Category: Victorian Arcades

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Eastern Arcade, Bourke Street, Melbourne, 1875, with banner for US Minstrels and images depicting the players. Photographer: NJ Caire/Anglo-Australasian Photo Co. State Library Victoria, H84.3/11

The Queen’s Arcade on Lonsdale Street in Melbourne, after renovations, reopened to great fanfare in March 1856, with a military band and a fountain of eau de cologne supplied by arcade fancy goods’ dealer Levy Bros, as well as

musical entertainments … varied by the performance of a powerfully toned apollonicon [a large barrel organ], which is intended in future to play at stated periods during the day, and thus prove a continual attraction to the passer-by to make use of this elegant avenue as a lounge


Age, 17 March 1856, 4

Arcades are often thought of purely as places of commodity exchange or places to eat and drink, with retail shops and tearooms often the focus of discussions both popular and academic. As I argue in my thesis, the arcades in fact reflected broader social and cultural aspects of urban life, with a wide variety of entertainments, including theatres, dance halls, hotels, balls and music in the promenades, and amusement parlours. As I note in Chapter Five, following James Lesh, arcades ‘catered for colonial Australian thirst for “amusements, performances and hospitality: novel forms of leisure and entertainment”[1] that were part of the global experience of modernity, many of which they might find within’ [2].

The entertainments in the arcades ranged in type. While there were more refined shows, such as art shows and elegant balls, displays at the ‘cheap amusement’ end of the spectrum were also found in these buildings, demonstrating the appetite for ‘new and innovative entertainments, many of which utilised new technologies in their presentation’ [3] but might also utilise the fantastical or seemingly strange to amuse patrons. While spectacle was a key component, these amusements might also be considered educative, about current or historic people and events, or new ideas and technologies.

The Queen’s Arcade was a regular site of such amusements, which also might play at other locations around Melbourne and Australia. These included models and panoramas of current events, such as important moments and sites in the war in the Crimea in the mid-1850s, including a model of the Sevastopol and Kronstadt naval bases, as well as St Petersburg. In 1855 and 1858, there featured an ‘exhibition of dissolving views‘ using a calcium light to project photographs, in the first case, including ‘places such as the Arctic regions, Turkey, Italy, Netley Abbey, and Walmer Castle‘, with the commonly applied entry fee of a shilling for adults and children at sixpence.

In the Eastern Arcade in Bourke Street Melbourne, there were a variety of such cheap amusements, as well as businesses that straddled the line between entertainment and health and wellbeing, such as phrenologists and fortune tellers. As these latter characters are the focus of the work of other scholars [4], I’ll focus here on the other amusements present in this building, but in another post, I might talk about these people in other arcades!

One of the other business-owners in the building also thought of innovative ways to attract people to the building. In 1879 fancy goods dealer Isaac Solomons hosted the Great American Pantechnetha in conjunction with a fancy bazaar, which featured panoramas of ‘the Prussian & Russian wars and views of the principal cities in Europe – surpassing anything ever seen in the Australian colonies’. He also later paid Dominick Sonsee, ‘the smallest man in the world’, to appear and hold an ‘at home’, where he chatted with visitors about politics and current events. Sonsee later, however, took publican Thomas Bentley to court over non-payment of the fee from Solomons, which Bentley had allegedly accepted on Sonsee’s behalf but not passed on, with newspapers rueing that Sonsee had been taken advantage of and portraying him in a pitying light.

 

Carte de visite advertisement for appearance of Dominick Sonsee at the Eastern Arcade, c1880.
Photographer: William Burman. National Portrait Gallery, 2014.5

The Eastern Arcade also had two dedicated entertainment spaces which featured entertainments such as the US Minstrels and Lady Court Minstrels (the latter also played at the Victoria Arcade & Academy of Music in 1884), and Kate and James Kelly, siblings of bushranger Ned, who held a rather grim entertainment where patrons could see and talk to them for one shilling prior to their brother’s execution in November 1880. In the same arcade in 1914, Seattle-born George and Leo Whitney, who had been leaseholders of Luna Park, Melbourne, opened the Joy Parlour amusement arcade in nine of the arcade shops, ‘entertaining hundreds of people both day and night with all kinds of amusement and picture shows. … Beautifully lit with electric light, and music always‘. According to the oral testimony of George K Whitney, his father (also George) ran the shooting and amusement section of the arcade, while his uncle ran the photography studio, before moving back to the US in the 1920s.

