History

Dream Time
Australia is the world's oldest continent and prior to European settlement was inhabited by the Aborigines for more than 40,000 years.

Aborigines had developed a sophisticated culture with excellent hunting skills and strong spiritual beliefs. This strong spiritual belief symbolised their relationship of themselves and with the natural environment around. Their survival and prosperity was a result of this deep understanding of their environment.

Traditional lifestyle consisted of living in small groups with a society broken up into numerous clans separated by different languages and cultures. It is believed that Aborigines were the first people in the world to manufacture polished edge-ground stone tools, cremate their dead and engrave and paint memoirs of their daily life and activities.

There are still sites around today, which are thousands of years old with paintings reflecting memoirs of encounters with people and now extinct animals. Included in these paintings are a variety of 'x-ray' art forms depicting the internal and external anatomy of living subjects.

Birth
The first wave of settlers came from England, Scotland and Ireland. John Batman and John Pascoe Fawkner created Melbourne's existence with the purchase of land from the local Aborigines, settled and named Melbourne after the British Prime Minister of the time in 1834. By 1840 the population grew to 10,000 people, leading to the formation of Victoria in 1851 with Melbourne becoming the capital.

Boom Time
In 1851 Melbourne entered a boom period with the discovery of gold in the state. The Goldfields of Bendigo, Ballarat and Castlemaine attracted fortune hunters, refugees and migrants from all over Europe (particularly Greece, Italy, Yugoslavia, Turkey and Poland) and also from Vietnam and Cambodia. These new Australians all contributed to the ethnic mix of Melbourne's population. Remnants of the grandeur and frivolity of the gold rush days adorn the city and state - from the ornamental gardens, public buildings to historic houses.

Multiculturalism
After WWII the Australian Government initiated an Immigration program called "Populate or Perish" in the hope that an increase in population would strengthen the Australian economy and contribute to it's ability to defend itself. From 1947-68 more that 800,000 non-English European migrants chose to call Australia home. These Immigrants were made up of Greek, Italian, Jewish, Turkish, Lebanese, Maltese, Polish and Yugoslavian. The 1970's saw another influx of immigrants coming from South East Asia and the Pacific. Many were refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia.

As you can gather, this vast range of new ethnic settlers is what gave Melbourne it's unique multicultural diversity.