Melbourne in two or three days: east to the ground, north to Fitzroy, and a third day on the bay

Overview

Melbourne repays a second day more than most cities its size, and for an odd reason: nothing in the centre takes long, and almost everything worth the journey is somewhere else. One day here is the grid and the water, and it works — the grid is a mile by half a mile, the arcades are twenty minutes each, and the bay is the end of a tram line. What one day cannot do is give a whole half-day to anything, and Melbourne’s best things are half-days: a stadium you go inside, a suburb you walk the length of, a park you get lost in on purpose.

So the two days below do not repeat the postcard. Day one begins in the grid and walks out of its eastern edge — a gaol, a parliament, a garden with an English cottage standing in it, and the ground the whole city arranges its year around. Day two leaves the grid altogether and goes north: the market, the two great buildings in Carlton, and then Fitzroy, which is the part of these two days people come back for. A third day goes south down St Kilda Road for the memorial, the botanic gardens and the bay.

The arcades, the laneways, Federation Square and the gallery across the river get no slot here, and that is a decision rather than an oversight. They are all within ten minutes’ walk of Flinders Street Station, they are free, and day one passes all of them but the gallery, and says exactly where to thread them in and what doing so costs. The two days are shapes rather than dates, and they may be taken in either order — which matters more than it sounds, and the last section explains why.

One thing has to be booked before you travel: the tour of the ground that ends day one, which is the only stop on these days you cannot simply turn up to. Two more are booked and optional — the climb to the dome on day two, and, if you take the third day, the penguin platform at the bay, which costs nothing. One ride is unavoidable: the tram out of Fitzroy at the end of day two. Everything else across the two days is walked — day one contains no ride at all — and whatever brought you in from the airport is on top of that. The third day adds three rides of its own.

Only the third day depends on the light, and it depends on it completely: it ends on a pier facing west across open water. The sun goes down here as early as ten past five in the second week of June and as late as a quarter to nine at the New Year, so take your own month’s hour and count backwards through that day’s durations. Days one and two have no such moment, and none has been invented for them. Each rests on a door instead, and each says which one.

Finally the bag, which matters here on exactly two mornings. The airport bus lands at Southern Cross Station on Spencer Street, and so do the interstate and regional trains, so however you arrived you are in the same building. Left luggage is there too — services of that kind move and change their hours, so confirm it before you build a morning around it. With the case off your hands, day one starts one stop away and finishes a couple of hundred metres from where it started. The two stops on these days that a suitcase genuinely spoils are the market on day two, which is a working floor rather than a shopping mall, and the beach and the pier on the third day. If your last day is the third one and you have a flight, that is fine — the tram from the end of Acland Street runs back to Southern Cross, and it is in the plan rather than a rescue from it.

Day one

Everything today runs west to east in one line, from the top of the grid to the far side of Yarra Park, and then walks back along the river. Nothing doubles back and nothing needs a fare.

Today has one fixed point and it is not the light: the tour of the ground at the end of it. Tours of the Melbourne Cricket Ground ran from ten in the morning until three in the afternoon in 2026, departing regularly from Gate 3, and the three o’clock is the last of the day. Book that one. Everything above it — the shot tower, the gaol, lunch, the parliament, the gardens and the six walks between them — comes to just under five hours. Read that forwards: leave Flinders Street Station at about a quarter to ten in the morning, be at Gate 3 at about half past two, come out of the tour at about a quarter past four, and be back across the river by about twenty to five. If the hours have moved, the method has not: book the last tour that runs, subtract five hours, and start there.

Just under five hours counts the time inside the places, the meal and the walking between them, and nothing else. It includes the forty-five minutes of the Parliament House tour, which is free and allocated at the desk on arrival rather than booked — so what it leaves out is the wait for a place, which is not a fixed quantity and can be anything from nothing to the best part of an hour.