Bourke Street in the area of the arcade was well-established as the heart of Melbourne’s popular entertainment during the late 1800s. The atmosphere was beautifully described around 1912 by future journalist, Hugh Buggy: ‘a non-stop vaudeville show … [with] its music halls or “academies” of music, its billiard parlours, its shooting galleries, and a waxwork chamber of horrors … it was the heart of Theatreland and the stomping ground of sports.'[5] Both the Eastern and the Victoria Arcade and Academy of music on the next block contributed much to this atmosphere. These entertainments and others at the Eastern Arcade show that the life of the surrounding streets entered the once-imagined refined confines of the building and may have contributed (along with larrikins, phrenologists, fortune tellers, theatre connections, and murders) to its poor reputation from the 1890s to 1920s.

Grand Arcade (second from corner at left), c1889. Photographer unknown. State Library Queensland, Negative: 100723

Heading north to Brisbane, Henry Morwitch’s Grand Arcade, which seemed to have a regular program of public events, hosting ‘a variety of entertainments and amusements on offer ranging from carnivalesque to the refined’. [6] In 1889, it featured a sideshow-type performer, Fedor Jeftichew, who experienced hypertrichosis, leading to excess body hair, billed as ‘Jo-Jo the Russian dog-faced boy‘. Demonstrating the transnational movements of so many of these entertainers across the globe, Russia-born Jeftichew toured England, Europe and Australia, originally with US showman and circus owner, PT Barnum, who satisfied the public appetite for shows featuring those advertised as ‘monsters’.

Shows that incorporated or featured new technologies also took place in the Grand, including Woodroffe’s glass-blowing exhibition in 1889. Born in the US, Charles Woodroffe exhibited in the States before coming to Australian in the 1860s under the patronage of entertainment entrepreneur George Coppin. Woodroffe’s shows featured glass-blowing combined with technologies such as steam engines made from glass. These shows were popular travelling entertainments and we see Woodroffe exhibiting throughout Australia, as well as presenting his more scientific glass aparatus at international exhibitions. The glassblowing shows were part informative and part show and, as Rebecca C Hopman tells us, ‘delight[ed] spectators with lampworking displays, fabulous models, and tables crowded with glass trinkets’. [7] In 1897 and 1898, new technology again featured, when Lumiére’s cinematograph of moving pictures was exhibited, producing images of the Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee and the Melbourne Cup, as well as ‘other exciting events’.

Description of Charles Woodroffe’s show in Maryborough, Queensland. Maryborough Chronicle, 30 August 1887, 2.
Poster for Woodroffe’s brother’s show in Utica New York, 1881. Rakow Research Library Special Collections, Corning Museum of Glass, Flat Files (Unit 31, Drawer 6)

Like those in Melbourne and Brisbane, Sydney’s arcades also hosted a variety of similar amusements. From October 1893 to around December 1894, the basement of the Strand Arcade played host to the Crystal Maze Palace of Amusement, in the Strand Arcade basement. The newspapers tell us that it included entertainments such as ‘Madame Paula, the scientific palmist’, a mirror maze, and mechanical novelties, gaining ‘a large measure of popularity as a holiday resort‘. The next year the arcade had a model of the Tower of London made entirely of cork (one million pieces!), and from 1896 to 1897, Sawyer’s Australian Waxworks, featuring celebrities of the day such as Sarah Bernhardt. These exhibits attained popularity in the nineteenth-century with contemporary and historical personalities rendered in wax, arguably the most famous today being Madame Tussauds, with branches all over the world (including Sydney). Waxworks seems to have tried to attract broad audiences, being advertised in numerous newspapers, including the Guang yi hua bao/The Chinese Australian Herald.

