Melbourne Audio Tours

Melbourne was founded in 1835 by free settlers from Tasmania, declared a city in 1847 and then transformed beyond recognition by the 1851 gold rush that made it one of the wealthiest cities on earth by the late 1880s. The nickname Marvellous Melbourne was not ironic. Flinders Street Station, the Royal Exhibition Building (now a UNESCO World Heritage Site) and the broad Victorian streetscapes of Collins Street's Paris End are what that gold rush money built. It served as Australia's capital from 1901 until Canberra took over in 1927, a period during which it lost to Sydney in the population race and developed a rivalry that has not fully resolved.

The lanes are the thing people remember.

Hosier Lane with its ever-changing street art, Centre Place with its coffee shops squeezed between Swanston and Collins, Degraves Street, AC/DC Lane. Melbourne pioneered the laneway cafe culture that the rest of Australia subsequently adopted, and the flat white, whatever its exact origin story, became an institution here in the 1980s. The food culture in Fitzroy, Collingwood and Carlton reflects successive waves of immigration, first Italian (Lygon Street still has the trattorias to prove it), then Greek, Vietnamese and more recently everything else. Federation Square, the fractured-geometry cultural plaza opposite Flinders Street, opened in 2002 and is still divisive.