Summer in Melbourne: Best Tours & Activities — Trip Planner

What's actually worth your time in Melbourne

Melbourne has no harbour to sell you, so the attraction is behaviour: laneways, tram lines and a football ground. An AFL match at the MCG in winter, among ninety thousand people who care enormously, beats any tour of the empty stadium. The little penguins that come ashore on the St Kilda breakwater at dusk are free and genuinely wild. Brighton's bathing boxes are one photograph and a long tram ride.

Melbourne after dark

The convention is that the good bar has no sign: a numbered door in a laneway, a staircase, a room of thirty people. Fitzroy's Brunswick Street and Collingwood's Smith Street run the density, with Brunswick's Sydney Road at the cheaper end. Live music is the real claim, and the Tote, the Corner Hotel and the Northcote Social Club have bands on most nights. Night Network runs through weekends.

What things cost in Melbourne

Two hours on a myki costs a little over five dollars and a full day around eleven, with a lower cap on weekends and public holidays. Coffee sits at $4.50 to $6 and a pub parma at $25 to $32. A pint in Fitzroy is $12 to $15. Melbourne Museum charges adults about $15 and children nothing, while the NGV and ACMI permanent collections are free.

Melbourne's museums, and which one to pick

The NGV splits across two buildings and the permanent collection in both is free: St Kilda Road for international art, where visitors lie flat on the Great Hall floor beneath Leonard French's stained-glass ceiling, and the Ian Potter Centre at Federation Square for Australian and Indigenous work. ACMI's moving-image galleries are free too. Melbourne Museum charges adults but not under-sixteens, and keeps Phar Lap's mounted hide.

What to eat in Melbourne

Coffee is the local seriousness, because post-war Italian migration put espresso machines into Carlton before most of the English-speaking world had them, and ordering filter still earns a look. Little Bourke Street's Chinatown has been continuously Chinese since the 1850s gold rush. Victoria Street in Richmond is the pho strip. In any suburban pub the default order is a chicken parma, and it will be enormous.

When to go to Melbourne

The month to avoid is July — around 13°C (55°F) with roughly 12 rain days. Prices and crowds track the weather here: February is the sweet spot, July the month most people skip.

Pack for peak season: Summer clothes, plus one light layer for air-con and evenings, Comfortable walking shoes — every guide on this site assumes you'll use them.