While these are just a snippet of the types of ‘cheap amusements’ that could be found in the Australian arcades in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they demonstrate the diversity of the types of entertainments that were available. Their presence indicates that arcades were not just sites that would attract the town elites but had a wider class of visitor. While the Eastern Arcade spatially was embedded in Melbourne’s entertainment district, the Strand was in a more apparently refined location on Pitt Street, in the shopping heart of Sydney, although relatively close to the theatre district on King Street. The presence of such amusements widen our understanding not only of the types of businesses found within arcades but also their visitors, breaking down the idea that these buildings were only the preserve of middle-class or elite shoppers and tea-drinkers.

At the same time, these examples also give insight into the global exchanges that took place in the arcades beyond those of commodities. These travelling entertainers often hailed from North America, Europe or Britain, and elsewhere across the the globe, and travelled independently or as part of troupes, sometimes managed by entertainment entrepreneurs such as Coppin or Barnum. They utilised a variety of genres and techniques, including music and dance, as well as technologies driven by steam and electricity [8], wax modelling, and glassblowing in order to amuse and delight their audiences within the arcades.

Learn more

On 31 October 2023, Dr Alexandra Roginski, a fellow Professional Historians Association (Vic & Tas) member, and Professor Andrew Singleton from Deakin University are presenting ‘An Evening of Mystery in the Eastern Arcade: Phrenologists & Spiritualists’ at the Victorian Archives Centre and online. It should be a great talk, so book via Eventbrite! I’m so looking forward to it!

Footnotes

  1. James Lesh, ‘Cremorne Gardens, Gold-rush Melbourne, and the Victorian-era Pleasure Garden, 1853-63’, Victorian Historical Journal 90.2 (2019): 219–252. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/INFORMIT.893493942124131.  
  2. Nicole Davis, Nineteenth-century Arcades in Australia: History, Heritage & Representation (PhD Thesis, University of Melbourne, 2023), 165.
  3. Ibid. 186.
  4. Alexandra Roginski, Science and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World: Popular Phrenology in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (Cambridge, 2022), in which she talks about the Eastern Arcade.
  5. Hugh Buggy, The Real John Wren (Widescope International, 1977), quoted in Otto, Capital, 47–48.
  6. Davis, ‘Nineteenth-century Arcades in Australia’, 192.
  7. Rebecca C Hopman, ‘Demonstrations Gain Steam’, Journal of Glass Studies 62 (2020): 281.
  8. See for example: Henry Reese, ‘”The World Wanderings of a Voice”: Exhibiting the Cylinder Phonograph in Australasia’, in A Cultural History of Sound, Memory, and the Senses, edited by Joy Damousi & Paula Hamilton (Routledge, 2017)

Other Sources & Further Reading

Mimi Colligan, Canvas Documentaries: Panoramic Entertainments. inNineteenth-Century Australia and New Zealand (Melbourne University Press, 2002).

Corning Museum of Glass, ‘The Grand Bohemian Troupe of Fancy Glass Workers|Behind the Glass Lecture’, 19 January 2019. YouTube.

Clay Djubal, ‘What Oh Tonight: The Methodology Factor and Pre-1930s’ Australian Variety Theatre (with Special Focus on the One Act Musical Comedy, 1914–1920)’ (PhD Thesis, University of Queensland, 2005).

Harry Gordon, ‘Buggy, Edward Hugh (1896–1974)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography.  

Andrew May, ‘Bourke Street’, eMelbourne: The City Past and Present.

Official Record Containing Introduction, History of Exhibition, Description of Exhibition and Exhibits, Official Awards of Commissioners and Catalogue of Exhibits. (Melbourne: Mason, Firth & McCutcheon, 1882), 434, 648.

Kristin Otto, Capital: Melbourne When it Was the Capital City of Australia, 1901–27 (Text Publishing, 2009), 47–75.

