ABSTRACT
The river and the civic axis of St Kilda Road/Swanston Street are the two primary linear elements of Melbourne's urban morphology, with the intersection long regarded as both the key node point and entry to the city. Princes Bridge is the urban threshold and has been the site for a long series of temporary archways that celebrate this flow of movement into the city; the grandest being the opening of the first federal parliament in 1901, celebrating independence from Britain and the birth of the Australian nation. A century later the south-eastern corner of this intersection has become the site of Federation Square (Figure 2.4). The city has long had an ambivalent relationship to its river landscape, both turning away from and yet facing the river. On the one hand, the first layer of development on the south-eastern corner was the city morgue, discharging its waste into the river. The neo-Gothic St Paul's cathedral by British architect William Butterfield replaced an earlier church on the north-east corner in the 1880s; although its spires were not completed until 1928. When Flinders Street Station was built on the south-west corner in 1901 it established the intersection of Flinders and Swanston as the busiest in town, as it further severed the city from the river. On the other hand, this southern view of the city with the cathedral as centrepiece became an iconic image as the ‘face’ of the city. While such images were crucial in the construction of Melbourne's identity, they were rarely photographs because the actual view in everyday life did not give the desired level of prominence to the cathedral; most postcard images are close-up three-quarter views (Figure 6.1). Early paintings and drawings often produced the illusion of a prominent cathedral, showing spires (which did not yet exist) and exaggerated vertically to dominate the city skyline.
