Australia holidays: Melbourne's best cultural experiences, from coffee to art

Thanks to its abundance of art galleries and museums, including the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne has gained a reputation as the cultural capital of Australia. Photo / Robert Blackburn

Kirstie Bedford discovers why Melbourne is dubbed the cultural capital of Australia and where you need to go to get amongst it

The click-clack of a tram echoes down Elizabeth St. I duck into a laneway and the smell of coffee wafts in the air. Hole-in-the-wall cafes line the narrow street. Someone orders a magic (double ristretto), another a mushroom latte, as casually as if they are asking for a peanut slab from the local dairy. True Melburnians, I think to myself.

I weave my way through the grid of tree-lined streets into another laneway where steaming soup is ladled from huge black copper pots; waiters call out from French-inspired eateries and Spanish tapas bars line the bluestone-cobbled paths where fairy lights hang overhead and walls are adorned in urban street art.

I head north to upper Collins St where a trio of women walk past dressed in tailored suits, sporting leather gloves as if they've come straight from a live theatre performance, and maybe they have. Melbourne is, after all, Australia's live performance capital. It also has one of the highest densities of commercial art galleries in the world, with more than 130 galleries and museums - and across the iconic Yarra River an entire arts precinct. With all this culture, it's hard to know where to start, and I settle on a tour.

Hole in the wall cafes and coffee stops line the laneways of Melbourne's CBD. Photo / Supplied

Coffee with that culture?

"Our tours aren't just for coffee drinkers." Fiona Sweetman, director of Hidden Secret Tours, tells me when I say I'm after culture more than coffee. "It's about our diverse cultures that have influenced our cafe scene, and the architecture of the city that has enabled the hole-in-the-wall types of concepts …[it's about] where we as a city find our gossip corners, or people-watching moments."

The Cafe Culture walk starts at Bourke St in the city's old cafe precinct. We call into Melbourne institution Pellegrini's, a family-run Italian coffeehouse; Sensory Lab (by St Ali) where, much like its namesake, you'll find a barista wearing a white lab-coat ready to help you find new ways to appreciate coffee; and Traveller in Crossley St, a bustling laneway where locals congregate.

When the transtasman bubble is in place, take a small group tour of Melbourne to really get to the heart of its cultural highlights. Photo / Supplied

"It's like the milk bar of days gone by, where the news of the corner was shared, and people kept in touch," says Sweetman. There's no shortage of food stops either and you can expect to indulge in rich, buttery croissants, handmade chocolate with coffee liqueur, French-style macarons, and a full lunch - but always there are stories of the history of Melbourne, including the once-bustling coffee palaces set up by temperance societies, proving coffee certainly is well entrenched in the culture of Australia's second-largest city.
hiddensecretstours.com

Urban Adventures' Collingwood Coffee, Culture and History tour is another walking tour that gives you a good dose of culture with your coffee. Melbourne manager Kellie Birkett says she believes Melbourne's culture is best experienced by visiting its inner-city suburbs, and "Collingwood embodies the community spirit and culture that defines Melbourne as a unique city and place to visit".

An Urban Adventures Collingwood Coffee, Culture and History Tour. Photo / Supplied

The tour includes a stop outside the 20-storey Matt Adnate mural on Collingwood's public housing tower. Guides talk about the stigma residents face and how Adnate uses street art to break down those barriers of minority groups and celebrate the suburb's diverse population. You'll visit local business Yorkshire Brewery and learn about the history of craft beer, and visit the newly repurposed Collingwood Arts Precinct, an independent social enterprise supporting local artists.
urbanadventures.com

Traditional take

Head to the Melbourne Arts Precinct in Southbank, home to the Arts Centre, with its iconic 162m spire that is an iconic landmark on Melbourne's skyline. The custodian of Australia's largest collection of performing arts materials, it has 680,000 pieces in its collection, including one object every visitor to Australia must-see: Kylie Minogue's gold hot pants, exhibited behind bulletproof glass.
artscentremelbourne.com.au

The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, in Melbourne's art precinct. Photo / John Gollings

Also in the arts precinct is The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. ACCA has collaborated with leading Australian glass artist, Yhonnie Scarce (Kokatha/Nukunu peoples) - a master glass-blower who creates pieces weighing in on the colonial trauma and displacement of Aboriginal peoples.
acca.melbourne/visit

The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) has two galleries, one in the arts precinct, and the other across the Yarra River at Federation Square. NGV International (at the precinct) focuses on European, Asian, Oceanic and American art with 70,000 works, while at NGV at the Ian Potter Centre you'll find more Australian art on permanent display than anywhere else in the world.
ngv.vic.gov.au

While you're in Federation Square call in at ACMI, Australia's national museum of screen culture, which has just reopened after a NZ$42.7 million redevelopment. Here you'll find a new permanent exhibition, The Story of the Moving Image, which explores the history of the moving image, Australian representation and identity and Indigenous storytelling. ACMI also has a new cinema screen and art installation called the Black Magic Preservation Lab, featuring works from internationally renowned Australian artists.
acmi.net.au

Indigenous artefacts on display in the First Peoples gallery at Melbourne Museum. Photo / Dianna Snape

Just north of the city, at the Carlton Gardens, is Melbourne Museum, home to the First Peoples gallery where through the voices and language of the Koorie community you can hear the story of Aboriginal Victoria. There are also more than 600 historic and contemporary artworks made by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
museumsvictoria.com.au/melbournemuseum

The new kids

The newest addition to the city's cultural crown is The LUME. Launched in autumn, it is permanently based in the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre (MCEC) at Southbank. The 3000sq m visual display covers every surface simultaneously, with themed food and drinks. The opening will feature works of Vincent Van Gogh – but forget tiptoeing around a silent gallery. This cultural extravaganza will be about light, colour, sound and aroma. Expect to get a sense of Van Gogh's thoughts, feelings and state of mind as his works come to life in vivid detail.
thelume.com

Rain Room is a new kid on Melbourne's cultural scene. Photo / Supplied

Rain Room is another new kid on the cultural scene. It reopened this year in St Kilda (6km south of MCEC) after a sell-out launch in 2019. Hosting just 12 people at a time, you navigate a 100sq m space of torrential rain and the work responds to your presence ensuring you are completely protected.
jackalopehotels.com/art/rainroom

Out of town

Fifteen kilometres to the northeast of Melbourne's CBD in leafy Bulleen is the Heide Museum of Modern Art. It first opened in 1943 as a home for artists John and Sunday Reed, and they have since evolved it into one of Australia's most important cultural institutions. It houses a broad range of art from figurative to abstract, expressionist to realist, and this year will see the first dedicated retrospective of the work of vanguard modernist sculptor Margel Hinder, exploring the artist's creative vision. This year also sees the opening of the Healing Garden, a place for relaxation, joy, and rejuvenation – and who doesn't need that this year.
heide.com.au

Melbourne skyline, as viewed from the Royal Botanic Gardens. Photo / Supplied

For me, it's back to the city to attempt the test to be a true Melburnian.
I stride down a laneway to a hole- in-the-wall cafe and confidently say, "Magic, please."
The young guy serving me pauses. Someone looks up. A chair scrapes. I start to question if this is a "thing" in every cafe here, and maybe I've got it all wrong. Maybe it's not so common after all. I step back, my face flushes.
"Sugar with that?" He asks casually.
I smile. Job's done.

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