Henry Reese, ‘Spectacular Entertainments at Edison Lane’ (parts one and two), State Library of Queensland Blog, 20 December 2022.

Henry Reese, ‘Settler Colonial Soundscapes: Phonograph Demonstrations in 1890s Australia’, in Phonographic Encounters: Mapping Transnational Cultures of Sound, 1890–1945, edited by Elodie A Roy and Eva Moreda Rodriguez (Routledge, 2022), 60–77.

‘The Great Exhibition, 1851: Philosophical instruments by Deleuil 1851’ [photograph], Claude-Marie Ferrier, RCIN 2800038, Royal Collection Trust.  

Richard Waterhouse, ‘The Internationalisation of American Popular Culture in the Nineteenth Century: The Case of the Minstrel Show’ Australasian Journal of American Studies 4.1 (1985): 1–11.

Richard Waterhouse, From Minstrel Shows to Vaudeville: the Australian Popular Stage 1788–1914 (NSW University Press, 1990)

Richard Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, Public Leisure: A History of Australian Popular Culture Since 1788 (Longman, 2005).

Alexa Wright, Monstrosity: The Human Monster in Visual Culture (Bloomsbury, 2013), 84–85.

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In October last year, along with other members of the Melbourne History Workshop (MHW), I presented at a public seminar, ‘Untimely Ends: Using Inquests for Family and Local History‘, at Public Record Office Victoria (PROV), which focused on a specific collection of documents at PROV. We looked at the broader details of information you can find in these Inquests (Series VPRS 24) and how to use them in historical research. You can find more information on the MHW website, including the PowerPoint of the talk, which is full of useful material.

For my specific section, I talked about some research that I have been doing on Fong Fat, the Chinese owner of several Fancy Goods stores: two on Swanston Street and one in the Eastern Arcade in the 1860s and 1870s (although not all at the same time). The inquests research revealed more about his story but, more significantly, gave some greater detail about the women in his family: his daughter, Ah Chow; his first wife, Chinese-born Quinti; and his second wife, English immigrant Catherine Downey, formerly the family’s housekeeper and shop assistant.

In the last post on Fong Fat, I wrote about English-born New Zealander Charles Rooking Carter‘s comment on the shopping opportunities in the city of Melbourne in 1869:

he could find only one handsome Chinese shop in all Melbourne, and that was kept by ‘celestial’ individual rejoicing in the name of Fong Fat. He indeed, had an excellent display of Chinese fancy goods, in the way of carved ivory work, ebony work, porcelain baskets — besides tea and tobacco.

Carter, Victoria: The British ‘El Dorado‘ (1870)

Fong Fat’s shop, at 96 Swanston Street, near Little Bourke, was joined by another at 48 Bourke Street, in 1871 and then by another, in 1872, in the new and prestigious Eastern Arcade on Bourke Street. It was this shop that led me to Fong Fat and his story. In my research work on nineteenth-century Australian shopping arcades I came across advertisements for the wares that Fong Fat sold in the arcade, including imported Chinese homewares, bric-a-brac, fireworks, tea, and tobacco.

Advertisement for Fong Fat’s Eastern Arcade store, Herald, 20 December 1872, 4

While we imagine arcades in this period, and indeed Melbourne itself, as rather heterogenous and white, Chinese, Indian, Afghani and other non-European shops appeared in them to satisfy the taste for, to European eyes, exotic products from these regions. These shops and the stories of their proprietors demonstrate that Australia and its urban centres were more cosmopolitan that we often imagine.

The image we often have of the Chinese in Australia is of goldfields immigrants, sojourners that return or intend to return to China after making their money, who send their profits home, and whose Chinese wives that are left behind with the extended family. But, as scholars of the Chinese-Australian experience such as Sophie Loy-Wilson and Kate Bagnall, have explored, the story is far more complex. Many also decided to remain in Australia, becoming an integral part of Australian urban and regional life.

