some cases the excavations were used as night-soil dumps. Bone mills, goats and pig-keeping added to the effluvia.
In the early 1860s the cream and red brick courthouse was constructed in Sandridge to a design by architect JJ Clark of the Public Works Department. After the first local election in 1861 the Council had met in the court house for the first time. It was also around this time that the police station and bluestone lock-up were built as part of the law enforcement complex. None of these buildings is still used for its original purpose.
In 1869 the first town hall was built in Bay Street. After congested accomodation in the church schools and the National school, a State primary school was opened in Nott Street in 1874. The Australian Handbook described Sandridge in 1875 as –
In 1884 Sandridge was renamed Port Melbourne. Its role as a transport centre meant that Port Melbourne was home to a number of hotels in the 19th century. The Fountain Inn (1860s), on the corner of Raglan/Crockford and Bay Street, was one such hotel. It remains largely intact today.
Port Melbourne also supported a number of industries during the 1800s. These included a soap and candle works, rice and flour mills, a sugar refinery, boot factory, chemical works, gasworks and a distillery.
In 1893 Port Melbourne became a town and on May 14 1919 was proclaimed a city.
In 1934-35 the cement rendered reinforced concrete beam and Centenary Bridge was constructed in Port Melbourne. Built as part of the Unemployment Relief Program of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the bridge features ornamented piers at its entrances. It was also the major publicly funded monument erected as part of Victoria’s Centenary Celebrations and was officially opened by the Duke of Gloucester. Centenary Bridge is today listed by the National Trust (Vic).
The suburb of Port Melbourne is located on Hobsons Bay, on the east bank of the mouth of the Yarra River, four kilometres south-west of Melbourne. It is today a part of the City of Port Phillip, which was formed by the amalgamation of the former cities of Port Melbourne, South Melbourne and St Kilda in 1994.
The port still plays host to cargo vessels and passenger ships, which dock at Station Pier (the northern section of which was built between 1922 and 1930). In modern times the suburb has also developed from one of Melbourne’s poorest areas into a wealthier residential area, blending more modern development with restored public buildings and workers cottages
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