Melbourne Cricket Ground

You are looking at the spiritual home of Australian sport. The MCG, or simply The G as locals call it, has been hosting cricket here since eighteen fifty-three, making it one of the oldest continually used sporting grounds on Earth. It seats over a hundred thousand people, making it the largest stadium in the Southern Hemisphere and the tenth largest in the world. On AFL Grand Final day, every single seat is filled, and the roar can be heard kilometres away.

But the MCG's history goes way beyond sport. This is where the first ever Test cricket match was played, between Australia and England in eighteen seventy-seven. This is where the nineteen fifty-six Olympic Games were held, the first time the Olympics left Europe and the Americas. The eighteen seventy-eight Melbourne Cup started from here. And during World War Two, the ground was commandeered by the military. American and Australian troops were quartered in the stands, and the oval became a training ground. The Members Pavilion was used as a military hospital.

Here is a fact that will stop you in your tracks. In nineteen seventy, during a VFL match between Richmond and Collingwood, the attendance was a hundred and twenty-one thousand, six hundred and ninety-six people. That is more than the current capacity. They just kept letting people in until the terraces were dangerously packed. Modern safety rules mean that can never happen again. The light towers, by the way, are the tallest of any sporting venue in the world at seventy-five metres. And the famous Long Room in the Members Pavilion contains one of the world's great collections of sporting memorabilia, including the ashes themselves during certain years.