Victoria (Melbourne Region)

Head up Capel Street to Courtney Street (or take tram #55 or #68 from the city centre) and you’ll find the Metro! Craft Centre (formerly Meat Market Craft Centre; daily 10am–5pm) in the second block along. Inside the converted nineteenth-century brick market you can watch craftspeople at work and buy their products. The centre also boasts a café, and a notice board that’s a good source of information on craft workshops and contacts.

Lygon Street itself is the obvious place to explore, but the elegant architecture also spreads eastwards to Drummond Street, and, flanking Carlton Gardens, Rathdowne and Nicholson streets. In the grounds of Melbourne University you’ll find cheap food and useful notice boards (for accommodation and things for sale) in the Union Building. Running along the western side of the university, Royal Parade gives onto Royal Park, with its memorial to the explorers Burke and Wills, and from there it’s a short walk through the park to the Zoo.

Bulleen and Eltham 

The Museum of Modern Art at Heide, on Templestowe Road at Bulleen, was the home of Melbourne art patrons John and Sunday Reed, who in the mid-1930s purchased what was then a derelict dairy farm on the banks of the meandering Yarra River. During the following decades the Reeds fostered and nurtured the talents of young unknown artists and thus played a central role in the emergence of Australian art movements such as the Angry Penguins, the Antipodeans and the Annandale Realists. The painters Sidney Nolan, John Perceval, Albert Tucker and Arthur Boyd were all members of the artistic circle at Heide at one time or another. The government of Victoria purchased the property shortly before the Reeds’ deaths in 1981, and their former home, itself an attractive specimen of the modernist architecture of the 1960s, is now a gallery housing consistently interesting, changing exhibitions of contemporary Australian art (Tues–Fri 10am–5pm, Sat, Sun & public holidays noon–5pm; $6). There’s also a good café, and you can ramble through the extensive gardens, which feature sculptures and a kitchen garden (no admission fee). The museum is about 14km from the city centre, but only fifteen minutes’ drive via the northeastern freeway. National Bus #200 runs approximately every thirty minutes from outside Melbourne Central Shopping Centre on Lonsdale Street (for timetable information call 03/9481 8333), or you could take the suburban train to Heidelberg Station (Eltham line) and from there bus #291 to Templestowe Road (frequent services).

Eltham, a bushy suburb further northeast, about 24km from the city, is known as a centre for arts and crafts. Its reputation was established in 1935 when the charismatic painter and architect Justus Jorgensen moved to what was then a separate town and founded Montsalvat, a European-style artists’ colony. Built with the help of his students and followers, the colony’s eclectic design was inspired by medieval European buildings with wonderful quirky results; Jorgensen died before it was completed and it has deliberately been left unfinished. He did, however, live long enough to see his community thrive, and to oversee the completion of the mud-brick Great Hall, whose influence is evident in other mud-brick buildings around Eltham. Today Montsalvat, a two-kilometre walk from Eltham Station, is still operating as a colony of painters, potters and craftspeople, and can be visited daily (9am–5pm; $5).

Fitzroy and Collingwood 

Fitzroy’s fringe art leanings are reflected in wacky “street installations” such as mosaic chairs, and sculptures like “Mr Poetry”. The eye-catching wrought-iron gate at the entrance to the Fitzroy Nursery at 390 Brunswick St, with its fairy-tale motif, sets the theme for the Artists Garden above the nursery, which exhibits sculptures and other decorative items for garden use. Small galleries worth looking out for are Roar Studios on 115A Brunswick St; the Print Guild at 227 Brunswick St (Mon–Fri 9.30am–5.30pm, Sat 10am–5pm, Sun 1.30–5.30pm), which sells limited-edition prints, etchings, lithographs, wood and linocuts by Australian and international artists; and the Centre for Contemporary Photography, 205 Johnston St (Wed–Fri 11am–5pm, Sat 2–5pm). Fitzroy also boasts its own arts and crafts market (third Sun of the month 10am–3.30pm) at the old Fitzroy Town Hall on the corner of Napier and Moor streets. The Fitzroy Pool, in the north of the suburb on the corner of Young and Cecil streets, is a summer meeting place where people occasionally swim between posing sessions.

While not as trendy as Brunswick Street, formerly shabby Smith Street (tram #86 from Bourke St), which forms the boundary between Fitzroy and Collingwood to the east, is catching up. You’ll still find many charity shops, ethnic butchers and cheap supermarkets, but New Age bookshops, quirky little cafés and revamped pubs are edging in. Collingwood and the adjacent suburb of Abbotsford have a large gay population, with a clutch of gay bars and clubs, particularly on Peel and Glasshouse streets.