Victoria (Melbourne Region)

North of Bourke Street, running parallel, is Little Bourke Street, with the majestic Law Courts by William Street at the western end, and Chinatown in the east between Exhibition and Swanston streets. Australia’s oldest continuous Chinese settlement, Melbourne’s Chinatown began with a few boarding-houses in the 1850s (when the goldrushes attracted Chinese people in droves, many from the Pearl River Delta near Hong Kong) and grew as the gold began to run out and Chinese fortune-seekers headed back to the city. Today the area still has a low-rise, narrow-laned, nineteenth-century character, and it’s packed with Chinese restaurants and stores. The Chinese Museum in an old warehouse on Cohen Place (Sun–Fri 10am–4.30pm, Sat noon–4.30pm; $5), is concerned particularly with the Chinese role in the foundation and development of Melbourne. The museum organizes two-hour guided tours of the building and Chinatown ($15, or $30 including lunch). Tours require a minimum of four people, and bookings two or three days in advance are preferred (tel 03/9662 2888).

Collins Street

Further up Collins Street, beyond the worthwhile diversion down William Street to the new museums in the Customs House, shops become the focus of attention. The 1890s Block Arcade, at nos. 282–284, is Melbourne’s grandest shopping centre, its name appropriately taken from the tradition of “doing the block” – promenading around the city’s fashionable shopping streets. Restored in 1988, the L-shaped arcade sports a mosaic-tiled floor, ornate columns and mouldings, and a glass-domed roof. Australia on Collins, a modern alternative next door, has set its sights firmly on the street’s glitzy shopping crown; in the basement it boasts an upmarket food court and adjacent licensed restaurants and bars. Beyond this, on the corner of Collins and Swanston streets, Neoclassical Melbourne Town Hall faces boring City Square, which never achieved the intended purpose of providing Melbourne with a focal point – it’s hoped that Federation Square, further south by the Yarra, will achieve this. There is, however, an unmissable landmark on the south side of the square: the splendid St Paul’s Cathedral, built in the 1880s according to the Gothic-revival design of English architect William Butterfield, who never actually visited Australia. Across from the cathedral on Swanston Walk, Young and Jackson’s Hotel is now protected by the National Trust, not for any intrinsic beauty but as a showcase for a work of art which has become a Melbourne icon: Chloe, a full-length nude now reclining upstairs in Chloe’s Bar and Bistro. Exhibited by the French painter Jules Lefebvre at the Paris Salon of 1875, it was sent to an international exhibition in Melbourne in 1881 and has been here ever since.

Back on Collins Street, the pompous Melbourne Athenaeum next to the Town Hall is an important ingredient in the rising streetscape leading up past Scots Church, whose Gothic-revival design merits a peek, though it’s famous mainly as the place where Dame Nellie Melba first sang in the choir. Further up, beyond expensive boutiques and even more expensive souvenir shops, Collins Place shopping centre and the towering Sofitel Hotel next door (still marked on some maps as the Regent Hotel) dominate the upper part of Collins Street, known as the “Paris end”. The (male) toilet of Le Restaurant on the 35th floor of the Sofitel is known as the “loo with a view”, but the view from the tables by the window isn’t bad, either – though it doesn’t come cheap. An arts and crafts market plies its wares in the atrium of Collins Place on Sunday between 9am and 5pm. Opposite, overshadowed by the Sofitel tower, stands one of the last bastions of Australian male chauvinism: the very staid, men-only Melbourne Club.

Old Customs House: Immigration Museum and Hellenic Antiquities Museum

The Hellenic Antiquities Museum on the second floor of the same building (same hours; admission fee depends on the exhibition; min $5) features travelling exhibitions of antique treasures loaned by the government of Greece, most of them rarely seen outside their homeland.

Old Melbourne Gaol

The bluestone prison was built in stages from 1841 to 1864 – the goldrushes of the 1850s caused such a surge in lawlessness that it kept having to be expanded. A mix of condemned men, remand and short-sentence prisoners, women and “lunatics” (often, in fact, drunks) were housed here; long-term prisoners languished in hulks moored at Williamstown, or at the Pentridge Stockade. Much has been demolished since the jail was closed in 1923, but the entrance and boundary walls at least survive, and it’s worth walking round the building to take a look at the formidable arched brick portal on Franklin Street.

The gruesome collection of death masks on show in the tiny cells bears witness to the nineteenth-century obsession with phrenology, the belief that people’s characters could be read by examining the features of their heads. Inmates of prisons and mental asylums came under particular scrutiny: the shape of someone’s brow, the length of their nose or even how their ear lobes joined their head could be deemed to indicate a predisposition to criminality or insanity. Accompanying the displayed heads are compelling, bloody case histories of the usually murderous crimes which the deceased’s cranial bumps were supposed to have predetermined. Most fascinating are the women: Martha Needle, who poisoned with arsenic her husband and her daughters, among many others; and young Martha Knorr, the notorious “baby farmer” who advertised herself as a “kind motherly person, willing to adopt a child”; after receiving $2–5 per child, she killed and buried them in her backyard.

State Library, National Gallery of Victoria and Melbourne Central

Opposite, Melbourne Central is an ultramodern shopping complex that has skilfully incorporated an old red-brick shot tower under its pointed glass dome. Among the shops here is the Daimaru department store, which offers a fascinating taste of things Japanese – not least in the food hall.

Queen Victoria Market