Morning

Start at Flinders Street Station, on the corner of Flinders Street and Swanston Street. If you have only just arrived, the airport bus and the interstate trains both put you down at Southern Cross Station, which is one stop away on any City Loop train and twenty-five minutes on foot down Collins Street. There is a third way and it costs nothing: the grid sits inside a free tram zone, so a tram between the two stations is free where the train is not. The card you need everywhere else is a Myki, and it is worth buying and loading on your first morning rather than on the evening you are standing at a stop in Fitzroy; the city guide says where and how.

From the station it is twenty minutes straight up Swanston Street to the top of the grid — or half an hour if you thread Degraves Street, Block Place, the Block Arcade and the Royal Arcade on the way, which is a much better walk and is the reason none of them has a slot of its own today. Take the longer version if the morning allows. If you do, those ten minutes come out of the gardens this afternoon and out of nothing else, which is worth remembering, because the last section names the same half hour as the first thing to cut when the day slips. You cannot spend it twice.

At the top of the grid, inside the shopping centre built over Melbourne Central station, stands Coop’s Shot Tower — fifty metres of brick, nine storeys, finished in 1889. Molten lead was dropped down its shaft into water at the bottom to make round shot, six tonnes of it a week, until 1961. It was saved from demolition in 1973, and in 1991 an eighty-four-metre glass cone was built over the top of it and a shopping centre built around that, so a Victorian industrial chimney now stands indoors like a specimen under a bell jar. Fifteen minutes, free, and one of the odder sights in the grid.

Six minutes north-east, on Russell Street between La Trobe Street and Victoria Street, is the Old Melbourne Gaol. Three storeys of bluestone cells run round a central void crossed by iron walkways, and you can go into the cells. One hundred and thirty-three people were hanged here between 1845 and 1924, and the gallows are still standing. Along the walls are the death masks: plaster casts taken from the heads of the executed for a phrenology nobody believes in any more, each with a card of the life that ended under it. Ned Kelly was hanged here in November 1880, and what the gaol holds of him is his death mask and his pistol — the armour on display is a replica, because the real suit belongs to the state library four minutes back down the street. That is worth knowing before you come, since the armour is what a good many people arrive for — and if it is what you came for, the two can be taken together, since that building is on the street you have just walked up. The five hours above do not include the detour. Give the gaol an hour. The former City Watch House next door runs as a separate ticketed experience with an actor in it; it is a genuine addition rather than a substitute, but it is not inside today’s five hours, and taking it means booking a tour of the ground earlier than three.

The morning ends at a table. Nine minutes south-east of the gaol you are on Little Bourke Street, in Chinatown, which runs east from Swanston Street towards Spring Street between the tall backs of the grid. Lunch here, sitting down, and give it an hour. It will be about half past eleven when you arrive, which is early and is meant to be: this is an office district, and the queue that forms at one o’clock is the reason to be finishing rather than starting then. A dim sim is a snack rather than a meal — the local, blunter descendant of a Cantonese dumpling, eaten standing up — and it belongs to fish-and-chip shops, milk bars and football-ground counters rather than to a table on Little Bourke Street, so do not come here expecting to find one. Eat properly instead, and meet the dim sim where it lives. The rule that holds here is that the narrow places up the lanes and the rooms on the first floor are better than anything at pavement level with photographs on the menu.

Afternoon

Nine minutes further east, at the top of Bourke Street, Spring Street closes the grid with Parliament House and its long flight of steps. It was begun in 1855 and opened in 1856 on gold-rush money, and it has never been finished: the dome Peter Kerr designed for it in 1877 was not built, and now cannot be, because the quarry its sandstone came from lies inside Grampians National Park and will not be reopened. Between 1901 and 1927 this was the Commonwealth’s parliament house while Canberra was being built, and the state parliament it displaced spent those twenty-six years meeting in the Royal Exhibition Building out in Carlton. The public tour is free, runs forty-five minutes, and takes in both chambers — the larger Legislative Assembly and the smaller, more ornate Legislative Council. It runs on weekdays only, and only when the house is not sitting; places are handed out at the desk on arrival rather than booked, and they go quickly, so arrive early in the hour rather than on it. The parliament publishes its own sitting calendar, and it is a thing to read the week before you travel; if your date turns out to be a sitting day, the last section gives the same replacement a weekend gets.

