Live at Queen Vic Market in Melbourne
Daily Photo – Melbourne’s Queen Vic Market
When one of Melbourne’s founding father’s, John Batman died in May of 1839, he was 38 years old and buried in the Old Melbourne Cemetery. While his name would forever be linked with founding the city of Melbourne, his death wasn’t so heroic. In fact, it was rather tragic. Having contracted syphilis, the disease quickly took over his body, he became disfigured, crippled and in the final months of his life, the disease was so advanced that his nose had rotted away, he became incapacitated and had to be pushed around in a wicker carriage. He died in debt, estranged from his wife and alone. His funeral was a modest, yet well attended affair, after which he was buried in the Old Melbourne Cemetery. In the coming years he would be joined by merchants, Ministers and many other of the city’s earliest settlers until the cemetery was closed for burials in 1854.
Throughout this time, Melbourne grew at a lively pace and small wholesale and retail markets started popping up to serve the rapidly growing population. One of which surrounded the Old Melbourne Cemetery. As the market encroached on the cemetery, the public outcry became furious and proved unpopular with market gardeners and traders who refused to use the space – fearing disease and the disrespect of selling food over graves.
That was until 1876 when everything changed. The Victorian Government passed an Act officially gazetting the Old Melbourne Cemetery site as land to be reserved and developed into markets. A year later as bodies and skeletons were exhumed and re-interred at the Melbourne General Cemetery – things got a little messy. You see, back in 1864, a fire at the lodge belonging to the Old Melbourne Cemetery gatekeeper destroyed most of the burial registers. This meant when it became time to exhume most of the bodies, officials had absolutely no idea who was buried and where. So while identified graves were shifted, some 6,000 to 9,000 graves remained buried as the new market space was developed and officially opened as The Queen Victoria Market on the 20th March, 1878.
