Home > From Abbatoirs to Zoning: Melbourne 1925

From Abbatoirs to Zoning: Melbourne 1925

Welcome to Melbourne in 1925.

Australia's capital city is a growing metropolis of almost a million, sprawling ten miles in nearly every direction from the General Post Office on Elizabeth Street to the ends of the suburban tramways and railway lines. The Melbourne City Council controls a much smaller area of about twelve square miles near its beating heart.

Each day, in the city centre, thousands of workers converge on offices, shops and factories from the suburbs and the country. At night, the streets are alive with the bustle of visitors to hotels, dance halls, theatres and markets.

From the Town Hall on the corner of Swanston and Collins Streets, the City Council aspires to be the leading municipality in one of the great cities of the world, as it deals with the ceaseless, unpredictable and occasionally puzzling work of managing roads, rates and refreshment kiosks. Among the thousands of letters typed and scribbled by the Council's employees, citizens and visitors is a snapshot of the city in 1925: at work, at play, and sometimes at a standstill.

Throughout the Melbourne 1925 website, you'll find interactive images like the one below. Click on the annotations to reveal more about the history behind the documents

Acknowledgements

This project was funded by a Hansen Little Public Humanities Grant, generously supported by the Hansen Trust and administered by the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne.

It was produced by the Melbourne History Workshop, with concept by Patrick Gigacz and technical development by Dr Mitchell Harrop. The Melbourne History Workshop is led by Professor Andrew J. May.

Image annotations use the Glycerine Image Annotation Workbench.