Twelve minutes east — north one block up Spring Street, then along Albert Street past the cathedral — the Fitzroy Gardens open out: twenty-six hectares laid out by Clement Hodgkinson from the 1860s, with elm avenues whose paths happen to trace something close to a Union Jack seen from above, which was an accident of the drainage lines rather than a piece of loyalty. Forty minutes here, and three things in it earn them. Cooks’ Cottage was built in 1755 at Great Ayton in North Yorkshire by James Cook’s parents, and it is here because Russell Grimwade bought it, had it taken apart into 253 cases and forty barrels, and shipped it out to be rebuilt for Victoria’s centenary in 1934; whether Cook himself ever lived in it is genuinely disputed by historians, though he almost certainly visited his parents there. It has a ticket of its own and takes ten minutes. The Fairies’ Tree is a stump carved all round by Ola Cohn in the 1930s and given by her to the children of the city. The third is the scarred tree, where a long panel of bark was cut out by Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people to make a canoe or a shield or a container; it is older than everything planted around it and it is the easiest thing in the gardens to walk past. The Model Tudor Village and the conservatory are pleasant, and they are the parts to leave out when the clock is against you.

A quarter of an hour south through Yarra Park brings you to Gate 3 of the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Your ticket includes the Australian Sports Museum inside the same gate, and the order matters: take the museum in the half hour before your slot rather than after it, because after seventy-five minutes on your feet you will walk through it without seeing it. The tour is seventy-five minutes, and that length is published rather than recommended — the Long Room, the members’ library that has been collecting since 1873, the players’ changing rooms, the media centre and a walk along the boundary of a bowl that holds a hundred thousand people. It is a stadium tour and it is unembarrassed about being one, which is exactly why it works: this is a city that organises its winter around this ground, and standing on the grass is the shortest way to understand that without buying a ticket to a match.

Local tip. If the morning has slipped, the stop to shorten is the Fitzroy Gardens: walk through them to the cottage and straight out the far side, which is most of what they are for, and the half hour is back before Gate 3. Do not make it up on the gaol instead. The gardens are free, open and visible from every path; the gaol is the one stop today that you cannot see any part of from outside, and it is the one you have already paid for.

Evening

Out of Gate 3, west across Yarra Park and over the William Barak Bridge into Birrarung Marr, the park along the north bank of the Yarra, and on to Federation Square. About twenty-five minutes the way this walk goes, through the park; the direct line off the bridge is a few minutes less. It is the longest single stretch of the day and the best of it, because the whole city arrives at once as you come off the bridge. In the second week of June you will be crossing in the last half hour of daylight, with the towers coming on ahead of you; at the New Year you will have four hours of light left. Either way the evening is the same one and it is a few minutes from where this walk ends: Flinders Lane and the laneways off it, which is where the grid eats. In June you go straight there; at the New Year you have the light to wander the arcades first. If your legs have finished at Gate 3 instead, Jolimont station is five minutes north through the park and one stop from Flinders Street on the Hurstbridge and Mernda lines; Richmond station is fifteen minutes the other way.

Day two

Today is the day that justifies the second day. It runs north out of the grid and then east across the top of Carlton into Fitzroy, about five kilometres in all, and it ends where you will want to eat.

This day rests on its first hour rather than its last. Queen Victoria Market stopped trading at three o’clock on its weekday trading days in 2026, and it is the one stop on this day that a late start destroys — everything after it keeps longer hours, or none at all. So the day is anchored at the front: start at the market at about nine and the rest follows, coming to about seven and a half hours and finishing on Gertrude Street at about half past four with dinner still ahead. If that hour has moved, the method has not: the market goes first whatever it now says, and nothing else on the day has to move with it. There is no moment today that depends on the light, and none has been manufactured.

Those seven and a half hours count the time in the places, the meal and the walking. What they do not count is the museum’s temporary exhibitions or its cinema, either of which is another ninety minutes and neither of which is in the plan below.

