The city of Melbourne comes of age

The Melbourne of the 21st century is a successful, thriving city and a key driver of the Australian economy (by 2018-19 it was contributing a record 38.9 per cent to national GDP growth, more than any other region in the country). It is also the country’s sporting capital, a status it owes in part to the staging of the Olympic Games Melbourne 1956.   

It was the first Olympic Games to be held in the Southern Hemisphere and the first staged outside Europe and North America. A landmark event, it was seen by the Organising Committee as an opportunity to showcase Australia as a “new nation in this old land” and was enthusiastically supported by Melbourne’s modernising, business elite.

The city experienced a boom in the 1950s and 60s, during which time it became the fastest-growing state capital in Australia. Standing at 1,332,000 in 1950, its population rose to 1,626,000 in the year of the Olympic Games and 2,500,000 in 1970, a figure that had nearly doubled by 2020.

Melbourne’s post-war growth was built on major investment in manufacturing, chiefly of consumer products such as cars and electricals; high levels of immigration, and of car and home ownership; and government intervention in the delivery of infrastructure. The city championed American economic and cultural influence, and became the most prominent centre of modernist art, architecture and design in Australia. The finest expression of the abilities of its architects and designers was the Olympic swimming pool, whose inverted pyramid design earned instant acclaim.

The staging of the 1956 Olympic Games provided Melbourne with a platform to present itself to the rest of the world as a modern metropolis and to make a decisive break from the past. That vision of a confident, forward-looking city was expressed in the Opening Ceremony souvenir programme: “Its rising tiers and spreading flats of steel and concrete, bronze and glass… are eloquent testimony to the promise of Melbourne, the City of the Future.”

Such confidence had been in short supply in the years immediately before the Olympic Games, however. There were genuine concerns among some Melburnians that the city was not sophisticated enough for foreign visitors, that its accommodation was substandard, and its customs too provincial, such as drinking laws requiring that bars close at 6 o’clock. The fear was that Melbourne and Australia would be unable to stage the Olympic Games, that it would be “the laughing stock of the world”.

Those fears, which drove the desire to modernise, proved unfounded. Melbourne delivered what became known as the “Friendly Games”, earning unanimous praise from the world’s press for its smooth organisation of the event. It proved a turning point in the city’s development, with the Olympic Games providing a platform for Melbourne to achieve civic progress and gain in self-belief.