Narrm’s bay city is Australia’s second metropolis
Melbourne, Victoria’s capital, is Australia’s second-most populous city, wrapping Port Phillip’s northern and eastern shores. By June 2025 estimates it held about 5.435 million people—nineteen percent of the nation—on Country the Kulin nations have held for over 40,000 years.
Local names survive for smaller places too: the ground near the cathedral was Geeburr, Fitzroy was Ngár-go and Collingwood Yálla-birr-ang. In Boonwurrung, Naarm means the bay, while in Eastern Kulin languages Narrm means scrub, echoing a creation story in which the Birrarung, the Yarra, flooded a dry plain of tea-tree where emu and kangaroo were hunted. Three language groups met here. In 2021 a Wurundjeri–Bunurong boundary was agreed that runs west to east through the city, placing the CBD with the Wurundjeri and St Kilda with the Bunurong, though some elders dispute it.
Colonel David Collins set up a penal camp at Sullivan Bay near Sorrento in October 1803, but the settlers soon left to found Hobart. In 1835 John Batman claimed to have bought 600,000 acres from eight Wurundjeri elders, who more likely saw the exchange as a tanderrum granting temporary access. Governor Richard Bourke annulled the treaty, commissioned the Hoddle Grid and on 10 April 1837 named the settlement, first called Dootigala, after Prime Minister Lord Melbourne.
Gold in the 1850s set off a boom that by the late 1880s made it one of the world's richest cities, and it served as the national seat of government from federation until Canberra took over in 1927. Australian rules football, Australian impressionism and Australian cinema all began here.
It is the southernmost city of over a million people, spread across 30 local councils and nearly 10,000 square kilometres. It runs the world's largest urban tram network and Australia's most extensive freeways. The Economist rated it the most liveable city for much of the 2010s, it hosted the 1956 Olympics and stages the Australian Open and Grand Prix, and Time Out voted it the world's best city in 2026.
Source: Melbourne
