71 Facts About Melbourne

Melbourne is home to many of Australia's best-known landmarks, such as the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the National Gallery of Victoria and the World Heritage-listed Royal Exhibition Building.

Melbourne consistently ranked as the world's most liveable city for much of the 2010s.

Melbourne Airport, known as the Tullamarine Airport, is the second-busiest airport in Australia, and the Port of Melbourne is the nation's busiest seaport.

Exponential growth ensued, and by 1865 Melbourne had overtaken Sydney as Australia's most populous city.

Melbourne quickly became a major finance centre, home to several banks, the Royal Mint, and Australia's first stock exchange.

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Melbourne acquired its first public monument, the Burke and Wills statue, in 1864.

In 1885, visiting English journalist George Augustus Henry Sala coined the phrase "Marvellous Melbourne", which stuck long into the twentieth century and has come to refer to the opulence and energy of the 1880s, during which time large commercial buildings, grand hotels, banks, coffee palaces, terrace housing and palatial mansions proliferated in the city.

Melbourne's land-boom peaked in 1888, the year it hosted the Centennial Exhibition.

The Melbourne financial crisis was a contributing factor in the Australian economic depression of the 1890s and in the Australian banking crisis of 1893.

At the time of Australia's federation on 1 January 1901 Melbourne became the seat of government of the federated Commonwealth of Australia.

Melbourne remained Australia's main business and financial centre until the late 1970s, when it began to lose this primacy to Sydney.

Melbourne experienced an economic downturn between 1989 and 1992, following the collapse of several local financial institutions.

Since the mid-1990s, Melbourne has maintained significant population and employment growth.

Melbourne sustained the highest population increase and economic growth rate of any Australian capital city from 2001 to 2004.

In 2009, Melbourne was less affected by the late-2000s financial crisis in comparison to other Australian cities.

In 2020, Melbourne was classified as an Alpha city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network.

Out of all major Australian cities, Melbourne was the worst affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and spent a long time under lockdown restrictions.

Melbourne is in the southeastern part of mainland Australia, within the state of Victoria.

Melbourne extends along the Yarra River towards the Yarra Valley and the Dandenong Ranges to the east.

Melbourne has a temperate oceanic climate, bordering on a humid subtropical climate (Koppen climate classification Cfa), with warm summers and mild winters.

Melbourne is well known for its changeable weather conditions, mainly due to it being located on the boundary of hot inland areas and the cool southern ocean.

Melbourne is prone to isolated convective showers forming when a cold pool crosses the state, especially if there is considerable daytime heating.

Melbourne is typical of Australian capital cities in that after the turn of the 20th century, it expanded with the underlying notion of a 'quarter acre home and garden' for every family, often referred to locally as the Australian Dream.

Much of metropolitan Melbourne is accordingly characterised by low-density sprawl, whilst its inner-city areas feature predominantly medium-density, transit-oriented urban forms.

Melbourne is often referred to as Australia's garden city, and the state of Victoria was once known as the garden state.

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Melbourne's parks are often considered the best public parks in all of Australia's major cities.

Several national parks have been designated around the urban area of Melbourne, including the Mornington Peninsula National Park, Port Phillip Heads Marine National Park and Point Nepean National Park in the southeast, Organ Pipes National Park to the north and Dandenong Ranges National Park to the east.

The extensive area covered by urban Melbourne is formally divided into hundreds of suburbs, and administered as local government areas 31 of which are located within the metropolitan area.

Melbourne has minimal public housing and high demand for rental housing, which is becoming unaffordable for some.

Melbourne is experiencing high population growth, generating high demand for housing.

Outstanding examples of Melbourne's built Victorian heritage include the World Heritage-listed Royal Exhibition Building, the General Post Office (1867), Hotel Windsor (1884) and the Block Arcade (1891).

Between the gold rush and the crash of 1890, Melbourne was Australia's literary capital, famously referred to by Henry Kendall as "that wild bleak Bohemia south of the Murray".

At this time, Melbourne-based writers and poets Marcus Clarke, Adam Lindsay Gordon and Rolf Boldrewood produced classic visions of colonial life.

Melbourne has Australia's widest range of bookstores, as well as the nation's largest publishing sector.

Melbourne has been called "the live music capital of the world"; one study found it has more music venues per capita than any other world city sampled, with 17.

