Melbourne
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Melbourne trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Melbourne is the city that was briefly the richest in the world, the first capital of federated Australia, and the place where Australian rules football, the Melbourne Cup and the country's first feature film were all invented. It is also the city with the world's largest tram network and, after six lockdowns, the longest total COVID lockdown anywhere. These 50 questions run from the easy to the obscure: the state and the bay, the Viscount who gave the city its name, John Batman's disputed treaty, the Hoddle Grid, the gold rush that let Melbourne overtake Sydney, 'Marvellous Melbourne' and the 1890s bust. Then culture and sport: Nellie Melba, Countdown, the Heidelberg School, Hosier Lane, the MCG and the first Test match, the Storm and the Victory. The hard tier asks for the demographic centre, the dam that holds most of the water, the airport that came before Tullamarine and the suburb that hosts Nintendo. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something either way. Play it solo, or print it for a pub night with Sydney friends.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Melbourne is the capital of which Australian state?
Victoria
Victoria became a separate colony in 1851 with Melbourne as its capital, and the city is now home to about 19% of Australia's population.
Q 02Melbourne occupies the northern and eastern shores of which bay?
Port Phillip Bay
Port Phillip Bay is so enclosed and shallow that its water is warmer than the open ocean in summer and colder in winter.
Q 03What are the inhabitants of Melbourne called?
Melburnians
Melburnians take their spelling from Melburnia, a Latin name for the city, though the variant 'Melbournian' also turns up.
Q 04Melbourne was named in 1837 after whom?
A British prime minister
A British prime minister, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, lent his title to the city while he led the government from 1835 to 1841.
Q 05Melbourne's founding settlers sailed across Bass Strait from which colony?
Van Diemen's Land
Van Diemen's Land, renamed Tasmania in 1856, sent two rival parties of settlers, who agreed to share the site rather than dispute who arrived first.
Q 06Melbourne was Australia's interim seat of government until Parliament moved to which purpose-built capital?
Canberra
Canberra was built as a compromise between rivals Sydney and Melbourne, and Parliament first sat there in 1927.
Q 07Why was Melbourne's 1956 Olympic riding held abroad?
Quarantine rules
Quarantine rules for horses forced the move, so riders competed in Stockholm in June 1956, five months before the rest of the Games.
Q 08Melbourne has the world's largest urban network of what?
Trams
Trams ride free inside the city's Free Tram Zone, introduced in 2015, and heritage trams loop the centre on the free City Circle route.
Q 09What Indigenous name is used for the Melbourne area?
Naarm
Naarm is the name the Woiwurrung and Boonwurrung peoples use for the wider bay area around which the city grew.
Q 10Who claimed in the 1830s to have bought 2,400 km² of land from Wurundjeri elders?
John Batman
John Batman paid with goods such as blankets, tomahawks, knives and flour, but the elders likely saw the exchange as a ceremony granting only temporary access.
Q 11Which colonial governor declared void the 1835 treaty through which Wurundjeri elders supposedly sold land around Melbourne?
Richard Bourke
Richard Bourke's 1835 proclamation declared such treaties void, and Melbourne's Bourke Street was later named after him.
Q 12What is the name of the 1837 street layout at the core of Melbourne's CBD?
Hoddle Grid
Hoddle Grid streets were surveyed 99 feet wide, and narrow 'little' streets were added through the blocks to give rear access to the allotments.
Q 13Which comedian created Dame Edna Everage, a Melbourne housewife?
Barry Humphries
Barry Humphries first staged her in a Melbourne University revue in December 1955, as a dowdy housewife from the suburb of Moonee Ponds.
Q 21Which city lost Formula One's Australian Grand Prix to Melbourne?
Adelaide
Adelaide lost the race after Premier Jeff Kennett announced in December 1993 that a contract to stage it in Melbourne had been signed.
Q 22Melbourne's Grand Prix is raced on roads circling the lake in which park?
Albert Park
Albert Park's lakeside roads are everyday streets for most of the year, and the state government passed a special act in 1994 to secure the race there.
Q 23In 2021 Melbourne passed which city's record for days locked down?
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires had endured a 234-day lockdown in 2020, and Melbourne's six lockdowns eventually totalled 262 days.
Q 14In 1851 the district around Melbourne separated from which colony?
New South Wales
New South Wales had governed the district, and when news of the separation came, the celebrations centred, by one early account, on a river red gum now called the Separation Tree.
Q 15What 1850s boom let Melbourne overtake Sydney as Australia's most populous city by 1865?
Gold
Gold found in 1851 set off a rush, and its wealth paid for grand stone buildings such as Parliament House.
Q 16Which 1979 action film was shot in and around Melbourne on a tiny budget?
Mad Max
Mad Max earned more than US$100 million worldwide and held the Guinness record for the most profitable film ever made for twenty years.
Q 17Where was Australia's first federal parliament officially opened on 9 May 1901?
Royal Exhibition Building
The Royal Exhibition Building then swapped roles with Parliament House: while federal MPs sat in Spring Street until 1927, the state parliament met in the exhibition building.
Q 18Which Melbourne band recorded the hit 'Down Under'?
Men at Work
In 2010 a judge ruled that the flute riff in Men at Work's hit copied part of the song 'Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree'.
Q 19Which Melbourne-born pop star first found fame as mechanic Charlene in the soap opera Neighbours?
Kylie Minogue
Kylie Minogue played Charlene from 1986 to 1988, and the show's Ramsay Street is a real cul-de-sac in the Melbourne suburb of Vermont South.
Q 20The construction of which 1958 building led to Melbourne's CBD height limits being lifted?
ICI House
ICI House broke Melbourne's 132-foot height limit, in force since 1916, and was Australia's tallest building when it was completed.
Q 24Which disaster struck on Melbourne's record-hot day of 46.4 °C in 2009?
Black Saturday
The Black Saturday bushfires of 7 February 2009 killed 173 people, Australia's highest loss of life from a bushfire.
Q 25Which phrase sums up Melbourne's famously changeable weather?
Four seasons in one day
Four seasons in one day: isolated showers can pass through in minutes, repeat several times a day, and give way to calm sunshine.
Q 26In which district does Australia 108, Melbourne's tallest building as of 2025, stand?
Southbank
Southbank is home to Australia 108, which topped out in 2020 and overtook the nearby Eureka Tower as Australia's tallest building by roof height.
Q 27Which champion racehorse's mounted hide is displayed at Melbourne Museum?
Phar Lap
Phar Lap's hide stayed in Melbourne while his skeleton went to New Zealand and his heart to the National Museum of Australia; he has been the museum's star exhibit since 1933.
Q 28Which Melbourne festival is Australia's largest free community festival?
Moomba
Moomba first ran in 1955, when The Age billed it as the city's rival to Pasadena's Tournament of Roses, and it still stages the Birdman Rally.
Q 29What did Melbourne's 1854 State Library pioneer?
Free entry
Free entry made it one of the world's first free public libraries, open to anyone over 14 with clean hands, and its domed reading room opened in 1913.
Q 30Which 1886 novel set in Melbourne was the fastest-selling crime novel of its era?
The Mystery of a Hansom Cab
The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, self-published by Fergus Hume in 1886, came out a year before Sherlock Holmes first appeared in A Study in Scarlet.