Victoria's history is one of Australia's more picaresque tales. It begins with geological upheaval and flourishing Indigenous cultures, but the unravelling of the latter that followed the European discovery of Australia in 1770 is a story of profound tragedy. The fraught and stop-start settlement of the state finally took hold with the discovery of gold in the mid-19th century – a find that thrust Victoria into the modern era, laying the foundations for the state's democracy, prosperity and multicultural make-up.
A mere 120 million years ago, Australia broke away from the vast supercontinent known as Gondwana, followed 40 million years later by another epic geological event – the separation of Australia from Antarctica. In prehistoric times, far lower sea levels exposed a land bridge between what is now Tasmania and Victoria. It was not until 10,000 years ago, with the rising sea levels that accompanied the end of the last ice age, that Victoria took on its current form as the southernmost extent of the Australian mainland.
Victoria's human history begins somewhat later: the earliest records of Australia's Indigenous people inhabiting the land date back around 52,000 years. At the time they hunted the giant marsupials that then roamed Victoria and Australia, among them a species of wombat the size of a rhinoceros and possibly even a giant, metre-long platypus.
The oral history of Indigenous Australians has its own version of Victoria's prehistory. For the Wurundjeri people, who lived in the catchment of the Yarra River where Melbourne is today, the land and the people were created in the Dreaming by the spirit Bunjil – ‘the great one, old head-man, eagle hawk’ – who continues to watch over all from Tharangalk-bek, the home of the spirits in the sky.
Victoria's Indigenous peoples lived in 38 different dialect groups that spoke 10 separate languages. These groups, some matrilineal, others patrilineal, were further divided into clans and sub-clans, each with its own complex system of customs and laws, and each claiming custodianship of a distinct area of land. Despite this, the British considered the continent to be terra nullius – ‘a land belonging to no one’.
The Wurundjeri were a tribe of the Woiwurrung, one of five distinct language groups belonging to southern Victoria’s Kulin Nation. They often traded and celebrated with their coastal counterparts, the Boonwurrung, among the towering red gums, tea trees and ferns at the river’s edge, as well as with other Kulin clans from the north and west.
As the flood-prone rivers and creeks broke their banks in winter, bark shelters were built north in the ranges. Possums were hunted for their meat and skinned to make calf-length cloaks. During summer, camps were made along the Yarra and Maribyrnong Rivers and Merri Creek. Food – game, grubs, seafood, native greens and roots – was plentiful. Wurundjeri men and women were compelled to marry out of the tribe, requiring complex forms of diplomacy. Ceremonies and bouts of ritual combat were frequent.
Close to sunrise on 19 April 1770, Lieutenant Zachary Hicks, on watch duty on board the Endeavour, spied a series of low sand hills. He immediately called his commander, James Cook. Although they didn't know at the time whether it was an island or part of the mainland, it would later prove to be the first European sighting of Australia's east coast (although Dutch seamen had been intermittently exploring the west coast for more than a century). Point Cook is now part of Croajingolong National Park, between Cape Conran Coastal Park and Mallacoota. In 1788 the first colony was established at Sydney Cove in New South Wales.
The first European settlement in Victoria in 1803 didn’t have an auspicious start. With a missed mail-ship communiqué and a notoriously supercilious British government calling the shots, Surveyor-General Charles Grimes’ recommendation – that the best place to found a southern settlement would be by the banks of the ‘Freshwater River’ (aka the Yarra) – went unheeded. The alternative, Sorrento, on what is now the Mornington Peninsula, was an unmitigated disaster from the beginning – as Lieutenant David Collins pointed out to his superiors, you can’t survive long without drinkable water. The colony moved to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), but one extremely tenacious convict escapee, William Buckley, was left behind; he was still on the lam when John Batman turned up a few decades later.
