Around Melbourne
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For as long as there have been curtains, folks have been twitching them for a nosy beak at the neighbours. It’s basically hardwired into our DNA to wonder incessantly about what goes on behind closed doors.
Which is why the geniuses who came up with the original Open House program way back in 2008 knew exactly what they were doing. Satisfying the snoop inside of all of us is a never-ending affair, so here we are, almost 20 years later, still craving more, more, more!
Open House Melbourne Weekend, radiating out across the city from July 26-27, goes all out this year, squishing our nosiness into almost 200 rarely snooped inside establishments.
No shit, you can dive headlong into the surprisingly stunning surrounds of Melbourne’s first-ever poop house. The French Renaissance-style red brick edifice that is the Spotswood Pumping Station opened in 1898 to help funnel crap from the city’s stinky sewers out to the treatment works at Werribee. Though its great gassy engines fell silent in 1965, it made its cinematic debut shortly thereafter, appearing in George Miller’s game-changing 1979 dystopia, Mad Max, and later popping up in beloved ABC show Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. Just make sure not to bump any of the pipes too firmly, what with a flood of faeces still flying through the site on its way westward.
If you’ve never had a chance to fly in or out of Essendon Fields Airport, only Australia’s second international hot spot when it opened with grass runways in 1921, airheads can peruse the terminal building’s nook and crannies. Now the home of Victoria’s aerial emergency services, the dinky airport welcomed everyone from the Beatles to Muhammad Ali back in the day. This historic spot also marks the notable site of Australia’s first parachute jump conducted by a woman, the plucky 17-year-old Jean Burns, in 1937.
If you prefer to keep your feet/wheels firmly on the ground, why not hang out with the elephants at Werribee Open Range Zoo instead? You can range free through 21 hectares of their fab new environment, because nosy folks know that the longer a nose, the better at sniffing out the sights.
At the newer end of the scale, infrastructure nerds who can’t get enough of BIG stuff or those with an incurable addiction to Lycra will be able to check out 2.5 kilometres of the bike-ready veloway on the rapidly evolving West Gate Tunnel project. You’ll also be able to check into Melbourne’s swishest new hotel with a behind-the-scenes tour of Melbourne Place. Those who love living the high life can stop for sustenance at the 12th-floor Mid Air bar, or if you love to see how stuff’s made, invite yourself into Crumpler’s latest workshop on Little Bourke Street, Bag House.
If you’re determined to up your nosy game, then make a busy beeline direct to the nine private homes that will throw their doors wide over the weekend, including Box Hill’s brick-clad beauty, the Naples Street House. The 2024 Robin Boyd Award winner is nestled around a blissful central garden courtyard, so that every sleekly conceived room of the Edition Office-designed sanctuary looks out onto this soothing space. It’s the real estate porn inspo you need in your life.
Those among us who can’t get enough of the drama will surely want to centre themselves as the MVPs of backstage tours of both MTC’s Southbank Theatre and the nearby Melbourne Recital Centre.
Travel into the future with Reworlding: Naarm, a three-hour-long role-playing adventure game that imagines what the city will look like as a 10 million-strong megalopolis in 2050 (assuming we haven’t gone the full Mad Max and annihilated ourselves by then). If you’d rather look back and learn from the best, you can take a First Nations-led kayak tour along the lifeblood of our city with What’s Good for the Birrarung is Good for Everyone, learning about the ancient waterways of Naarm.
With all this and plenty more to explore across Open House Melbourne’s bumper weekend, your curtain-twitching ticks will be fully satiated.
For a full list and to book limited tours, events and experiences, visit the website here.
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