7 ideal things to do in Melbourne

The short list, pulled out of the long essay. No opening hours, because they change and I would only get them wrong — just what is worth your morning, roughly when to turn up, and where I have wasted time so you don’t have to.

By Ščenza

Last checked September 3, 2026

The CBD laneway circuit: Degraves, Centre Place, Hosier Lane
Melbourne CBD, between Flinders Street and Collins StreetA weekday morning, during the working coffee rush
Hosier Lane runs off Flinders Street opposite Federation Square and has been a free-to-paint wall since 1998, which means everything you photograph today will be under someone else's paint within the month. Degraves and Centre Place are the coffee end: tables wedged into the alley, an entire city drinking standing up. One correction to my own earlier writing, offered without much dignity — Pellegrini's, the 1954 espresso bar that half the coffee mythology hangs on, is not in a laneway at all. It is at 66 Bourke Street and always has been.
The Leonard French ceiling at NGV International
St Kilda Road, just south of the YarraAny day; the Triennial comes round every three years
Walk in through the water wall — a sheet of glass with water running down the outside that every child in Victoria has put their hands on — and go straight to the Great Hall. Then lie down on the carpet. Everybody does it, there is no dignity left to protect, and above you is one of the largest suspended stained-glass ceilings in the world, moving colour across the floor as the day turns. The gallery has been collecting since 1861; the Australian half of it lives at Federation Square in the Ian Potter Centre, opened in 2002.
Queen Victoria Market and the Wednesday night market
Northern edge of the CBD, Elizabeth and Victoria StreetsClosed Mondays and Wednesdays in the day; Wednesday evenings for the night market
Open since 1878 and shut on Mondays and Wednesdays, which is the kind of thing you discover on a Wednesday, standing outside it, in the rain. The Deli Hall dates from 1868 and is the oldest structure on the site: cheese, smallgoods, and a century and a half of migration legible in what sits on the counters. On Wednesday evenings in both summer and winter the sheds turn over to a night market with food stalls and bands. Go near the end of a trading day if you want to hear the produce sellers negotiating with themselves.
The La Trobe Reading Room dome, State Library Victoria
Swanston Street, opposite Melbourne CentralA weekday afternoon; climb to the top balcony
Climb to the highest gallery and look down on three hundred and twenty people reading beneath a concrete dome opened in 1913 — thirty-four and three-quarter metres across and exactly as tall, and the largest of its kind anywhere when it was poured. Six floors of balcony radiate off it. Ned Kelly's armour sits a few rooms along in the museum galleries: dented, rust-coloured, and noticeably smaller than the legend requires. Nobody asks you for anything and nobody hurries you out, which in a city centre is remarkable in itself.
A match at the MCG, or the Australian Sports Museum
Yarra Park, a ten-minute walk from Federation SquareAFL through the winter; the Boxing Day Test from 26 December
A hundred thousand people, and the noise when a goal goes through at the crowded end does something physical to your ribcage. Australian rules runs through the winter, the Test starts on Boxing Day, and the ground is contracted to host the Grand Final until 2059, which is the most Melbourne fact I own. If nothing is on, the Australian Sports Museum inside the stadium runs tours that put you out on the turf. I went to a Thursday night game between two teams I could not tell apart and left hoarse and fully committed to one of them.
Tram 96 to St Kilda Beach and the Scenic Railway
East Brunswick to Acland Street, 13.9 km end to endSunday afternoon; Luna Park runs year-round
Route 96 crosses the entire city, runs down the Bourke Street Mall in the middle of it, and finishes on the old St Kilda railway alignment, converted to trams in 1987, at the beach. Waiting at the end is Luna Park, open since December 1912 and entered through an enormous open mouth. The Scenic Railway inside is the oldest continuously operating roller coaster on earth and still carries a brakeman who stands upright in the middle of the train working the brake by hand. He looked profoundly bored. I would not have been.
Great Ocean Road to the Twelve Apostles
Port Campbell National Park, west of MelbourneGo as an overnight, not a day trip; winter for weather with opinions
There are seven stacks left, not twelve, and there were only ever nine — the name was invented to shift more tickets, which I find hard to hold against anybody. One fell in 2005 and another in 2009, and standing on the boardwalk while the Southern Ocean takes run-ups at the survivors is the actual experience on offer. Stay a night at Port Campbell. Everyone insists it is a day trip; a day trip is four hundred kilometres of driving and forty minutes of looking, and I remember mostly the car.

The long version

Melbourne: the laneway city of coffee and contradiction

Melbourne is the second-largest Australian city and, by most metrics that matter to a traveller, the more rewarding one. The laneway coffee culture, the food, the small-bar scene, and the Australian Open in January make for a city that punches well above its harbour-less weight.

Read the full essay →