How Like England We Can Be

To accommodate and feed inter-colonial and international visitors to Exhibitions in Sydney (1879) and Melbourne (1880 and 1888) ‘coffee palaces’ were constructed on a grand scale. ¹ These were majestic hotels that did not serve alcohol, built in response to the temperance movement, a worldwide lobby group that reached its height in the late nineteenth century. Although the temperance movement maintained momentum well into the twentieth century, the 1880s in particular was a golden era of pledging the virtues of abstinence. This coincided with an economic boom in Australia that had gathered momentum since the 1850s gold rush. Prosperity, along with new technology, and the ideology of temperance afforded the massive construction of coffee palaces.