Royal Exhibition Building

You are standing in front of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the first building in Australia to receive that designation, and also the building where Australia itself was born. On the first of January, nineteen oh one, the Commonwealth of Australia was proclaimed inside this hall. The first federal parliament sat here. The nation's very first laws were debated under this dome. For the first twenty-seven years of Australian federation, before Parliament House in Canberra was built, this is where it all happened.

The building was designed by Joseph Reed, the same architect behind the Melbourne Town Hall and the State Library, for the Melbourne International Exhibition of eighteen eighty. It was one of the great world's fairs, and Reed designed a building to match: a cathedral of commerce with a soaring dome modelled on the Florence Cathedral. Over one and a half million people visited that first exhibition. The building is the only surviving major exhibition hall from the great nineteenth-century world's fair movement. Every other exhibition palace from that era, London's Crystal Palace, Paris's Palais de l'Industrie, has been demolished or destroyed. This one endures.

The Carlton Gardens surrounding it are equally World Heritage-listed, designed in a mix of Victorian, French, and English landscape styles. At dusk, the gardens come alive with wildlife: brushtail possums, tawny frogmouths, kookaburras, and even grey-headed flying foxes when the native trees are flowering. And here is a nice detail: the fountain in front of the building was manufactured by the same French foundry that made the fountains at the Place de la Concorde in Paris. Melbourne, even in the eighteen eighties, was not shy about its ambitions.