History of Melbourne - Post World War Two

Post World War Two

After World War II, a new era of increasing prosperity arrived, fuelled by high prices for Victoria's wool, increased government spending on transport and education, and the stimulus of renewed high immigration. Unlike prewar immigration, which had been mostly from the British Isles, the postwar program brought an influx of Europeans, at first mostly refugees from eastern and central Europe. A large proportion of these immigrants were Jews, and the Jewish population of Melbourne became the largest population proportionally of any Australian city, at about 1.4% in 1970. They were followed by migrants from Italy, Greece and the Netherlands.

Later, in the 1960s, migrants came from Yugoslavia, Turkey and Lebanon. These inflows rapidly transformed the city's demographic profile and many aspects of its life. This new growth required new spending on infrastructure such as roads, schools and hospitals, which had been neglected during the long decades of recession and low growth between 1890 and 1940. Henry Bolte, Premier from 1955 to 1972, was responsible for much of this rapid development of infrastructure. Under Bolte, some of the old inner-city slums were bulldozed and the dislocated tenants were housed in high-rise blocks of state-owned apartments.

Since the 1970s, the pace of change in Melbourne has been increasingly rapid. The end of the White Australia Policy brought the first significant Asian migration to Melbourne since the gold rushes, with large numbers of people from Vietnam, Cambodia and China arriving. For the first time, Melbourne acquired a large Muslim population, and the official policy of multiculturalism encouraged Melbourne's various ethnic and religious minorities to maintain and celebrate their identities. At the same time, the practice of mainstream Christianity largely declined, leading to a secularisation of public life.

State patronage of the arts led to a boom in festivals, theatre, music and the visual arts. Tourism became a major industry, bringing still more foreign faces to Melbourne's streets. In 1956, the city became the first in the Southern Hemisphere to host the Olympic Games. Two new universities opened, Monash University in 1961 and La Trobe University in 1967, followed by others in the 1980s, maintaining Melbourne's place as a leader in tertiary education.

By the end of the 20th century Melbourne had 3.8 million people. The urban sprawl spread from Werribee in the south-west to Healesville in the north-east and encompassing the whole of the Mornington Peninsula and Dandenong Ranges to the south and east. A program of freeway construction was fast tracked in the 1970s and 1980s, while the expansion of rail and tram networks were neglected. These factors led to the rapid growth of the number and use of private cars.

Partly as a result of the increasing difficulty of traveling across the city, the central business centre declined, and satellite suburbs such as Frankston, Dandenong and Ringwood, and further out Melton, Sunbury and Werribee, became centres of manufacturing, retailing and administration. As a result, industrial employment in the old working class inner suburbs declined, with these areas rapidly gentrifying in the 1990s and 2000s.