Royal Exhibition Building and Melbourne Museum

Why it matters

This is the country of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Boon Wurrung Bunurong peoples of the eastern Kulin Nations, as Museums Victoria acknowledges on its pages for both the building and the museum.

The building was put up in 1879 and 1880 for the Melbourne International Exhibition, one of the world's fairs at which the nations of the nineteenth century showed off their manufactures, machines and art. Melbourne, rich on gold, built big: the Great Hall is about 152 metres long, and the dome rises about 68 metres. The architects were Reed and Barnes, and Joseph Reed also laid out the gardens around it. The building was used again for the Centennial International Exhibition of 1888, which the Victorian Heritage Database records as the first international exhibition lit by electricity.

Its largest moment came on 9 May 1901, when the first Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia was opened in the Great Hall. There was no national capital yet, so the Parliament of Victoria lent its Parliament House on Spring Street to the new federal Parliament, and moved itself into the Exhibition Building's western wing. It expected to be there for three to five years and stayed until 1927; its members, the Victorian Parliament's own history records, complained of the damp air and missed their library. The hall was redecorated for the 1901 opening by John Anderson, and the Heritage Database counts his scheme among the finest public artworks in Victoria.

Between the great occasions the hall did whatever Melbourne needed. In 1919 it became an emergency hospital during the influenza pandemic, and in 1956 it held the Olympic basketball, weightlifting and wrestling and the fencing of the modern pentathlon. Generations of Victorian students have sat their final exams in it.

The twentieth century was less kind to the building itself. In 1948 Melbourne City Council voted only narrowly against demolishing it. The annexes went one by one, the last of them, the ballroom, demolished amid protest in 1979, and the building's survival was in doubt for decades. In 2004 the building and Carlton Gardens together were inscribed on the World Heritage List, the first built site in Australia to be listed. Melbourne Museum opened on the site of the demolished annexes in October 2000.

The precinct today

The gardens cover 26 hectares, with two lakes, three fountains and long avenues of plane trees. Museums Victoria says the building drew more than 627,000 visitors in 2024-25; the report does not say how many came for events and how many for tours. Melbourne Museum has counted more than 23 million visits since it opened. The Great Hall still earns its keep: it holds markets, fairs and other events, university and school exams, and in March the Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show.

What it's like

The approach is the best way to understand the building. From the south, off Victoria Street, a broad path runs up between avenues of plane trees, past lawns and flower beds, to Josef Hochgurtel's Exhibition Fountain of 1880, the largest and most elaborate in Australia, according to the Heritage Database. Behind it the building fills the view, cream render and arched windows, with the ribbed dome rising from the middle like a cathedral's. The dome was meant to be seen from a distance, and the garden avenues were laid out to frame it.

On the north side, where we began our March day, the building meets the modern museum across a wide paved forecourt, and the two face each other: the angled roof of the museum, from 2000, points towards the dome of 1880. We walked round the outside. There was no way in. On an ordinary day the doors are shut, and the building is opened for booked tours and for events.

Inside, the hall runs about 152 metres under a painted ceiling. The original scheme of 1880, by John Mather, used stencilled patterns throughout, with murals in the curved panels and on the buttresses beneath the dome; what survives today is largely Anderson's redecoration of 1901, restored in the 1990s. Tripadvisor reviewers, who rate the building 4.4 out of 5, write of the tour taking them through the building and up to the roof, and keep coming back to the craftsmanship of the interior and to the view from the top. Museums Victoria does not describe the tour's route, so ask when you book how much of the hall you will see.

What writers and artists have made of it

The opening of 1901 was painted by Tom Roberts, for a fee of 1,000 guineas. He spent two years on a canvas about 3.6 by 5 metres, with 269 portraits of the people in the hall, centred on the Duke of Cornwall and York, the future George V, declaring the Parliament open; the work, Parliament says, damaged his eyesight and his health. It is known as the Big Picture. It hung in St James's Palace in London until 1957 and is now on permanent loan from the Royal Collection to Parliament House in Canberra. If your tour takes you onto the floor of the hall, you are standing inside Roberts's painting.

The answer is practical and also telling. In 1901 the Commonwealth had no capital and no Parliament house of its own, and its opening needed a room for a great crowd. The exhibition halls of the nineteenth century were the great public rooms of their age, built for crowds and for the idea of progress, and the new Commonwealth borrowed that idea along with the space.

What to do there

The building, the museum and the gardens fit into one visit. The tours leave from the museum's foyer, so many visitors join one and then stay for the museum; the gardens are the way in and the place to sit afterwards.