Morning

Give Queen Victoria Market an hour. It is a working market rather than a food hall, the halls in the middle are where the trade is, and the sheds at the Elizabeth Street end sell what an airport sells. Come with an empty bag or none at all.

Twenty-five minutes east along Victoria Street — the longest single stretch of the day, and there is no useful tram along it — brings you to the Carlton Gardens with the Royal Exhibition Building standing in the middle of them. Its foundation stone was laid in February 1879 and the building was finished in eighteen months, in time to open the Melbourne International Exhibition on 1 October 1880; Joseph Reed designed it, and its dome, sixty-eight metres up, is modelled on the one in Florence. On 9 May 1901 the first Parliament of Australia was opened in the Great Hall under that dome — this is the other end of the swap day one described from Spring Street, and this is the room the Victorian parliament sat in for those twenty-six years. In 2004 it became the first building in Australia inscribed on the World Heritage list. Half an hour outside it and in the gardens is enough to read it. If you want to go higher, the Dome Promenade — the walkway round the outside of the drum, shut in the 1920s for repairs that never happened and reopened in October 2022 — is a separate ticketed tour booked through the museum next door, and it takes about half an hour. Book it when you fix your dates, and take that half hour out of the museum below rather than out of the market above.

Three minutes north, on the far side of the gardens, is Melbourne Museum, and two hours is the right amount to give it — but only if you choose. The Forest Gallery is a living slice of temperate Victorian forest built through the middle of the building, birds and reptiles included, and it is the thing here you will not find elsewhere. Bunjilaka is the museum’s Aboriginal cultural centre, and its galleries are by the Aboriginal peoples of Victoria rather than merely about them; there is a notice at the door saying they may contain images, voices and names of people who have died, which is there for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander visitors and is worth reading rather than walking past. The city stands on Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Country, of the Kulin nation, and this is the room that says so properly. The third thing, if you want it, is the mounted hide of Phar Lap, a racehorse that has been an object of national feeling since it died in 1932. The Dinosaur Walk is very good and is also the one to leave out.

Local tip. Two of the three above, not three, and certainly not five. This is a big museum at the point in the day when all the walking is still ahead of you, and the hour you overrun here is the hour Fitzroy loses at the other end. Take Bunjilaka first, while you are fresh, because it is the one that asks something of you.

Afternoon

Thirteen minutes north-west out of the gardens brings you to Lygon Street, which is Carlton’s spine and the old centre of Italian Melbourne. This is lunch, and an hour — a lunch of convenience, taken here because it is where the day stands at one o’clock. The one piece of navigation worth having: the southern end, nearest the city, is the touted end, with people standing outside doors trying to get you through them — walk north past Elgin Street before you sit down, where the same street is quieter.

Brunswick Street is twenty minutes east; the walk crosses Nicholson Street and drops you at the top end of Fitzroy. Fitzroy was Melbourne’s first suburb, subdivided in February 1839, and it is still the smallest and most densely populated piece of the city outside the grid — a hundred hectares of narrow streets and back lanes, built out in the Victorian boom with terraces that were slums within a generation and are now among the most expensive addresses in Australia. Brunswick Street is its commercial spine and the reason people come: give it an hour walking south down it, in and out of whatever is in the shopfronts that week — books, records, clothes, the long-standing and the brand new in the same block — with the street art thickening in the lanes off it. The mix turns over, so take the street rather than a list. Twenty of that hour should be spent sitting down with a coffee rather than carrying one, because sitting down is the entire exercise. Coffee here is an ordinary daily habit taken seriously, which is a different thing from a ceremony.