After the failed Sorrento colony, it was 20-odd years before explorers made their way overland to Port Phillip, and another decade before a settlement was founded on the southwest coast at Portland. Around the same time, in the early 1830s, the Surveyor-General of NSW, Major Thomas Mitchell, crossed the Murray River (then called the Hume) near Swan Hill and travelled southwest. He was delighted to find the rich volcanic plains of the Western District. His glowing reports of such fertile country included him dubbing the area ‘Australia Felix’ (fortunate Australia) and encouraged pastoralists to venture into the area with large flocks of sheep and herds of cattle.
It was not until 1835, when Australian-born entrepreneur John Batman sailed from Van Diemen's Land to arrive in what we now know as Victoria, that the process of settling the area began in earnest. He would later write of travelling through ‘beautiful land…rather sandy, but the sand black and rich, covered with kangaroo grass about ten inches high and as green as a field of wheat’. He noted stone dams for catching fish built across creeks, trees that bore the deep scars of bark harvesting and women bearing wooden water containers and woven bags holding stone tools. However, the Indigenous people’s profound spiritual relationship with the land and intimate knowledge of story, ceremony and season would be irrevocably damaged within a few short years.
As European settlement fanned out through Victoria, and the city of Melbourne transformed from pastoral outpost to a heaving, gold-flushed metropolis in scarcely 30 years, the cumulative effects of dispossession, alcohol and increasing acts of organised violence and numerous massacres resulted in a shocking decline in Victoria’s Indigenous population. From the earliest days the colonial authorities evicted Aboriginal people from their traditional homes. By the early 1860s the Board for the Protection of Aborigines had begun to gather together surviving Aboriginal people in reserves run by Christian missionaries at Ebenezer, Framlingham, Lake Condah, Lake Tyers, Ramahyuck and Coranderrk. These reserves developed into self-sufficient farming communities and gave their residents a measure of ‘independence’ (along with twice-daily prayers and new boots at Christmas), but at the same time inflicted irreversible damage.
‘Modern’ Melbourne’s story begins in the 1830s. John Batman, an ambitious grazier from Van Diemen’s Land, sailed into Port Phillip Bay in mid-1835 with an illegal contract of sale. (Britain’s colonial claims of terra nullius relied on the fiction that the original inhabitants did not own the land on which they lived and hence could not sell it.) He sought out some tribal elders and on a tributary of the Yarra – it’s been speculated that it was Merri Creek, in today’s Northcote – found some ‘fine-looking’ men, with whom he exchanged blankets, scissors, mirrors and handkerchiefs for more than 2400 sq km of land surrounding Port Phillip.
Despite the fact that the Aboriginal people from Sydney who were accompanying Batman couldn’t speak a word of the local language and vice versa, Batman brokered the deal and signatures were gathered from the ‘local chiefs’ (all suspiciously called Jika-Jika and with remarkably similar penmanship). He noted a low, rocky falls several miles up the Yarra, where the Queens Bridge is today. Upstream fresh water made it a perfect place for, as Batman described it, ‘a village’. Batman then returned to Van Diemen’s Land to ramp up the Port Phillip Association.
It’s at this point that the historical narrative becomes as turbid as the Yarra itself. Before Batman could get back to his new settlement of Bearbrass (along with ‘Yarra’, another cocksure misappropriation of the local dialect), John Pascoe Fawkner, a Launceston publican and childhood veteran of the failed Sorrento colony, got wind of the spectacular opportunity at hand. He promptly sent off a small contingent of settlers aboard the schooner Enterprize, who, upon arrival, started building huts and establishing a garden. On Batman’s return there were words, and later furious bidding wars over allotments of land. Historians regard the two in various ways, but Fawkner’s foremost place in Victoria’s story was sealed by the fact he outlived the syphilitic Batman by several decades. Despite the bickering, hubris and greed of the founders, the settlement grew quickly – around a year later, almost 200 brave souls (and some tens of thousands of sheep) had thrown their lot in with the new colony.
