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Town Hall, 333 Bay Street, Port Melbourne 3207
Town Hall, 333 Bay Street, Port Melbourne

Welcome to The Port Melbourne Historical & Preservation Society

The area of Port Melbourne has been inhabited by the Aboriginal people of the Kulin Nation for over 20,000 years. They lived here through the final centuries of the ice age. In more recent times they observed the flooding of the great plain that we know as Port Phillip Bay.

The first white men visited early in the 19th century and by the 1830s there were European settlers living at the top of the bay in the area known as Sandridge.

Surveyor Darke's Camp, Sandridge. W F E Liardet, State Library of Victoria

Our Port stories are organised under the umbrella term Port Melbourne History but where the story also relates to a Port Melbourne person or place, or an item from our archives the additional categories of People, Places and Collection have been used.

When viewing a story, the categories are shown directly below the title. Clicking on a category name will list other stories that fall within that broad topic.

Each story is tagged with key words that appear as bubbles at the end of the article. Clicking on a bubble will list any other stories also tagged with that term.

A search facility in the top right corner of each page allows you to find information across the whole PMHPS site. Searching for Crichton, for example, will find stories relating to Cr J P Crichton, Crichton Reserve, Crichton Avenue and Cr Crichton’s son, James, who enlisted for active service during WWI in July 1915.

Click on the PMHPS logo or scroll back to the top go this page to see the Search option. Clicking on our logo at the top of any page on the site will take you back to the top of the home page.

Following are a random selection of Port stories to pique your interest.

Many of the stories on our site highlight items from our archives. You will find them listed in the Collection category.

Our archives are also searchable through Victorian Collections (VC). Visit the PMHPS page on the VC website and scroll down to find the search facility. You will also find a link to Victorian Collections in the footer at the bottom of each page.

Below are a few randomly selected stories featuring items from the PMHPS collection.