Northbank Heritage Trail

STOP 5
More bridges over the Birrarung/Yarra

Location:
Flinders Walk, on ramp approach to Evan Walker Bridge

As you stroll along the riverbank and enjoy the London Plane trees planted alongside Flinders Street Station, it is very hard to picture the river as the teaming workplace of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The relationship between maritime trade on the Birrarung/Yarra and the evolving railway network was critical. The rail network developed in conjunction with the port of Melbourne. which explains its location on the river. In 1854, Flinders Street Station was known as the Melbourne Terminus, a collection of weatherboard sheds. In 1854 it became Australia’s first steam rail station when people and goods were carried by steam train between the port and town on the privately-owned Melbourne & Hobson’s Bay Railway Company’s new track, between Flinders Street and Sandridge via Sandridge Bridge.

The original Sandridge Bridge was built in 1853 with private funding; a second bridge was constructed in 1859; then in 1888 came Sandridge Railway Bridge, an important example of 19th-century industrial technology designed by the Victorian Railways to carry busy the Port Melbourne and St Kilda railway lines. Eventually the railway line fell into disuse and in 2006 the bridge was re-purposed as a pedestrian bridge which opened in time for the Commonwealth Games. Now known simply as Sandridge Bridge, it features The Travellers, a steel sculpture representing ten periods Australian migration.

In the 1990s the former Southbank Pedestrian Bridge became the Evan Walker Footbridge and crosses the Birrarung/Yarra diagonally. It is named in honour of the late Professor Evan Walker, a former architect who became Planning Minister behind creating the Urban Development Project which became Southbank. In 1991 the Southbank Precinct and the bridge won the RVIA Urban Design Award

Crossing the Birrarung/Yarra has always been of critical importance from Indigenous times, early colonial settlement and to modern Melbourne. Bridges across the Birrarung/Yarra enabled development on both sides of the river, and commerce in the colony to prosper. With pressure from the population and economic expansion, the purpose and the structure of the bridges evolved to enable rail and motor vehicles. However, as these bridges were low-gradient designed to serve railways, they began to restrict and ultimately prevent river-based maritime trade, as they prohibited larger ships from accessing the riverport. The once thriving port of Melbourne which grew along the river banks up as far as Princes Bridge, incrementally shifted downstream towards the mouth of the river estuary and Port Phillip Bay.

FURTHER READING

IMAGE CREDIT
Section of Nathaniel Whittock’s engraving City of Melbourne 1855, State Library Victoria, showing from right, Princes Bridge, Sandridge Bridge, The Falls, the turning basin, wharves, and shipping at the Port of Melbourne