New South Wales wasn’t happy. Governor Bourke dispatched Captain William Lonsdale south in 1836, quashing any notion of ownership by the Port Phillip Association. Surveyors were sent for and the task of drawing up plans for a city began. Robert Hoddle, the surveyor in charge, arrived with the governor in March 1837, and was horrified by the lack of order, both of his unruly staff – who had absconded upriver to get drunk or shoot kangaroos one too many times – and the antipodean topography itself. For Hoddle it was all about straight lines, and his grid, demarcated by the Yarra and what was once a ‘hillock’ where Southern Cross Station now lies, is Melbourne’s defining feature. Land sales commenced almost immediately, and so the surveying continued, but with little romantic notion of exploration or discovery. It was, by all accounts, a real-estate feeding frenzy. The British were well served by their terra nullius concept, as returns on investment were fabulous. The rouseabout ‘Bearbrass’ was upgraded to the rather more distinguished ‘Melbourne’, after the serving British prime minister.
During these years, the earliest provincial towns were also established along Victoria’s coast, around the original settlement of Portland to the southwest and Port Albert to the southeast. Early inland towns rose up around self-sufficient communities of sheep stations, which at this stage were still the main source of Victoria’s fast-increasing fortunes. That, however, was soon to change.
In 1840 a local landowner described the fledgling city of Melbourne as ‘a goldfield without the gold’. Indeed, with a steady stream of immigrants and confidence-building prosperity, there had been growing calls for separation from convict-ridden, rowdy New South Wales. By the end of 1850, the newly minted colony of Victoria had got its wish to go it alone. This quickly seemed like a cruel stroke of fate as gold was discovered near Bathurst in NSW in early 1851, sparking a mass exodus. Pastoral riches or not, there was every chance that without a viable labour force (many had already succumbed to the siren call of California) the colony would wither and die.
Melbourne jewellers had for some time been doing a clandestine trade with shepherds who came to town with small gold nuggets secreted in their kerchiefs. Wary of the consequences of a gold rush on civic order, but with few other options, the city’s leading men declared that gold must indeed be found. As was the Victorian way, a committee was formed and a reward was offered. Slim pickings were discovered in the Pyrenees and Warrandyte, before a cluey Californian veteran looked north to Clunes. Just over a ridge, in what was to become Ballarat, was the proverbial pot at the end of the rainbow. It wasn’t long before miners were hauling 27kg of the magic mineral into Geelong at a time, and the rush was well and truly on.
The news spread around the world and brought hopefuls from Britain, Ireland, China, Germany, Italy, the US and the Caribbean. By August 1852, 15,000 new arrivals were disembarking in Melbourne each month. Crews jumped ship and hotfooted it to the diggings, stranding ships at anchor. Chaos reigned. Everyone needed a place to stay, even if only for a night or two, and when there was no room at the inn, stables were let for exorbitant amounts. Wives and children were often dumped in town while husbands continued on to the diggings. Governor La Trobe despaired of his grand civic vision, as shanties and eventually a complete tent village sprung up. Canvas Town, on the south side of the Yarra, housed over 8000 people.
Catherine Spence, a journalist and social reformer, visited Melbourne at the height of the hysteria and primly observed that ‘this convulsion has unfixed everything. Religion is neglected, education despised…everyone is engrossed with the simple object of making money in a very short time.’ The 567,000kg of gold found between 1851 and 1860 represented a third of the world’s total. That said, relatively few diggers struck it lucky. The licensing system favoured large holdings, policing was harsh and scratching out a living proved so difficult for many that dissent became as common as hope had been a few years before.
For some, 1852 was indeed a golden year, but by 1854, simmering tensions had exploded in Ballarat.
As the easily won gold began to run out, Victorian diggers despaired of ever striking it rich, and the inequality between themselves and the privileged few who held the land that they worked stoked a fire of dissent.
Men joined together in teams and worked cold, wet, deep shafts. Every miner, whether or not gold was found, had to pay a licence fee of 30 shillings a month. This was collected by policemen who had the power to chain those who couldn’t pay to a tree, often leaving them there until their case was heard.