Evening

Sixteen minutes further south, Brunswick Street crosses Gertrude Street, and the towers on that corner are Atherton Gardens, a public housing estate built in the 1960s by demolishing the streets that stood there. People live in them now, which is worth holding onto as you pass: this is somebody’s front door and not a feature of the route. Gertrude Street matters more than its length suggests. From the 1960s it was the centre of Aboriginal Melbourne — people who had left the missions and the reserves came here looking for family, one pub in the district would serve them and the rest would not, and the Aboriginal Health Service opened on this street in 1973 and worked as a community centre at least as much as a clinic until 1992. Archie Roach’s song Charcoal Lane takes its name from a lane behind a factory near here, and names these streets in its verses. What the street looks like now is galleries, small bars in narrow shopfronts and very good cooking, and both of those things are true at the same time — the second did not replace the first, and nothing above is a closed chapter. Forty-five minutes to walk it before you eat, and then eat here: the corner where it meets Smith Street is where this end of Fitzroy is busiest after dark, and where the choice is widest.

Getting back is one ride, and it is the only fare these two days need. The 86 runs along Gertrude Street and then down Bourke Street and Spencer Street past Southern Cross Station, and it is the one you can board from where you are standing. The 11 runs the length of Brunswick Street and then down Collins Street to the same station, which means walking back west along Gertrude Street first. If you took the shortened version and ate on Brunswick Street instead, the two are the other way round: the 11 is at your feet and the 86 is the one that costs the walk. Either way you are outside the free tram zone by now, so this is the ride the Myki is for. Have it loaded before you get here; the city guide says where to buy one.

With a third day

Append it, and give it to the corridor the other two days never enter: straight south down St Kilda Road, through the memorial and the botanic gardens, and out to the bay.

It goes last by default and moves when it has to, because this is the only one of the three days that will take any day of the week, which makes it the one that shifts when the calendar will not cooperate. The arrangement it rescues is a Saturday arrival, and it rescues it completely: day two on the Saturday, this day on the Sunday, day one on the Monday. Moving it costs exactly one thing — the tour of the ground follows day one, so fix your arrival day before you book that tour rather than after. Nothing on days one or two points at anything this day contains, so nothing else moves at all. And if you have only two days, this is the day you lose, which is worth saying plainly: the bay is the picture of Melbourne most people arrive with, and two days here does not include it.

This is the day the light runs. Its last stop is a pier facing west, and everything above the pier comes to about six and a half hours, so subtract six and a half from your own month’s sunset. From ten past five in the second week of June that is a start at about twenty to eleven. One hour bounds the other end: the Shrine of Remembrance shut at five in 2026, so it goes first whatever your month, and if that hour has moved it still goes first, because the bay keeps no hours at all. In the long half of the year the subtraction gives an answer that is arithmetically correct and practically absurd — a start in the middle of the afternoon, lunch at five, and the whole morning of a three-day trip thrown away. Ignore it, start at ten, and spend the surplus at the bay, which is the one place on this route that improves with spare hours.

Take any southbound tram from Federation Square except the 1, and get off at stop 19, Shrine of Remembrance; it is 1.3 kilometres and about ten minutes. The path up from that stop is steep, so if that is a problem get off one earlier, at stop 17, and come in from the level side. There is also a train: Anzac station sits in the reserve itself. Whichever you take, all three of this day’s rides are outside the free tram zone, so keep the Myki topped up.

The Shrine is free, needs no ticket and no booking, and takes an hour. It was designed by two men who had fought in the First World War, its foundation stone laid in November 1927 and the building dedicated in November 1934, and it is a classical mausoleum on a rise with the whole of St Kilda Road running north from it to the grid — a view that is worth the climb to the balcony on its own. Below that is the Sanctuary, where the Stone of Remembrance is set beneath the floor so that you have to bow your head to read the line cut into it, greater love hath no man. Once a year, at eleven on the morning of 11 November, a shaft of daylight crosses the stone and comes to rest on the word love. That is the thing everybody has heard about this building, and here is the part nobody passes on: daylight saving moved the state’s clocks and broke the alignment, so on the day itself a mirror now puts the sunlight where the sun used to put it, and for the rest of the year what you are watching is a lamp reproducing the effect on a cycle through the day. It is worth standing there for. It is not the sun. This is a working memorial rather than a museum — services are held in it, the Sanctuary is kept quiet, and if one is running you wait at the back rather than walk through. Underneath are the Galleries of Remembrance, which is where the objects and the letters are. Free guided walks of forty-five minutes leave from the visitor centre through the day; you can book one online before you travel or take a place at the information desk when you arrive.

