Queen Victoria Market Melbourne Layover

Queen Victoria Market fills two blocks at the top of Elizabeth Street in Melbourne and trades from 6am on five days a week, with the bluestone gaol where Ned Kelly was hanged ten minutes east along La Trobe Street and a 19th-century shot tower under a glass cone eight minutes south of that.

Old Melbourne Gaol, where Ned Kelly was hanged in 1880

Building started on Russell Street in 1839 and the first cell block took prisoners in 1845. The gaol ran until July 1924, and in that time 133 people were hanged inside it, Ned Kelly among them in November 1880 at the age of 25. The National Trust has run the place as a museum since 1972, so what is left is three tiers of cells around an open well, the gallows still in position on the upper landing, and a shelf of death masks cast from the heads of the executed.

Kelly’s death mask and one of his pistols are here, along with a replica of the armour; the real suit is a few streets away at the State Library. Adult entry runs around A$38 and the doors are open 10am to 5pm daily apart from Good Friday and Christmas Day, and a ticket bought ahead through a tours and activities platform comes with the self-guided audio tour and skips the counter queue.

Under the market sheds before seven in the morning

Melbourne has sold produce on this ground since 1878, and the fruit and vegetable traders are set up and shouting by six. The Dairy Produce Hall on the Queen Street side is the brick one, a long arcade of arched windows over counters of cheese, smallgoods and delicatessen stock, and it is the part of the market that reads least like a market and most like a building.

The open sheds behind it are the general merchandise half, trestle tables end to end with aisles between them barely two people wide, and on a Saturday morning the whole market moves through those aisles at once. A suitcase in that gap stops the line behind it, which is the single reason to arrive here without one. Outside D shed, a blue and white van has sold hot jam doughnuts since 1950, when two former schoolmates bought what was then the German Doughnut Kitchen; it starts at 7am on trading days and the queue at the window is part of the scenery.

Under the open-air car park at the southern end of the market lie the remains of roughly 9,000 people. The ground between Queen, Franklin and Peel streets was Melbourne’s first cemetery, in use from 1837, and when the market expanded over it in 1922 only about a thousand graves, the ones with legible headstones, were exhumed and moved. Fire destroyed the burial records in 1864, so the rest could not be identified and were left where they were, a metre or two down. A memorial on the corner of Queen and Therry streets marks them, and building work at the market still turns up bone.

Coop’s Shot Tower under the glass cone at Melbourne Central

Lead shot was made by pouring molten lead through a sieve at the top of a tall tower and letting it pull itself into spheres on the way down into a water bath. Coop’s Shot Tower was built for that in 1889: nine storeys, 50 metres, 327 steps, and six tonnes of shot a week until changes to firearm law killed the demand in 1961.

It was slated for demolition in 1973 and saved instead, and when Melbourne Central was built around it in 1991 the developers put an 84-metre conical glass roof over the whole thing rather than knocking it down or hiding it. Walking in costs nothing, it is bone dry in any weather, and a small museum inside the tower’s base explains the process. The square underneath also holds a large marionette watch that opens up and plays on the hour.

Getting from the market out to the airport

Southern Cross Station is about 15 minutes’ walk south-west from the market’s Peel Street corner, or a few stops on a tram down William Street, free the whole way since this end of the grid is inside the free tram zone. The SkyBus Melbourne City Express to Melbourne Airport (MEL) leaves the coach terminal there from Bay 75, roughly 4am to 1am, every 10 minutes at peak and every 15 outside it, at A$25.90 for an adult one way. The ride averages 30 minutes and closer to 45 in the peaks.

An early market morning fits a mid-afternoon flight comfortably, which is the main argument for this end of town over the longer walk down the grid: the market is finished by three, and so is your reason to be here.