In September 1854, Governor Hotham ordered that the hated licence hunts be carried out twice a week. A month later a miner was murdered near the Ballarat Hotel after an argument with the owner, James Bentley. When Bentley was found not guilty by a magistrate (who happened to be his business associate), miners rioted and burned the hotel down. Though Bentley was retried and found guilty, the rioting miners were also jailed, which enraged the miners.
The Ballarat Reform League was born. They called for the abolition of licence fees and for democratic reform, including the miners’ rights to vote (universal suffrage was yet to exist) and greater opportunity to purchase land. This was to lead into the Eureka Stockade.
Gold brought undreamed-of riches and a seemingly endless supply of labour to Victoria. Melbourne became ‘Marvellous Melbourne’, one of the world’s most beautiful Victorian-era cities, known for its elegance – as well as its extravagance. Grand expressions of its confidence include the University of Melbourne, Parliament House, the State Library and the Victorian Mint. Magnificent public parks and gardens were planted both in the city and in towns across the state. By the 1880s Melbourne had become Australia’s financial, industrial and cultural hub. The ‘Paris of the Antipodes’ claim was invoked: the city was flush with stylish arcades, and grand homes were decorated with ornate iron balconies. The city spread eastwards and northwards over the surrounding flat grasslands and southwards along Port Phillip Bay. A public transport system of cable trams and railways spread into the growing suburbs.
Regional cities, especially those servicing the goldfields, such as Ballarat, Bendigo and Beechworth, also reaped the rewards of sudden prosperity, leaving a legacy of magnificent Victorian architecture throughout the state. ‘Selection Acts’ enabled many settlers and frustrated miners to take up small farm lots (selections). Although a seemingly reformist, democratic move, these farms were often too small to forge a real living from and life in the bush proved tough. Grinding poverty and the heavy hand of the law led to some settlers turning to bushranging (rural armed robberies of money or livestock), variously considered a life of crime and/or an act of subversion against British rule, depending on which side of the economic and religious divide you were on.
In 1880 (and again in 1888) Melbourne hosted an International Exhibition, pulling well over a million visitors. The Royal Exhibition Building was constructed for this event; Melbourne’s soaring paean to Empire and the industrial revolution is one of the few 19th-century exhibition spaces of its kind still standing.
This flamboyant boast to the world was, however, to be Marvellous Melbourne’s swansong. In 1889, after years of unsustainable speculation, the property market collapsed and the decades that followed were marked by severe economic depression.
Victorian bushranger Ned Kelly (1854–80) became a national legend when he and his gang donned homemade armour in an attempt to deflect the bullets of several dozen members of the constabulary. Kelly’s story, set among the hills, valleys and plains of northeastern Victoria, has a Robin Hood–like quality, as well as the whiff of an Irish rebel song.
Kelly’s passionate, articulate letters, handed to hostages while he was robbing banks, paint a vivid picture of what he believed to be a harsh injustice of his time, as well as his lyrical intelligence. These, as well as his ability to evade capture for so long, led to public outrage when he was sentenced to death and finally hanged at the Old Melbourne Gaol in 1880.
The enduring popularity of the Kelly legend is evident in the mass of historical and fictional accounts that continue to be written to this day. His life has also inspired a long string of films, from the world’s first feature film, The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), to two more recent versions, both simply called Ned Kelly, with the first starring Mick Jagger (1970) and the second, the late Heath Ledger (2003). A series of paintings by Sidney Nolan featuring Kelly in his armour are among Australia’s most recognisable artworks. In 2001 Australian novelist Peter Carey won the Man Booker Prize for his True History of the Kelly Gang.
Despite the symbolic honour of becoming the new nation’s temporary capital in 1901, Melbourne’s fortunes didn’t really rally until after WWI, and by then its ‘first city’ status had been long lost to Sydney. When WWI broke out, large numbers of young men from throughout Victoria fought in the trenches of Europe and the Middle East, with enormous losses.