Fong Fat’s life is a one of those that little different to the Chinese sojourner trope, as is that of his family. Born in Canton around 1820, he came to Australia about 1857, presumably for gold, and established himself as a shopkeeper. He died in Stawell in 1884 after having married English-born widow Catherine Downey in 1872. This aspect of his story is really interesting, although not so highly unusual for Chinese-Australian men of the period; quite high numbers began relationships and had children with non-Chinese women. What intrigued me even more though was the story of his first family.

As I searched through Trove, as you do, for newspaper reports on him, I found some intriguing articles about two inquests in which he gave evidence. The first was that of four-month-old Ah Chow, the child of Fong Fat, who died in 1865 of inflammation of the lungs. The second, was that of his Chinese wife Quinti whose death, five years later, was caused by a stroke, and the newspapers claimed was probably the first inquest on a Chinese woman in the Australian colonies. These stories really intrigued me because our general story is that almost no Chinese women were present in Australia during this period. The Victorian census records indicate that there were eight Chinese women in 1861 (although 7% of the total population was China born), which grew to 31 in 1871. But there were a very very small number, of which Quinti was one .

Report on the inquest of Ah Chow, The Age, 10 July 1865, 4
Report on the inquest of Quinti, The Age, 17 May 1870, 3. The report mentions Catherine Downey, who was soon to become Fong Fat’s second wife

Interested in finding more, I obtained the inquest records (now almost all digitised!) from PROV, which told us a little more about the findings of the coroner, although the majority of the information was really quite well reported in the newspapers. But the inquests help to personalise this much more as we read the words of Fong Fat’s testimony for both his little daughter’s and wife’s deaths (the second was given through a translator). Like many testimonies, they seem dry, but we can imagine the probable distress of the father and husband at these events. Of Ah Chow’s death he stated:

The deceased female infant Ah Chow was my child. She was 28 days old. She was healthy up to the day before yesterday. She was in bed with her mother when I went home at 12 o’clock at night. My wife was crying. I saw blood coming from the child’s mouth. I went for a doctor but he was not at home. The child was alive then but lived only two hours.

Inquest deposition of Fong Fat in the death of his daughter Ah Chow. Public Records Office Victoria, VPRS 24 P0000 Unit 167, 4

The inquests are also interesting as they not only have testimonies from Fong Fat but also non-Chinese associates. This includes, in the inquest of Quinti, their housekeeper and shop assistant in Fong Fat’s store, Catherine Downey. Name sound familiar? Yes, this is the English-born widow that he married in 1871 and was his wife until her death fifteen years later!

I approach the history of urban Australia often in through the avenues of family history such as this. Using the personal stories of individual personalities to tell bigger histories and revealing larger events, such as the goldrush and its aftermath, Chinese migration to Australia, and the history of the city. Someone like Fong Fat, making his way in a city we often envisage as European and the presence of his Chinese wife and child, gives a different complexion to our imagination of Australia during the period.

Once I had found the inquests, I sourced as many other documents as I could to build a picture of these people and their lives – more newspaper reports, including advertising for the shops, stories about a court case Fong Fat’s second wife brought against someone, records of Catherine’s burial in the Melbourne General Cemetery and the gold that is the death certificates of Ah Chow and Quinti, which told us a little about them. Quinti, we find was born in Canton in around 1846 and had come to Victoria in around 1864 or 5, presumably to be a wife to Fong Fat. She quickly bore her only child, Ah Chow, in the colony, only to lose her, and then to die herself five years later.

The inquests themselves are only suggestive of what life would be like for Chinese women in Australia. Unfortunately, there is not a lot of detail in these particular ones but … in many other inquests we would receive a wealth of other detail about individuals. The death certificates reveal a little more, but they add to the story we are building. Importantly to me they also disrupt the idea that Chinese women were not present in Australia at all and the trope of the single sojourner Chinese man.

I think they also put a human slant on the often racialised and sensationalised newspaper reports about the Chinese community in the colonial city.  Together with all these other documents, the inquests provide another window into the lives of Fong Fat, Quinti and their baby daughter, as well as his second wife, and show how these types of records can provide more detailed information and illuminate the stories of Australian families.

