The Lost City of Melbourne

Have you ever heard of the Federal Hotel, the Padua Theatre or Parer’s Crystal Café and Hotel? Chances are you have not. These buildings were exemplars of Victorian architecture, a pompous symbol of wealth, opulence and status in Melbourne’s post-Gold Rush era in the late 1800s. In The Lost City of Melbourne, director and producer Gus Berger traces the evolution of Melbourne’s cityscape, from its glory days to a period of modernisation and demolition in the 1950s. 

In cinemas now, The Lost City of Melbourne is a moving and incredible feature-length documentary that explores the changing face of architecture, Melburnian’s everlasting fascination with culture and entertainment, and what life was like in the golden era from the 1880s to 1920s. Rare photography and archival footage from the State Library of Victoria and the National Film and Sound Archive, interviews with experts on Melbourne’s history, and commentary re-create a lost Melbourne in cinematic splendour. 

Melbourne in the 1800s was a city where everything was named either ‘Queen’, ‘Victoria’ or ‘Royal’. Exhibition Street was infamously known as Stephen Street. The patchwork of laneways was beginning to take shape. Collins Street was a precinct devoted to “fashion and high-class life”; Bourke Street was a place of trade, retail and theatre. 

Gus Berger, a Melbourne-based filmmaker and owner of two cinema companies, Blow Up Cinema and Thornbury Picture House, weaves through the role of cinema in Melbourne at the turn of (the last) century. The doco cites that Melbourne was home to the world’s first feature film – The Story of the Kelly Gang – and the appetite for cinema grew so much that cinema palaces propped up all over the inner city. In the 1920s, the zenith of cinema in Melbourne, theatres in St Kilda and Preston no longer hosted vaudeville shows but screened movies to a thousand people under the stars. 

By the 1950s, the shine had faded, and with the impending Queen’s visit and the 1956 Olympic games, Melburnians felt a deep-seated embarrassment that the city would be perceived as a rural town. The once-beautiful buildings were deemed too old-fashioned, too-Victorian, too-impractical. Enter Whelan the Wrecker and his brigade of acrobats who demolished much of the old, and over the next twenty years, many iconic buildings were dismantled. The line in the sand, which triggered the heritage movement in Melbourne, was when the Regent Theatre was threatened to be pulled to pieces. Literally! 

An in memoriam of sorts, The Lost City of Melbourne follows a formulaic process when it comes to documentary storytelling. It opens with the highest highs, then pulls you in with a great sense of loss – which is quite emotive, to be honest – then rests at a place of acceptance of what we have lost, but it’s important to hold onto the treasures we still have. With a side piece of the importance of cinema, music and entertainment in Melbourne. 

For me, I found The Lost City of Melbourne to be superb. The imagery is mesmerising. The nuggets of Melbourne trivia are excellent. The history is so rich. This doco is perfect for lovers of Melbourne, for architecture enthusiasts, for cinephiles, for anyone who has a ‘3’ at the beginning of their postcode. 

The Lost City of Melbourne
In cinemas now
View Trailer