There was a renewed spirit of expansion and construction in Victoria in the 1920s, but this came to a grinding halt with another economic disaster, the Great Depression (in 1931 almost a third of breadwinners were unemployed). When war broke out once again in 1939, Melbourne became the heart of the nation’s wartime efforts, and later the centre for US operations in the Pacific. It was boom time again, though no time for celebration.
While the state’s Victorian heritage did not fare well during the postwar construction boom – when Melbourne hosted the Olympic Games in 1956, hectares of historic buildings were bulldozed with abandon; this continued apace during the new boom days of the 1980s as well – significant parts of the city and many goldfield towns still echo with Victorian ambition and aspiration.
In 1901 one of the first things the newly created Australian government did was to pass legislation with the express wish to protect its security and assert its sense of identity as a member of the British Empire. The so-called White Australia policy restricted the entry of non-Europeans, and was followed a couple of years later by the Commonwealth Naturalisation Act, which excluded all non-Europeans from attaining citizenship, and limited both citizens' and non-citizens' ability to bring even immediate family to Australia. This subsequent piece of legislation was particularly devastating to Victoria’s Chinese community, who maintained strong family and business ties with China. Victoria’s early history of diversity came to an abrupt end.
Although the state’s loyalties and most of its legal and cultural ties to Britain remained firm, the 1920s did herald change, as small Italian and Greek communities settled in both the city and the state’s agricultural heartland, part of a renewed spirit of expansion and construction at the time. They set about establishing food production companies, cafes, restaurants, fish-and-chip shops, delis and grocers, and the efforts of these small business pioneers were to prove an inspiration for a new generation of migrants in the 1940s and '50s.
Close to a million non-British immigrants arrived in Australia during the 20 years after WWII – at first Jewish refugees from Eastern and Central Europe then larger numbers from Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Turkey and Lebanon. With the demise of the blatantly racist White Australia policy in early 1973, many migrants from Southeast Asia also settled in Victoria. These postwar migrants also embraced the opportunity to set up small businesses, adding a vibrancy and character to their new neighbourhoods, such as Carlton, Collingwood, Richmond, Brunswick and Footscray. Melbourne’s cultural life was transformed by these communities, and diversity gradually became an accepted, and treasured, way of life.
Victoria's multicultural past continues to diversify. Around 28% of Victorians were born overseas and Melbourne is home to people from close to 200 countries. Together they speak 233 languages and dialects, and adhere to 116 religions. The largest group of foreign-born residents comes from the UK, more than double that of any other country. The other main source countries are New Zealand, China, India, Philippines, Vietnam and Italy.
Victoria's historical reputation as something of a conservative counterpoint to the more radical politics of racy Sydney was born as far back as the 19th century, when the money that flooded the state during the gold-rush years established Victoria as one of the wealthiest places in Australia. Family dynasties grew up and the powerful families that controlled the business and political levers of the state made Melbourne one of the most powerful cities in the country – hence its choice as the nation's temporary capital from 1901. By the middle of the 20th century, Melbourne was a conservative city, the seat of the state's old-money families and still Australia's economic capital. This history is reflected in the fact that conservative political forces – the Liberal Party, usually in coalition with the predominantly rural National Party – held power in Victoria from 1955 to 1982.
But things were changing. During the early 1970s, a burgeoning counterculture’s experiments with radical theatre, drugs and rock 'n' roll rang out through the Melbourne suburb of Carlton. By the later years of that decade, Melbourne’s reputation as a prim ‘establishment’ city was further challenged by the emergence of a frantically subversive art, music, film and fashion scene that launched bands like the Birthday Party onto the world stage. During the real-estate boom of the 1980s, a wave of glamorous shops, nightclubs and restaurants made way for Melbourne’s emergence as Australia’s capital of cool. Changes to the licensing laws in the 1990s saw a huge growth of small bars, cafes and venues – and the birth of the laneway phenomenon.