The Dome Promenade tour

The tour is the only ordinary way inside. Museums Victoria runs it as a guided tour of 60 minutes for up to 30 people, which meets at the Tours Lounge in the Melbourne Museum foyer and walks across to the building. It takes you up to the Dome Promenade, the outdoor walkway high on the dome from which visitors to the exhibitions of 1880 and 1888 looked out over the gardens, and includes an exhibition on the building's history and uses; today the view takes in the gardens and the city skyline. Tickets cost $29 for adults, $23 for seniors and concessions and $15 for children aged 16 and under, and bookings are essential.

The upper promenade is reached by about 20 steps and is not wheelchair accessible; the basement, mezzanine and lower promenade can be reached by lift. Both promenades are outdoors, so a wet or windy day spoils the view. Museums Victoria gives no lower age limit, but under-fives on an exposed walkway need a hand held.

Melbourne Museum

The museum is the half of the precinct you can simply walk into. It is open from 9am to 5pm every day except Good Friday and Christmas Day, and Museums Victoria's own suggested route for adults takes about two and a half hours.

Upstairs, Melbourne Story tells the city's history, and in it stands Phar Lap, the champion racehorse; further in, you walk through the workers' houses of Little Lon, a lost quarter of the city centre, and see recent archaeological finds from it. First Peoples, in the Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre, was made with the Yulendj Group of Elders and tells the history, cultures and survival of the First Peoples of south-eastern Australia through more than 600 objects; outside it, the Milarri Garden has an eel pond with a daily feeding.

The Forest Gallery brings a mountain forest indoors, with native fish, spiny crayfish and birds such as the tawny frogmouth; the museum suggests it as the place to slow down. The dinosaurs are the draw for children: Dinosaur Walk, and Horridus, which the museum calls the most complete real dinosaur on display anywhere in Australia, in Triceratops: Fate of the Dinosaurs. The Pauline Gandel Children's Gallery is made for children up to five. In the Research Institute gallery the museum shows its current science, with objects that have never been on display before; the museum picks out the thylacine, the extinct Tasmanian tiger, as a highlight. Some temporary exhibitions cost extra.

Carlton Gardens

The gardens are free to walk through. The southern half is the formal forecourt to the building: the main avenue of 26 plane trees frames the dome, and flower beds line the southern promenade. Besides Hochgurtel's fountain there are the French Fountain and the Westgarth Fountain, and two ornamental lakes, each with an island. Avenues of elms, cedars, poplars and oaks cross the lawns. The northern part, around the museum, was laid out after 1888.

Also in the building

IMAX Melbourne shares the museum building, with documentaries at $12 for everyone and feature films from $18 to $31.50. We have not researched it further.

How to visit

Visiting with children

The museum is one of the best places in Melbourne to take children: they go free, the dinosaurs and the Children's Gallery are made for them, and the gardens outside give them room to run.

Getting there

The precinct sits on the north-east edge of the city centre, between Nicholson Street on the east and Rathdowne Street on the west. Trams 86 and 96 stop at the Melbourne Museum stop (stop 11) on Nicholson Street, beside the museum. Museums Victoria lists the free City Circle tram and Parliament station, on the City Loop, as other ways in; from Parliament station the gardens are north, up Spring Street. Buses 250, 251 and 402 stop on Rathdowne Street. Our guide to getting around Melbourne explains the trams and the free tram zone.

For anyone without the map: the museum and its tour desk are on the north side of the building, entered from the forecourt between Nicholson and Rathdowne Streets; the building and its fountain face south, over the gardens towards Victoria Street.

A half-day here

A plan that works for most visitors: come up through the gardens from the south in the morning, to the fountain and the front of the building; walk round to the museum forecourt for your booked tour; then go into the museum for the rest of the morning or the afternoon. Lunch at the museum café or on Lygon Street, and the gardens are there for an hour on the grass afterwards. With children, start with the museum while they are fresh and keep the tour for later, or leave it out.

Food, toilets and opening

Access

The museum is step-free through its lifts and lends wheelchairs and a scooter free, booked on 13 11 02. In the building, the lifts reach the basement, the mezzanine and the lower promenade; only the upper promenade is by stairs.

When to go

Museums Victoria says the museum's quietest hours are from 3pm to 5pm on school-term weekdays. Pick a clear day for the dome tour, since the promenade is outdoors. In March the Flower and Garden Show takes over the building and gardens.

Making the most of it

Nearby

South of the gardens, down Spring Street, stands Parliament House, where the federal Parliament sat from 1901 to 1927. It was our next stop that day, and by the time we reached it the chill had gone and it was pleasantly warm. West of the gardens, beyond Rathdowne Street, Lygon Street is Carlton's Italian street of cafés and restaurants, and our guide to where to eat in Melbourne covers it with Fitzroy, to the east.

For a day in the northern half of the centre, pair the precinct with Queen Victoria Market, a short tram ride west, or with the laneways and arcades to the south. The Melbourne guide shows how the city fits together.