Precinct 6: The Heights of Respectability

‘It is impossible for a man to walk the length of Collins Street up by the churches and the club to the Treasury Chambers…without being struck by the grandeur of the dimensions of the town,’ wrote the English novelist Anthony Trollope in 1871.

We first pause beside the Town Hall clocktower. To the west is the Manchester Unity Building, Melbourne’s tallest building when it was erected in 1932. South down Swanston Street is St Paul's Anglican Cathedral (1891), designed by the English Gothic Revival architect William Butterfield. In the distance is the stepped pyramid of the Shrine of Remembrance (1934), the massive memorial to the Victorians killed in World War I. Nearby, on the edge of the City Square, Charles Summer’s 1865 statue commemorates another Australian tragedy — the deaths of Victorian explorers Robert O’Hara Burke and William Wills as they returned from the first overland crossing of Australia.

Stop 14
The gold rushes made Melbourne rich. They also made it democratic and respectable. The new settlers built churches, libraries and public halls as well as banks and warehouses. Scottish Presbyterians, English Methodists, Baptists and Congregationalists set the tone of public life. Soon the city was as famous for its high-minded intellectual life as its sober Sundays.

Stop 14 
A civic palace
Politics was a passion among the gold generation. In the 1860’s working men marched through the streets in torchlight processions and listened to street corner orators. Citizens petitioned the Town Council for a hall to accommodate those ‘who may wish to assemble for political or other purposes’. The Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Victoria’s son, laid the foundation stone of the Melbourne Town Hall in 1867.

Stop 15 
Educating the masses
The Athenaeum was founded on this site in 1839 (the facade dates from 1885-6) as the Melbourne Mechanics' Institute — a society 'for the promotion of science…particularly among the young as well as the operative classes'. In 1851, the institute had offered a reward of £200 for the discovery of gold within 200 miles of Melbourne. It later opened a lending library and a theatre, both operating to this day.

Stop 16 
Holy Hill
Collins Street was the ideal place for a church. Architect Joseph Reed added a portico the Baptists’ classical temple in 1862.

Stop 17
St Michaels Uniting Church
Joseph Reed also designed the St Michaels Uniting Church (Romanesque Independent Church), (1886), and its Gothic neighbour, Scots Church (1873). David Mitchell, Scottish stone-mason, goldrush immigrant and father of diva Nellie Melba, was the builder.