These changes were reflected in the political arena. The left-centre Labor Party governed for 10 years from 1982, and it was during this period that Victoria's reputation as a seat for progressive politics and as a centre for the arts was born. In 1992, Liberal Party premier Jeff Kennett won a landslide victory in statewide elections. Although from the conservative side of politics, Mr Kennett pursued a quite radical agenda, modernising many government institutions but alienating large sections of the community (particularly when it came to school reforms) in the process. An unexpected victory for the Labor Party in 1999 ushered in a decade of left-of-centre rule – a significant part of its success was its surprisingly good electoral results in regional Victoria. A twist came in December 2010, when a Liberal–National Party coalition came to government. It lasted just one term with the Labor Party being voted back in in 2014 with Daniel Andrews as premier. The next election will be held in 2018.
80 million years ago
The Australian continent breaks away from Antarctica to form its own land mass.
50,000 BC
The first humans colonise southeastern Australia. The people of the Kulin Nation live in the catchment of the Yarra River, and various other tribes, speaking 38 dialects among them, are spread throughout Victoria.
1770
Lieutenant Zachary Hicks becomes the first European to lay eyes on the eastern Australian shoreline. Captain Cook will later name the spot in far-east Gippsland 'Point Hicks'.
1803
Victoria’s first European settlement is at Sorrento. It is an unmitigated disaster, with no fresh water to be found; the settlers abandon the site after six months and relocate to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania).
1834
Portland pioneer Edward Henty, his family and a flock of sheep arrive from Van Diemen’s Land, marking the first permanent European settlement in the region that will become Victoria.
1835
John Batman meets with a group of local Aboriginal people and trades a casket of blankets, mirrors, scissors, handkerchiefs and other assorted curios for around 2400 sq km of land.
1837
The military surveyor Robert Hoddle draws up plans for the city of Melbourne, laying out a geometric grid of broad streets in a rectangular pattern on the northern side of the Yarra River.
1838
The Melbourne Advertiser, Melbourne’s first newspaper, is first published, with 10 weekly handwritten editions. In 1839 it rolls off the presses daily as the Port Phillip Patriot & Melbourne Advertiser.
1841
One of the largest of many organised massacres of the Indigenous population occurs at Warrigal Creek, Gippsland, as part of the colonisers' push to expand white territory.
1851
Victoria separates from the colony of New South Wales. Gold is discovered in central Victoria and the world’s richest gold rush is on.
1854
Gold miners rebel over unfair licences, raising the Southern Cross flag at the Eureka Stockade. Brutally suppressed by soldiers and police, their actions enter into Australia’s nation-building mythology.
1854
Australia’s first significant rail line, from Melbourne Terminus on Flinders St, across the Yarra, to Station Pier in Port Melbourne, opens.
1856–60
Stonemasons building the University of Melbourne strike and the struggle for a shorter working day begins; the subsequent 'eight-hour day' campaign transforms Victorian working conditions.
1858
The Melbourne Football Club is formed. Australian Rules Football’s first recorded match takes place between Scotch College and Melbourne Grammar School.
1859
Thomas Austin releases rabbits onto his property at Winchelsea, west of Melbourne, beginning a rabbit infestation that will spread across the southern part of Australia and continue to this day.
1880
The International Exhibition is held at the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne’s Carlton Gardens. Over a million visitors come to see the fruits of the Empire.
1883–85
The railway line linking Sydney and Melbourne opens in 1883, followed two years later by Melbourne's first cable-tram service, running from the city centre to Richmond.
1884
HV McKay’s invention of the Sunshine stripper harvester in Ballarat makes leaps and bounds in the efficient harvest of cereal crops, putting Australia on the map as a leading exporter of grain.
1901
Australia’s collection of colonies become a nation. The Federation’s first parliament is held at the Royal Exhibition Building; parliament will sit in Melbourne for the next 27 years.
1923
Vegemite, a savoury sandwich spread and Australia’s most enduring culinary quirk, is invented in Melbourne, using autolysis to break down yeast cells from waste provided by Carlton & United Breweries.