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Queens Arcade Melbourne
Queen’s Arcade, Melbourne, Interior. St Gill, 1856. State Library Victoria

I know I’ve been very very quiet lately! I actually have lots of prepped posts but have been super busy over the last six months madly writing my thesis plus conference papers plus journal articles (this is good!). Today I’m writing Chapter Two and came across just the best advertisement for the Queen’s Arcade, placed in the newspaper in its opening days in October 1853.

Nineteenth-century newspaper advertisements were often entertaining and appealed to the reader through a variety of methods, including in this case … rhyme. It shows that the arcade’s owners, a consortium of well-off middle-class Melbourne businessmen, aimed provide a the wide variety and mix of tenants and produce for the consumer who visited.

Much like today’s modern shopping mall, everything shoppers desired could be found at the arcade – clothing and accessories, fabrics jewellery, musical wares, art materials, luxury consumables and onsite refreshment rooms. This gave them (ideally) no cause to go elsewhere, and the diversity and variety available seemed to place the new novelty of the arcade in an ideal position to become the centre of shopping and social life in Melbourne.

THE QUEEN’S ARCADE.

THE Belles and Beaux of Melbourne’s Town to aid,
What can be better than the Queen’s Arcade for
A pleasant lounge in summer’s sultry days,
Well shelter’d from old Sol’s o’powering rays;
And when the hot winds drive dust helter skelter
What place than this more cool and fit for shelter?
When the wet season makes our town a swamp.
The Queen’s Arcade is dry and free from damp;
And here the Melbourne belles may walk at ease,
And choose what rare commodities they please.
I’ll run them over with your kind permission
First, we’ve G. Goldsmith’s Bonnet Exhibition,
To suit complexions whether dark or fair;
Jewels and ornaments, both rich and rare;
Scents of all kinds, exquisite and recherche,
With papier mache, too, and gutta percha;
Drapery, hosiery, splendid silks, and satin,
With books in English, French, German, and Latin.
“Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast,”
And fewer bosoms. Here you’ll find the best
Quadrilles by Jullien, D’Albert’s waltzes fast,
The Arcade Polka, Winterbottoms’s last,
Bijouterie and articles of dress
On your attention, ladies, let me press,
That everything for widow, wife, or maid,
Is to be met with in the Queen’s Arcade;
And if the ladies’ smiles we only win,
Of course the gentlemen will soon drop In,
And they will find that them we’ve not forgot,
Havannahs and cheroots, a splendid lot,
With meerschaums, cutties, snuffs of every kind,
In short, all tastes will here be pleased; you’ll find
Rings, watches, pins, and studs in rich array.
Coats, trousers, vests of patterns neat or gay,
Canes, riding whips, and boots of patent leather,
With Mackintoshes to resist the weather.
To sum up all, an Universal Mart,
We mean to be a Gallery of Art,
And every exertion will be made
To please the public, in the Queen’s Arcade.
Refreshments of the best and choicest kind.
Will also be provided; you will find
Confectionery, pastry, jellies, ice,
Crackers, bon-bons, and everything that’s nice;
And taste it once, you’ll say such lemonade
You never drank but in the Queen’s Arcade.

The Banner, Melbourne, 7 October 1853 (via Trove)

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Being a researcher of any sort takes a large degree of doggedness, obsessiveness, and lots of eye strain. From scientists to historians, professionals, and amateur enthusiasts, anyone who researches has experienced this. We also understand the need to go over our material again and again, looking for new angles and evidence.

SLV H332 Gill The Block
Doing the Block, Melbourne. ST Gill, 1880. State Library Victoria.

So my quest to explore the history of Australia’s shopping arcades. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve trawled through Trove, Google Images, library websites, and books looking for images of these buildings. In addition to that, I’ve looked through hundreds of dusty old archival files, maps and plans that I’m terrified will crumble in my hand, astonishing but delicate and hard-to-see 100-year-old glass plate negatives and the most unsexy and eye-killing of research tools – the microfilm. Every time this was in pursuit of myriad tiny bits of information that a historian pieces together to tell as coherent a story as possible about their subjects.

