Treasures unearthed on walk trail

‘You’re told you can find treasure,” writes Australian author Lorelei Vashti of Melbourne, her adopted home town. “The secret bars hidden down alleyways, the tiny shops filled with precious curios, the art openings overflowing on to the street.”

Reading these lines in Vashti’s memoir Dress, Memory shortly before a trip to Melbourne, they invoke an image of the city that’s familiar to me: bars, restaurants, shopping, laneways, galleries. But I’m soon to discover the city harbours treasures of many different kinds.

Some weeks later we’re in the Victorian capital with an afternoon to spare. We’re more than halfway through a week-long stay and we’ve done lots of eating and drinking, plenty of shopping, heaps of wandering and exploring. I’d like to see the city in a new way. Something structured would be nice but we still want to be independent.

A little research into self-guided walking tours leads us to download Museum Victoria’s free MV tours app which provides three self-guided tours of various parts of Melbourne. We opt for Melbourne’s Golden Mile, which confidently promises to lead us on “Australia’s most historical trail”, exploring heritage precincts, city streets, arcades and laneways.

The tour begins near the bottom of Flinders Street, outside the Immigration Museum. Much as I like to visit Melbourne, I’m embarrassingly ignorant about its history, so luckily our downloaded guide Charlotte (“a senior curator at Museum Victoria”) starts at the beginning, with the local Boonwurrung and Woiwarring Aboriginal people, the original inhabitants of this area.

The domed ceiling of the former banking chamber of the Commercial Bank of Australia

In 1835, Charlotte says, a group of graziers led by one John Batman — good name — came here from what was then Van Diemen’s Land and claimed to have made a treaty with the local indigenous people. Shortly afterwards the first permanent European settlement was established in the area.

By the time Victoria seceded from New South Wales in 1851, Charlotte tells us, this area was home to wharves and warehouses along the waterfront. And after the gold rush kicked off in the colony soon afterwards, it became the gateway to the goldfields.

Heading up William Street to the corner of Flinders Lane, we come to the site of Fawkner’s Hotel, Melbourne first permanent house. Patrons apparently used to complain that it offered only bad rum and river water to drink, with nothing to eat and nowhere to sleep, although its proprietor, John Pascoe Fawkner, was successful enough to go on to become Melbourne’s first newspaper owner and a well-known politician.

Continuing on through the business district, the emphasis remains decidedly quirky as we trace the history of the city, from the early years of the gold rush to the boom in land and share speculation that followed and the inevitable ensuing crash.

Charlotte directs our attention to the Rialto luxury hotel, now part of the InterContinental chain. Intact at the rear of the magnificent original gothic building is the corrugated-iron structure that once contained urinals where male guests relieved themselves in the days when the city was not sewered and notorious as “Marvellous Smellbourne”. But like the local sanitation system, I suspect their usage may have altered in the intervening years.

Flinders Street station.

There’s no shortage of magnificent buildings along our route, many dating from the 1880s boom years. Some, like the Rialto, have quirky stories to tell, and more than a few hide an unexpected grandeur within.

There’s the ANZ building on the corner of Collins and Queen, for example: a Gothic Revival masterpiece built to house the English, Scottish and Australian Bank, where ornate detail and lashing of gold leaf contrast with modern corporate branding in the main public banking hall.

And further up Collins Street, an unobtrusive facade hides a spectacular domed space, the former banking chamber of the Commercial Bank of Australia, so richly decorated it looks more like an European cathedral than a commercial space. From the street you’d never realise it was here and I feel I've come across something special and secret.

We reach Elizabeth Street, which Charlotte tells us was traditionally the divide between the business end of town and the retail precinct. The stretch of Collins Street beyond here was known as “the block” and promenading up and down here was known as “doing the block”, a fashionable pursuit up until World War I. This remains a popular shopping strip, of course, peppered with laneways and arcades leading through to Little Collins Street and Flinders Lane.

Wandering through we exit on Swanston Street beside the grand 1867 town hall which, according to Charlotte, represents the way the gold rush made Melbourne democratic and respectable as well as rich. Flush with their new fortunes the newly minted wealthy built churches, libraries and public halls and the city developed the reputation for intellectual and cultural life that it maintains today.

Rejoining Collins, we come to a pair of churches either side of Russell Street — St Michael’s Uniting Church and the Scots’ Church. They have traditionally demarcated another divide: we’re now at the “Paris end” of Collins Street, once a fashionable residential area strongly associated with members of the medical profession. In the 1870s, Charlotte tells us, residents of Collins Street lead the movement to shade the city streets with the plane trees which today lend the CBD such elegance (and, incidentally, give hell to hay fever sufferers such as myself in spring).

Inside the Block Arcade

On Spring Street, facing the grand Old Treasury building and Parliament House, where the Australian parliament sat when Melbourne was the national capital from 1901 to 1927, we stop for a rest at the Cricketers Bar at the Hotel Windsor. Described by Charlotte as “the last of Melbourne’s opulent Victorian hotels”, it opened in 1883 and has since hosted everyone from Katharine Hepburn and Lawrence Olivier to Muhammad Ali and Kylie Minogue.

Feeling refreshed, we continued through Little Bourke Street and Chinatown. Settled in the 1850s by Chinese immigrants, Charlotte says this is the oldest continuous Chinatown in the Western world. The early immigrants set up boarding houses and provision stores for their countrymen, who arrived in Melbourne en route to the goldfields, drawn by the promise of the so-called “New Gold Mountain”. (The original “Gold Mountain” referred to the North American gold rush regions, such as California.)

We end up to the north of the city centre, in the shady Carlton Gardens surrounding the World Heritage-listed Royal Exhibition Building. Today it’s hosting a classic car show but the structure was initially designed and built for two International Exhibitions in the 1880s. Like the banks in the business district, it recalls a splendid cathedral, or perhaps even a royal palace. And indeed, as Charlotte says, it is the only 19th century great hall to survive largely intact, still in its original landscape setting and still used — as she quaintly puts it — “as a palace of industry”.

Our tour finishes on the eastern side of the building, in front of something I’ve passed many times before but never really noticed until now: a huge granite drinking fountain, topped with a pair of kangaroos, metal emu heads protruding from each end, with drinking facilities for people, horses and dogs. It was commissioned as a sentimental gift to the city by early colonist, William Westgarth, in the 1880s.

The kangaroos atop the fountain might not be the most skilful likeness I’ve ever seen — one wag on a website I read later deems them “quirky and quaint but not great sculpture” — and the water in the horse trough has long ago turned green and mucky. But once again I have the sense I’ve come across something overlooked and special — that I’ve found some of those hidden Melbourne treasures.