1925
The first Australian-built Ford Model Ts roll off an improvised production line in a disused wool store in Geelong.
1928
Australia's first set of traffic lights begin operation at the junction of Collins and Swanston Sts in Melbourne.
1930
A plucky young chestnut gelding called Phar Lap wins the Melbourne Cup. His winning streak endears him to the nation and he remains one of the most popular exhibits in the Melbourne Museum.
1953
The first Italian Gaggia espresso machine is imported to Melbourne. Soon University Cafe in Carlton, Pellegrini’s in the city and Don Camillo in North Melbourne are serving the city’s first cappuccinos.
1956
Melbourne hosts the summer Olympic Games. Despite this mark of sporting bonhomie, the event is marked with political unrest due to the Suez crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary.
1964
The Beatles visit Melbourne, staying in the since-demolished Southern Cross Hotel on Bourke St and creating city-wide ‘youthquake’ hysteria.
1967
Prime Minister Harold Holt disappears while swimming at Cheviot Beach near Portsea on the Mornington Peninsula; his body is never recovered.
1970
Melbourne’s West Gate Bridge collapses during construction, killing 35 workers. The impact and explosion that follows is heard over 20km away. Melbourne's Tullamarine Airport opens in the same year.
1977
The Centenary Test, commemorating the first cricket Test match between Australia and England, is played at the MCG. Amazingly, Australia triumphs by the same margin as the original: 45 runs.
1982–84
The Victorian Arts Centre, built to the design of Roy Grounds, opens in stages at the site now known as Southbank after a construction period of 11 years.
1988
The Australian Tennis Open moves from Kooyong to the hard-court venues of Melbourne Park. Attendance jumps by 90%, to well over 250,000 spectators.
1992
Southgate shopping centre, built on a former industrial site, opens, connecting the Arts Centre with the city and marking the start of massive redevelopment of Melbourne’s waterfront spaces.
2002
Federation Sq opens – a year late for the centenary of federation – amid controversy about its final design and cost ($440 million), but to public praise.
2004
Michael Long, a former AFL player of Aboriginal decent, sets out on foot from Melbourne to Canberra to speak to Prime Minister John Howard and raise awareness of the plight of Indigenous Australians. His walk becomes known as The Long Walk.
2006
With the failure of late winter and spring rainfalls and the second-driest conditions since 1900, water restrictions are introduced across Victoria.
2006
Melbourne hosts the Commonwealth Games, the largest sporting event ever to be held in the city – in numbers of teams, athletes and events it eclipses the 1956 Olympics.
2009
Victoria records its hottest temperatures on record. The Black Saturday bushfires that follow leave 173 people dead, more than 2000 homes destroyed and 4500 sq km burned out.
2010
Adam Bandt becomes the first member of the Australian Greens to be elected to the federal House of Representatives in a general election. He retains the inner-city seat of Melbourne in the 2013 election.
2010
The conservative Liberal–National Party coalition returns to power in the Victorian state parliament, after 11 years in the political wilderness.
2011
Victoria is devastated by the worst ‘flood events’ in its recorded history, with the central and northern parts of the state, including the towns of Horsham, Shepparton and Swan Hill, worst hit.
2014
The Labor Party is voted back in after one term for the conservative Liberal–National Party coalition.
2015
Bushfires roar through parts of the Great Ocean Road on Christmas morning, destroying more than 100 homes between Wye River and Separation Creek.
2016
Freak weather conditions prompted thunderstorm asthma in Melbourne in November claiming the lives of nine people and sending 8500 people to hospital emergency departments in Melbourne and Geelong.
2016
A new law in Victoria allows Koorie people to protect and control the use of their culture and heritage by nominating for protection particular elements with significant spiritual and cultural connection to knowledge.
2017
The first Australian Women's AFL League launches with a massive audience turning up for the first match and thousands of spectators turned away due to a packed-out venue.