Cremorne Gardens, Gold-rush Melbourne, and the Victorian-era Pleasure Garden, 1853–63

Abstract

For ten summer seasons, from 1853 to 1863, Cremorne Gardens—gold- rush Melbourne’s premier leisure attraction—welcomed thousands of visitors. A desirable modern pleasure garden, Cremorne, this article argues, was at once a space of modernity for its host colonial city, and a remarkable node in a global network of mid-nineteenth-century pleasure gardens. Cremorne’s three proprietors, including the prominent businessman and politician George Coppin, carefully arranged this commercial venture. Cremorne became an alluring urban space that engendered new social experiences and provoked contested responses, inflected by contemporary standards of social etiquette and public morality. Cremorne thus ..