Eleven minutes east across Birdwood Avenue and you are in the Royal Botanic Gardens: thirty-eight hectares laid out from 1846 and given their present shape by William Guilfoyle from 1873, who threw out the straight lines and built sweeping lawns and the Ornamental Lake instead. Ninety minutes, and the three things to walk between are the Fern Gully, a damp trench of tree ferns under a closed canopy that is several degrees colder than the lawns above it; Guilfoyle’s Volcano, a nineteenth-century reservoir on a mound, restored and planted with succulents, with water still standing in the top of it; and the lake itself, which is where the birds are. The Tan, the track that runs round the outside, is 3.8 kilometres and is not the walk you want today. Come out at the Domain Road gate for lunch, which is an hour: that is the South Yarra edge and the eating is on that street, three minutes from the gate. Then ten minutes back west across the reserve to St Kilda Road.

The 16 runs from there down St Kilda Road, through St Kilda Junction and into Fitzroy Street. Twenty minutes. Get off where Fitzroy Street meets the Esplanade, and the water is in front of you.

Give the foreshore an hour. Walk south along the Esplanade and then down onto the sand. St Kilda Beach is a bay beach rather than an ocean one — flat, shallow and warm enough to swim in from about December — and the whole promenade, with its palms, its lawns and its rockeries, is the work of one engineer, Carlo Catani, who planned it from 1906 and died in 1918 before he saw it finished. On the way you pass the St Kilda Sea Baths, which have stood in some form since 1862, the Palais Theatre of 1927, and the enormous painted face you walk through to enter Luna Park, open since 1912. If you swim, swim between the flags where they are up. This is not surf, it does not look like water that needs a rule, and that is exactly why it is worth saying out loud on a bay beach that a great many people treat as a swimming pool.

Seven minutes on, Acland Street runs inland from beside the park, and this is dinner or cake or both: a faded seaside strip that keeps a run of Eastern European cake shops, which is what people came down here from the north side for long before anyone thought of it as a destination. Forty-five minutes.

Then walk back north-west along the foreshore, about sixteen minutes, to St Kilda Pier for the last of the light. It doubles back on the afternoon, and that is deliberate: the sun goes down at this end and the food is at the other, and eight hundred metres of seafront is not a price worth worrying about. The pier runs out to a rubble breakwater with the city behind you and Port Phillip Bay in front, and the sun goes down over open water rather than behind anything. A colony of little penguins lives in the rocks of that breakwater and comes ashore after dark rather than at sunset; since 2025 they have been watched from a ticketed platform in capped sessions, the ticket costs nothing and still has to be booked ahead, and the rule on the platform is no torches and no flash. That arrangement is new enough to still be settling — sessions, months and how far ahead booking opens are all the sort of thing that moves — so check it holds before you plan the end of a day around it. If you have a session, that is your evening. If you have not, the walk out to the end and back is still the right way to finish, and the 96 leaves from the terminus at the end of Acland Street and runs back through the city to Southern Cross.

Local tip. Take the free guided walk at the Shrine if the timing lands, and do the Galleries of Remembrance on your own afterwards rather than before. The building above is the part that needs somebody to explain it and the galleries below are the part that does not, and taking them in that order is the difference between an hour there and two — which, on the one day of the three that is racing the light, is the whole afternoon.

Practicalities

One booking is compulsory and it is the tour of the ground on day one: bookings are essential rather than advisable, they are made on the ground’s own site rather than through a reseller, and the moment to make them is when you fix your dates rather than the week you fly. The ticket that includes the Australian Sports Museum was in the fifty-to-sixty-dollar range for an adult in 2026, against the thirty-to-forty-dollar range for the tour alone. Buy the combined one — the museum is where you wait for your slot anyway. Two other bookings are optional. The Dome Promenade on day two is ticketed and booked through the museum next door. The penguin platform on the third day is free and still has to be booked, because the sessions are capped — book it as soon as the date is fixed, for the same reason, and check first that the arrangement still stands. Nothing else needs arranging: the gaol, the museum and the cottage all sell at the door, the market costs nothing to walk into, and the parliament, the exhibition building’s gardens, both sets of gardens, the Shrine and every metre of the third day’s coastline are free.

