In Melbourne, local innovators are breathing new life into forgotten spaces

Travel

The greatest treasures in Victoria’s capital lie down dark lanes and behind hidden doors. Small businesses and creatives are revitalising these forgotten spaces ­— but to find them, you might need to ask a local.

ByJustin Meneguzzi

Published December 13, 2023

• 15 min read

This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK)

An Aboriginal healer, dressed as a Jedi and wielding a glowing blue boomerang like a lightsaber, beckons to me. Inching my way along the shadowy corridor of Flinders Street Station’s third floor, I find twisted tree roots carved into haunting sculptures, ancient spirits cast in red neon lights, and an ochre termite mound rising from the centre of a cavernous ballroom. A woman’s mournful singing floats in the darkness. 

The art installations are captivating, but each room I pass is also a time capsule, preserving small moments from a 113-year-old building — Australia’s oldest railway station. Errant brushstrokes left by painters. Scrawled phone numbers from trespassers. Antique vaults anchored to the floor of former offices. 

With its arresting French Renaissance architecture and turquoise copper dome, Flinders Street Station in central Melbourne has become a recurring icon on postcards and T-shirts. But few know about the building’s past as the epicentre of the city’s social life. 

In its heyday, the 11 rooms that make up the station’s top floor — which included a gymnasium, smoking room and library — were a hive of activity. At its centre was the ballroom, which hosted boxing and, in the aftermath of the First World War, jubilant dance parties. Tired with age and falling into disrepair, the ballroom saw its last dance in 1983. Locked shut, it fell out of public memory and into urban legend. But nearly 40 years on, the space has been restored and reopened to host evocative shows that are part of Rising, Melbourne’s annual contemporary art festival.

Curator of the event’s Shadow Spirit exhibition, Kimberley Moulton is a Yorta Yorta woman, whose ancestors came from the Murray River area of Victoria and New South Wales. Her show is an exploration of the Aboriginal spiritual world that melds traditional knowledge with elements of pop culture. Kimberley’s boots click on the floorboards as she guides me from room to room, explaining the layers of meaning in each artwork: “I believe spaces and objects hold energy, and you can really feel that in this building.” 

She jumped at the opportunity to present her people’s culture in one of Melbourne’s most revered colonial buildings: “I’m interested in seeing art outside institutional spaces like museums. By exhibiting here, we’re leaning into the architecture of the space as well as its history. 

“The land we’re standing on was, and still is, an important meeting place for Aboriginal people before a train station was built on it.”

The revival of Flinders Street Station’s third floor is a high-profile example of how new life is being breathed into Melbourne’s forgotten spaces. Enterprising businesses — from tattoo artists to cheesemongers — have moved into the city’s folds and creases, filling them with new energy and reinvigorating the city. 

Some hide in plain sight, while others need to be nosed out with a bit of spelunking through graffitied lanes.

Less than a block from Flinders Street Station is the Nicholas Building. It opens onto Swanston Street, one of the city centre’s crowded arterial roads. Few pause to appreciate the barrel-vaulted arcade with leaded glass on its ground floor. Fewer still venture past the foyer and step into the cosy elevator to explore further. If they did, they’d find more than 100 creatives — from tailors and fashion brands to game designers and architects — spread over 10 floors in a fluorescent-lit vertical village. 

Rewarding the curious

“Many people don’t even know we’re here,” says jeweller Brooke Everett, who has lived in the city for 30 years, “but those who do are grateful. We don’t put it all out there in the way that Sydney or the Gold Coast does. Melbourne likes to keep things on the downlow.”

We have tea together in her studio in the Nicholas Building, where she hosts jewellery-making workshops, and scrapbooking, watercolour-painting and lipstick-making classes. A collection of stone-setting tools wait patiently at her workbench. The bangles and rings on her hand — one of them made from recycled buttons rescued from a charity shop — gleam in the sunlight that floods in.

The Nicholas Building was put up during Melbourne’s 1920s construction boom. The Chicago-style tower has a colonnaded facade and wide windows that project a stately elegance to the street, but inside, the 97-year-old building is showing its age. Chunks of wall tiles have collapsed to expose concrete, and windows are held shut by the sticky grace of electrical tape. Were these flaws anywhere else, you’d be calling the landlord to demand repairs. But it’s all part of the building’s bohemian charm according to Brooke. 

(How to spend a day in Melbourne)

She isn’t the only artist at the Nicholas Building sharing her skills with curious visitors: other studios are scattered between art galleries, bookstores and boutiques. Two floors down, a wave of aromas greets me when I meet Samantha Taylor at The Powder Room. An Adelaide native who now calls Melbourne home, she is dressed head to toe in black, with black glasses framing her face. Her attire matches the obsidian vials lining her shelves, each bearing a handwritten label such as ‘cedar’, ‘gunpowder’ and ‘roast lamb’. A fragrance specialist, Samantha hosts masterclasses in the artistry and history of perfume, with participants taking their bottled creations home with them. 

