您正在看的文化英语是:世界城市览胜（6）Melbourne（澳大利亚）。

Melbourne is a smorgasbord（瑞典式自助餐）of a city that invites you to take a bite. A leafy bayside community on the 'upside-down', brown Yarra River（亚拉河）, it is cosmopolitan, suburban, cultivated, conservative and a haven for the avant-garde（先锋派）. Visitors come for its shopping, restaurants, nightlife and sporting calendar, and most agree that it's one of the world's most liveable cities.
In the last 10 years the city has undergone a renaissance. Innumerable（无数的）hip boutiques, restaurants and bars crowd the alleys and Victorian-era arcades（拱郎）off the main streets. Its riverbanks and docklands（港区）have been tranformed into spruced-up sites for swanky waterside socialising.

Although mystery surrounds many aspects of Australian prehistory, it seems certain that the first humans came here across the sea from Southeast Asia around 50,000 to 70,000 years ago. There were about 38 tribal groups living around Victoria when white people arrived. Aborigines were traditionally tribal people living in extended family groups and using the environment sustainably. It is believed that Aboriginal people were the first to make polished, stone tools, to cremate（火葬）their dead and to engrave and paint representations（画像）of themselves and animals. Although their society was technologically simple, it was culturally sophisticated, using complex ceremonies which integrated religion, history, law, art and codes of behaviour.

Aboriginal people around Victoria resisted white settlement (which began in 1803), and although some settlements had to be abandoned, the original inhabitants were really just postponing the inevitable. Soon after settlement, the Aboriginal people had been dispossessed of their lands and massacred in their thousands.

Melbourne was established in 1835 by a group of Tasmanian（塔斯马尼亚的）entrepreneurs, and is the youngest city of its size in the world. Although the settlement was not named until 1837, its characteristic grid layout was imposed by military surveyor Robert Hoddle the same year, and by 1840 over 10,000 people had been attracted to the area. The colony of Victoria was formed in 1851, with Melbourne as its capital, neatly coinciding with the discovery of gold which swiftly and inexorably（无情地）transformed them both.

Gold brought a huge influx of immigrants from around the world, and the wealth it generated created a city of extravagant proportions. In 30 years the designs of the city's architects, the skills of its many European tradespeople（商人们）and the designation of large areas of the city for public parkland had established what was known as 'Marvellous Melbourne - the Paris of the