In 1891, at the end of Melbourne’s first property boom, the nation’s original capital was the largest city in Australia with almost half a million inhabitants.
Melbourne or bust.
It constituted 42 per cent of Victoria’s population and, as Geoffrey Blainey observed, “some economists thought that such a centralising of the people in a capital city was quite without precedent and utterly unhealthy”.
Imbalance continues
Fast-forward 126 years and that “unhealthy” trend ha…