We sniff samples of native lemon myrtle and Tasmanian honey as Samantha tells me about her work, which includes creating scents for airlines and luxury hotels. I challenge her to capture Melbourne in a bottle. She layers woodfire smoke and whisky with the musty bouquet of the city’s heritage theatres. Capping it off are native botanicals such as saltbush and toasted wattleseed, to honour the city’s First Peoples and flourishing restaurant scene, which increasingly uses homegrown ingredients in its kitchens. 

A taste of history

On the quieter fringes of Melbourne’s Central Business District is another hidden treasure. An overhead projector hums and casts a monochrome shot of a mop-haired Chinese woman, wearing a buttoned-up shirt, onto a wall. At just 19, Tiecome Ah Chung jumped ship in Melbourne while being deported from Hobart to Shanghai. She assumed a new moniker — Yokohama — and founded a brothel in the city’s seedy northeastern corner, known as the Little Lon district.  

Fast forward 120 years and I’m sitting outside her red-brick cottage with Melburnian Brad Wilson, owner of the Little Lon Distilling Co — a microbrewery squeezed between the lodging’s heritage-listed walls.

A natural storyteller, Brad delivers a gin masterclass that comes with a side of history. As we sip, he describes how the gins are based on real people who lived and worked here, vividly bringing their stories to life with a slideshow of police records and diary entries. 

There’s Constable Proudfoot, a strong herbaceous gin named after a police officer who patrolled these streets. Dutchy Thomas — a mellow Dutch gin with whisky notes — is inspired by a Dutch Olympian who frequented these parts. Madame Yokohama herself is honoured by Little Miss Yoko, a lychee-infused gin that sizzles seductively across my palate. 

“This place is our own Pompeii,” says Brad, describing how excavations around the cottage played a part in unearthing more than 500,000 artefacts from the city’s 19th-century slums. Today, mementos from Little Lon’s past — Chinese coins, medicine bottles, clay pipes and children’s dolls, previously buried to make way for new development — are displayed proudly outside the distillery.

After finishing our workshop, Brad takes us on a guided tour that reveals just how tiny the cottage is. The former living room has been converted into an intimate bar. The bedroom, barely big enough to fit a double bed, is so small that a gin still had to be custom-made for the space.  

Heritage protections meant there were restrictions on what changes could be made to the structure when it was converted into a distillery, but Brad says this led to creative problem-solving, like running plumbing through the ventilation ducts.  

Flanked by glittering skyscrapers, the building is tricky to find and is several blocks away from Melbourne’s main drags. Most people discover the distillery through word of mouth. I suggest to Brad that operating a hidden business is counterintuitive. He shrugs: “Someone is always going to come across our bar, and that just means we can continue to tell these stories again and again to new people.”

Insider tips
Melbourne’s signature trams are an easy way to explore the inner city. A free zone extends to Docklands in the west of the Central Business District and Queen Victoria Market in the north. To ride, just hop on. 

Head to St Kilda’s breakwater at dusk to see a resident colony of little penguins come ashore. An enhanced pier and viewing platform are opening in early 2024. 

Tables at the city’s hottest restaurants, such as Chin Chin and Flower Drum, are often booked weeks in advance but most have limited room for walks-ins, and Melburnians are happy to queue. Arrive early, add your name to the list, and enjoy a cocktail in the restaurant’s bar while you wait.  

The first game of Australian rules football was played in Melbourne in the 1850s. It has since evolved into a local religion. Catch a match at the hallowed Melbourne Cricket Ground or watch at one of the pubs in nearby Richmond. 

Subterranean sustenance

Brad isn’t the only one to see benefits in being hidden. It’s evening when I slip down a narrow lane, buzz an apartment building’s intercom and take an elevator down to find my next stop: Ishizuka, a high-end Japanese restaurant concealed in the basement. “Once you discover something,” says restaurant manager Louise Naimo as she greets me, “it becomes part of you.”

It’s common for lost diners to run late for their reservations. “A lot of people take pride in showing their friends or family the way here,” Louise says. “Often, guests are coming to celebrate a special occasion and being hidden heightens the excitement.”

Moodily lit with brutalist decor, Ishizuka serves just 16 guests around a U-shaped table that faces head chef Shin Kato and his team. They prepare a masterful 10-course kaiseki menu with matched cocktails. For 600 years, kaiseki ­— a ritualised multicourse Japanese banquet ­— has been eaten out of sight in private tea gardens and underground spaces that remove distractions and allow food to be the focus. And here in a basement of Australia’s most food-obsessed city, that tradition continues in a restaurant that keeps its cards close to its chest. 

Each dish captures what Louise calls “little moments”. Like a symphony, the degustation is conducted from raw to soupy and fresh to sour as Kato experiments with techniques and seasonal produce. A white ball of tender snow crab unfurls in a cloudy turnip broth. Translucent strips of King George whiting fly in, shaped into the wings of a white crane, and chaperoned by hot wasabi and zesty yuzu sauce. Peeling back petals of black truffle reveals rich cubes of Wagyu beef and glistening French caviar. It’s heavy. It’s rich. It’s like a warm hug. 

I chat with a man next to me and learn he’s celebrating buying his first home. Across the table, a smiling couple toast their engagement. Fleeting friends for just a couple of hours, we return to the surface to say farewell then head our separate ways, carrying our common secret into the night. 

Published in the December 2023 issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK).

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