But I also really really want to find some photos – because they are of course half the story and what helps bring to life these stories for your readers. Being an urban historian, this has often involved scouring street scenes of numerous Australian towns to hope that you’ll finally catch a glimpse of that building that you know existed but no-one thought it worth keeping an image of, or it hasn’t been tagged in digital files in order for you to find.

As an urban historian and curator first starting out, I spent probably over 100 hours looking at street scenes of Sydney for the Sydney’s pubs exhibition, trying to find elusive pubs that no-one knew about. I had eureka moments, when I spotted the Imperial Hotel on Wynyard Park, and crashing defeats in others, such as the Blue Anchor on George Street. Nine years later I still find myself looking for ones that escaped me, or getting excited about new images of those I already had found (that’s the obsession part!).

a089601r
Wynyard Square, Sydney. 1879. State Library New South Wales.

Now I’m back to scouring for this project. Realistically, most of the Australian arcades I’m researching have exterior images that are relatively easy to find. Interior images decidedly less so. For the last few years I’ve been searching for images of the first arcade built in Australia, the Queens Arcade, built on Lonsdale Street, Melbourne, in 1853. And believe me I’ve looked. I feel like I can see the changing urban portrait of Lonsdale Street from the 1850s to the 1890s in my mind like a palimpsest over today’s streetscape. But I had very little success in finding any image of any part of the building. The camera was always facing not quite the right way or the photo I found was of the site after the arcade had been demolished. And definitely no interior was to be found.

The first breakthrough was when I was trawling the internet yet again and found an old illustration in an old lecture Powerpoint that eminent urbanist Miles Lewis had put online. The Illustrated Melbourne Post is one of those rare newspapers that hasn’t been put online and you need to go to and find it in the State Library of Victoria on a microfilm ‘in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of the Leopard”‘ (Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1979).

Queens Arcade, Melbourne, Illustrated Melbourne Post, 29 October 1853, p4.
Queens Arcade, Melbourne, Illustrated Melbourne Post, 29 October 1853, 4

But frustratingly, I could never find anything else. Until the other day. I just decided to randomly look on the State Library of Victoria’s site again and up popped a new image of the interior of an arcade from 1856 – the Queen’s Arcade. The image shows its curved corrugated iron roof (one of the first galvanised iron structures made locally in Melbourne) as well as the lighting, which was achieved using clerestory windows rather than a glass ceiling. This was a simple interpretation of the arcade form, inspired by European examples but built using local materials.

Queens Arcade, Melbourne, Interior. St Gill, 1856. State Library Victoria
Queens Arcade, Melbourne, Interior. ST Gill, 1856. State Library Victoria.

Additionally the description of this item mentioned another image – a panorama of Little Collins Street by Melbourne photographer Charles Nettleton – that also shows the arcade from its back entry at far right. I may have looked at this photograph before but never picked up on the arcade being in it – it also didn’t come up in searches, as the description is not labelled it with the name of the arcade. Here you can see clearer the curved roof and clerestory windows, as well as the rather ornate back entrance on Little Bourke Street.

SLV H23929 Bourke Street Looking NE
Bourke Street Looking NE. Charles Nettleton, 1860. State Library Victoria.

SLV H23929 Bourke Street Looking NE detail
Bourke Street Looking NE (detail). Charles Nettleton, 1860. State Library Victoria.

The image of the interior was by celebrate illustrator ST Gill, who captured the life and rhythm of mid- to late nineteenth-century Melbourne and Ballarat. Currently the library is hosting a fantastic exhibition of Gill’s work, which I’ve lately found to be one of the visual inspirations for my thesis in the way it brings to life the city streets and their inhabitants. The Gill drawing probably went up online as part of the library’s research for the exhibition and my finding of it shows that its worth (re)searching again and again for images (and other historical information), as institutions like the library are always working on new exhibitions and research and, therefore, putting up new digitised images and other information for us to discover.

