In 1979, the Victorian Government asked a deceptively simple question: What should Melbourne's landmark be? The Melbourne Landmark Ideas Competition invited anyone-architects, artists, engineers, dreamers, and amateurs-to imagine a new symbol for the city on the neglected Jolimont rail yards opposite Flinders Street Station. The response was overwhelming: 2,300 proposals from around the world. They ranged from a giant Peach Melba and a building-sized chair to floating structures and megastructures, theme parks, monumental bridges, crystal pyramids, aquariums, laser beacons, and towers designed to rival the world's great icons. One scheme proposed a gigantic clock spanning the Jolimont rail yards. Another imagined a crocodile large enough to swallow the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Overwhelmed by the abundance, the judges famously failed to choose a single winner. Instead, they named forty-eight. Nothing was built.
Nearly half a century later, architectural historian Derham Groves revisits this extraordinary episode in Melbourne's history. Drawing on the original competition entries preserved in the Public Record Office Victoria, he reconstructs a moment when the city briefly opened its imagination to the world. Part detective story, part cultural history, and part cabinet of architectural curiosities,
The 1979 Melbourne Landmark Ideas Competition
uncovers the forgotten schemes, the personalities behind them, and the debates they provoked. The result is a vivid portrait of Melbourne at a turning point-when modernist certainty was fading, postmodern playfulness was emerging, and the future of the city seemed up for grabs. The competition never produced a landmark, but it left behind something more revealing: a dazzling record of how people once imagined Melbourne's future-and how different that future might have been.
Dr Derham Groves studied architecture at Deakin University and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), and art history at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of many articles and books about popular culture, architecture, and design, including
Arthur Purnell's "Forgotten" Architecture
(Palgrave, 2020)
, Australian Westerns in the Fifties
(Palgrave, 2022)
,
and
Walt Disney's Forgotten Australia
(Palgrave, 2025)
.
