page_title: History of Melbourne
section_title: Interwar period
hierarchical_section_title: History of Melbourne / Interwar period
context_page_description: The history of Melbourne details the city's growth from a fledgling settlement into a modern commercial and financial centre as Australia's second largest city.
context_section_description: Melbourne's mood was also darkened by the terrible sacrifices of World War I, in which 112,000 Victorians enlisted and 16,000 were killed. There were bitter political divisions during the war, with Melbourne's Irish-born Catholic Archbishop Daniel Mannix leading opposition to conscription for the war and the Labor Party suffering a traumatic split. Another 4,000 Victorians died in the Spanish flu epidemic which followed the war. There was a modest revival of prosperity in the 1920s, and the population reached 1 million in 1930, but in 1929 the Wall Street Crash ushered in another Depression, which lasted until a return to prosperity in by the late 1930s, cut short by World War II.
  In 1934 Melbourne celebrated its centenary and acquired another great landmark, the Shrine of Remembrance in St Kilda Road. The population stagnated again, and was still only 1.1 million in 1940.
caption: Flinders Street station, intersection of Swanston and Flinders Streets in 1927 when it was the world's busiest passenger station.
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