Addendum: ST Gill also drew this illustration of Melbourne’s second arcade, the 1854 Victoria Arcade, which doesn’t have appeared to have lasted long and may have never really got off the ground.

Victoria Arcade, Bourke Street Melbourne. ST Gill for JS Campbell & Co, Lithographers, 1853. State Library Victoria
Victoria Arcade, Bourke Street Melbourne. ST Gill for JS Campbell & Co, Lithographers, 1853. State Library Victoria

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On 8 March it was International Women’s Day and the AFL kicked off with the NAB Cup … In honour of these, a bit of trivia:

In 1911 & 1912 both suffragist Vida Goldstein & the Victorian Football League had offices in the Block Arcade Melbourne. You can find information about these and many other tenants of buildings throughout the state in the Sands & McDougall Directory of Victoria at the State Library of Victoria.

The Argus, 25 April, 1912, p5. Accessed on Trove at http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/11670383
The Argus, 25 April, 1912, p5. Accessed on Trove at http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/11670383

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So I always knew you could create a custom map on Google. But didn’t think to do one basic one for the nineteenth-century arcades in Australia until I did my post the other day about creating maps in TileMill.

I am not sure yet how much you can customise these custom Google Maps but for the moment it is a good little reference point. And it means other people can see it and imagine these buildings in relation to the street layout of today.

So here is the link to the map for those who want to check it out. Please let me know if you can’t see it!!

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block
Block Arcade, Collins Street, Melbourne

Between 1853 and 1893 approximately 12 glass-roofed shopping arcades were built in the the colony of Victoria. Influenced by the numerous examples built in Europe from the late eighteenth century onwards, these buildings were hailed as symbols of the colony’s modernity and progress.

The majority were built in the central business district of Melbourne, but some also appeared in suburban Melbourne and regional cities. For many years Victoria was the only state to boast these forms of architecture, followed by Brisbane in the 1870s, then Sydney, Perth, Adelaide and various regional cities in the 1880s. The building of arcades in Victoria ceased after 1893, possibly due to the economic depression that affected Australia so greatly in this decade.

In the first half of the twentieth century, arcades were built all over Australia, from capital cities to small country towns; arguably they were an influence on the suburban shopping arcade and the large shopping centres of the second half of the century.

I say there were approximately 12 arcades, but I have glimpsed hints of some through newspaper reports and such for which I have little further information – and there may even have been more. If you have any further examples or know any information about the arcades listed I would love to hear from you!

Today I will just leave you with a short list of the nineteenth-century arcades of Victoria and will return to discuss them in further detail at a later stage.

Nineteenth-century Arcades in Victoria

1853    Queens Arcade, Lonsdale Street, Melbourne

1854    Victoria Arcade, Bourke Street, Melbourne

c1869  Royal Arcade, Sturt Street, Ballarat

1870    Royal Arcade, Bourke Street, Melbourne

1872    Eastern Arcade, Bourke Street, Melbourne

1876    Victoria Arcade, Bourke Street, Melbourne

1889    Prahran Arcade, Chapel Street, Prahran, Melbourne

1889    Queens Walk Arcade, Collins & Swanston Streets, Melbourne

1890    Howey Place, Little Collins Street, Melbourne

1891    Metropole Arcade, Bourke Street, Melbourne

1892    Block Arcade, Collins Street, Melbourne

c1892  Bendigo Arcade, Hargreaves Street, Bendigo (on the site of an earlier arcade?)

1893    Kings Arcade, High Street, Armadale, Melbourne

EDIT: Sadly I’ve had to strike the Kings Arcade off the list! I’ve discovered that it was actually a single block of shops until the 1920s, when it was turned into an arcade. I was doubtful that it was all nineteenth century from visiting it but this was confirmed when I visited the National Trust (Victoria) and looked at some of their files. Such a shame that now I can only say that there was one nineteenth century suburban shopping arcade in Australia – the Prahran Arcade!

ANOTHER EDIT: Or was their only one … tantalising hints are surfacing!