page_title: History of Melbourne
section_title: Post World War II
hierarchical_section_title: History of Melbourne / Post World War II
caption_attribution_description: English: Melbourne Tram
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: After World War II, a new era of increasing prosperity arrived, fuelled by high prices for Victoria's wool, increased government spending on transport and education, and the stimulus of renewed high immigration. Unlike prewar immigration, which had been mostly from the British Isles, the postwar program brought an influx of Europeans, at first mostly refugees from eastern and central Europe. A large proportion of these immigrants were Jews, and the Jewish population of Melbourne became the largest population proportionally of any Australian city, at about 1.4% in 1970.    They were followed by migrants from Italy, Greece and the Netherlands.
  Later, in the 1960s, migrants came from Yugoslavia, Turkey, Hungary and Lebanon. These inflows rapidly transformed the city's demographic profile and many aspects of its life. This new growth required new spending on infrastructure such as roads, schools and hospitals, which had been neglected during the long decades of recession and low growth between 1890 and 1940. Henry Bolte, Premier from 1955 to 1972, was responsible for much of this rapid development of infrastructure. Under Bolte, some of the old inner-city slums were bulldozed and the dislocated tenants were housed in high-rise blocks of state-owned apartments.
  Since the 1970s, the pace of change in Melbourne has been increasingly rapid. The end of the White Australia Policy brought the first significant Asian migration to Melbourne since the gold rushes, with large numbers of people from Vietnam, Cambodia and China arriving. For the first time, Melbourne acquired a large Muslim population, and the official policy of multiculturalism encouraged Melbourne's various ethnic and religious minorities to maintain and celebrate their identities. At the same time, the practice of mainstream Christianity largely declined, leading to a secularisation of public life.
  State patronage of the arts led to a boom in festivals, theatre, music and the visual arts. Tourism became a major industry, bringing still more foreign faces to Melbourne's streets. In 1956, the city became the first in the Southern Hemisphere to host the Olympic Games. Two new universities opened, Monash University in 1961 and La Trobe University in 1967, followed by others in the 1980s, maintaining Melbourne's place as a leader in tertiary education.
caption: A tram travels down Brunswick Street, 1979.
exif: {"Image Make": "Canon", "Image Model": "CanoScan 4400F", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "CanoScan Toolbox 5.0", "Image DateTime": "2008:07:13 13:35:24", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image ExifOffset": "214", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "300", "Thumbnail YResolution": "300", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "454", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "5446", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2008:07:13 13:35:24", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1794", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1158", "EXIF FileSource": "Reflection Print Scanner", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto"}