"Melbourne" Blogs & Blog Posts

StKilda once celebrated its reputation as a centre of privilege and taste, the wealthiest suburb in C19th Melbourne. Although spouse and I lived in St­Kilda from 1976 on, I knew nothing of this cool C19th history. So I was very pl­eased to connect...

Shakshuka probably came from Africa’s Maghreb, the regions of North Africa along the Mediterranean Sea. Plus note that the word meaning shaken comes from the Tunisian dialect. An alternative history is that shakshuka came from Yemen or Ottoman...

The discovery of gold in 1851 attracted Chinese imm­ig­ration to Vic­toria. Ships sailed to Australia from Hong Kong with their cargo of men who had come in search of the new gold fields. From 1853-5, thousands of Chinese disembarked here. Very fe...

Geelong lad Arthur Streeton (1867-1943) studied at the Nat­ional Gallery School of Art in Melbourne from 1884-7. In summer 1886 he painted with Frederick McCubbin and Tom Roberts in Mentone. In 1887 he camped and painted with Louis Abrahams, Tom Rob...

Greek royal family opening the 1896 Gamesfollowed by British Prince of Wales and Russian Duchess OlgaPinterestThe first Olympic Games in the Southern Hemisphere EVER were in Mel­bourne in 1956. These Games put our beautiful city on the map, got my f...

James Cook Snr brought his large family from Scotland in 1736 where he had secured more reliable employ­ment on estate farms. As a bo­n­us, he could send young James to school at his employer’s  expense.        &nbs...

Jews, Christians and Muslims, Peoples of the Book, shared a common basis of their religious beliefs in the Jewish Bible aka the Old Testam­ent. Recognising the two older systems as precur­sors to their own, Muslims grant­ed free­dom of worship to...