Melbourne

Melbourne is the capital of Victoria, a city in southeastern Australia at the mouth of the Yarra River on Port Phillip Bay. It was named after William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, the British prime minister of the time. UNESCO made it a City of Literature, the second city to hold the title.

The Wurundjeri and Bunurong peoples of the Kulin nation lived around the bay for thousands of years before a party from Van Diemen's Land settled on the Yarra in 1835. The gold rush of the 1850s brought wealth and migrants, and by the 1880s the city had wide boulevards, cable trams and grand buildings that earned it the name Marvellous Melbourne. It was the first capital of the Commonwealth of Australia from 1901 until Canberra took over in the 1920s. After the 1940s migrants from Italy, Greece and later Vietnam settled in its inner suburbs, and their cafés and restaurants shaped the food of the city.

BHP, the mining company, has its head office in Melbourne and digs iron ore and copper in Western Australia, South Australia and Chile. CSL, which began as the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories, makes blood plasma therapies and influenza vaccines. The Port of Melbourne, on the lower Yarra, handles containers and new cars for the southeast of the country.

The Melbourne Cricket Ground hosted the Summer Olympics in the 1950s and holds the AFL Grand Final of Australian rules football each September. The Royal Exhibition Building, put up for an international exhibition in the 1880s, is on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The Australian Open tennis tournament is played each January at Melbourne Park beside the river. The Melbourne Cup horse race, run on the first Tuesday of November at Flemington, is a public holiday in the city.