Queen Victoria Market

You are shopping on top of a cemetery. That is not a metaphor. Approximately nine thousand people are still buried beneath the sheds and car park of Queen Victoria Market. This was the Old Melbourne Cemetery, formally gazetted in eighteen thirty-nine as the burial ground for the entire founding population of Melbourne. Everyone from the city's first settlers to its first criminals ended up here. John Batman, the man who controversially claimed to have purchased Melbourne from the Kulin people, was buried on this site.

The cemetery operated until eighteen eighty-four, by which point about ten thousand people had been interred. But Melbourne needed a bigger market, and the dead were, well, not complaining. Between nineteen twenty and nineteen twenty-two, nine hundred and fourteen graves with identifying monuments were exhumed and reinterred at Fawkner, Kew, St Kilda, and Cheltenham cemeteries. The rest were left where they lay. The market literally paved over them.

The Queen Victoria Market officially opened in March eighteen seventy-eight and has been operating continuously ever since, making it the largest open-air market in the Southern Hemisphere. At seven hectares, it covers two full city blocks. The heritage-listed sheds date from the eighteen eighties and nineties, and the produce hall with its soaring roof trusses is one of the great market buildings of the world. There is a memorial sculpture called Passages on the corner of Queen and Therry streets, acknowledging the people who remain underground. It is a rare and rather uncomfortable example of a multi-denominational early colonial cemetery representing virtually the entire founding population of a state capital, and you are walking over it right now.