Melbourne remained a world leader in filmmaking until the mid-1910s, when several factors, including a ban on bushranger films, contributed to a decades-long decline of the industry.

Melbourne filmmakers led the Australian Film Revival with ocker comedies such as Stork and Alvin Purple (1973).

Melbourne is home to Docklands Studios Melbourne, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and the headquarters of Village Roadshow Pictures, Australia's largest film production company.

Melbourne has long been regarded as Australia's sporting capital due to the role it has played in the development of Australian sport, the range and quality of its sporting events and venues, and its high rates of spectatorship and participation.

Melbourne's sporting reputation was recognised in 2016 when, after being ranked as the world's top sports city three times biennially, the Ultimate Sports City Awards in Switzerland named it 'Sports City of the Decade'.

Melbourne hosted the 2006 Commonwealth Games, will host the 2026 Commonwealth Games along with a number a number of regional areas of Victoria, and is home to several major annual international events, including the Australian Open, the first of the four Grand Slam tennis tournaments.

Rowing forms part of Melbourne's sporting identity, with a number of clubs located on the Yarra River, out of which many Australian Olympians trained.

Melbourne has a highly diversified economy with particular strengths in finance, manufacturing, research, IT, education, logistics, transportation and tourism.

Melbourne's suburbs have the head offices of Coles Group and Wesfarmers companies Bunnings, Target, K-Mart and Officeworks.

Melbourne Airport provides an entry point for national and international visitors, and is Australia's second busiest airport.

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Melbourne has an important ICT industry that employs over 60, 000 people, with a turnover of AU$19.

Melbourne has been attracting an increasing share of domestic and international conference markets.

Melbourne is the second most visited city in Australia and the seventy-third most visited city in the world.

Melbourne has now attracted the largest proportion of international overseas immigrants finding it outpacing Sydney's international migrant intake on percentage, as well as having strong interstate migration from Sydney and other capitals due to more affordable housing and cost of living.

Melbourne is on track to overtake Sydney in population between 2028 and 2030.

Melbourne has the 10th largest immigrant population among world metropolitan areas.

Melbourne has a wide range of religious faiths, the most widely held of which is Christianity.

Muslim religious life in Melbourne is centred on about 25 mosques and a number of prayer rooms at university campuses, workplaces and other venues.

Furthermore, Melbourne was ranked the world's fourth top university city in 2008 after London, Boston and Tokyo in a poll commissioned by the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

Melbourne universities have campuses all over Australia and some internationally.

In recent years, the number of international students at Melbourne's universities has risen rapidly, a result of an increasing number of places being made available for them.

Education in Melbourne is overseen by the Victorian Department of Education, whose role is to 'provide policy and planning advice for the delivery of education'.

Melbourne has many community run stations that serve alternative interests, such as 3CR and 3KND.

Governance of Melbourne is split between the government of Victoria and the 27 cities and four shires that make up the metropolitan area.

Major medical, neuroscience and biotechnology research institutions located in Melbourne include the St Vincent's Institute of Medical Research, Australian Stem Cell Centre, the Burnet Institute, the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute, Victorian Institute of Chemical Sciences, Brain Research Institute, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, and the Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre.

Melbourne is home to the Royal Children's Hospital and the Monash Children's Hospital.

Today Melbourne has an extensive network of freeways and arterial roadways.

Out of Melbourne's 20 declared freeways open or under construction, 6 are electronic toll roads.

In Melbourne, tollways have blue and yellow signage compared to the green signs used for free roads.

Melbourne has an integrated public transport system based around extensive train, tram, bus and taxi systems.

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Melbourne's trams are recognised as iconic cultural assets and a tourist attraction.

Avalon Airport, located between Melbourne and Geelong, is a secondary hub of Jetstar.

Melbourne has a significant general aviation airport, Moorabbin Airport in the city's southeast that handles a small number of passenger flights.

The Port of Melbourne is Australia's largest container and general cargo port and its busiest.

Water storage and supply for Melbourne is managed by Melbourne Water, which is owned by the Victorian Government.

Melbourne has a moderately low crime rate, ranking 18th for Personal Security and 9th in the overall Safe City Index in The Economist 2021 Safe Cities Index, placing it in the second best category of "high safety" level.