The weekday rules matter more here than the bookings, and there are three of them plus one permission. Day one must be a working weekday, because Parliament House’s tour runs Monday to Friday only, and only when the house is not sitting — and it must also miss an event day at the ground. A public holiday landing on a weekday is not covered by that rule, and Victoria has several of them. Both institutions publish their own dates and neither is a thing you can guess: check your date against both calendars rather than against the working week in your head. Day two must miss Monday and Wednesday, because the market is dark on both of them, and without the market this day has no morning. The third day takes any day there is, and a Sunday adds the arts and crafts market that has run on the Esplanade every Sunday since the 1980s. And the permission that makes the rest workable: day one and day two may trade places. Neither depends on the other, and nothing in either points at the other.

So: arrive on a Monday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday and the days run in the order written. A Tuesday arrival would put day two on the Wednesday, so swap them — day two on the Tuesday, day one on the Wednesday. A Sunday arrival is the same swap for the opposite reason: day two on the Sunday, day one on the Monday. With three days, a Saturday arrival works as described above.

The trap is the commonest city break there is: a Friday-night arrival for Saturday and Sunday only. Day one cannot be either of those days, and no reordering fixes it, because there is no weekday in the trip to move it to. That version keeps day one exactly as written and replaces one thing, which is the inside of Parliament House. You still walk the length of Spring Street past its steps and its colonnade, which are free, outdoors and on your route regardless, and the forty-five minutes goes to the Fitzroy Gardens, which absorb it without strain — the Model Tudor Village and the conservatory are what those minutes are for, and they are the two things the full day skips. The same substitution covers a weekday that turns out to be a sitting day. What it does not cover is the ground: a winter weekend is exactly when Australian Rules fills it, so on this arrangement day one may have to replace two things rather than one. Check the ground’s calendar as well as the parliament’s, and if there is a match on, take the trade below and buy a ticket to it.

Two of these rules can genuinely fail together, and here is the trade. Day one must be a working weekday, and it must miss an event day at the ground — and those two are usually friends, because Australian Rules fills the ground on winter weekends, which day one is avoiding anyway. The clearest case is the Boxing Day Test and the days after it, which occupy the ground across a run of weekdays, and in that week there is no arrangement that satisfies both rules. Do not substitute your way round it. Buy a ticket to what is on instead, take the rest of day one as written and drop the walk back through the park, because a day at that ground is better than a tour of it and it is the only version of day one that ends at night rather than in the late afternoon. And do not read that week as the only one it can happen in: a fixture list is not a tidy thing, weekday and evening matches happen, so check your own dates against the ground’s own calendar rather than against a count.

If you are short of time rather than short of days, cut in this order, and cut on the day that gains by it. On day one the Fitzroy Gardens go from forty minutes to ten — walk through to the cottage and out the far side — which is the half hour that saves a slipping morning; if you threaded the arcades on the way up Swanston Street, ten of that half hour has already been spent and there are twenty minutes in it rather than thirty. After that, Coop’s Shot Tower, which is fifteen minutes and a curiosity. On day two the museum goes from two hours to one, and that hour goes to Fitzroy, which is what the day is for; if you are shorter still, drop Gertrude Street and stay on Brunswick Street, which is an hour including the walk between them, and eat where you already are. On the third day the Royal Botanic Gardens go from ninety minutes to forty-five — the Fern Gully and the lake, nothing else — and that three quarters of an hour is precisely what the pier needs when you have started late. Do not cut the tour on day one or the Shrine on the third day. They are what those days exist for.

Everything else is walking. This is a low city rather than a hilly one, but it is not flat: the grid rises away from the river, day one climbs that rise twice — up Swanston Street in the morning and up Spring Street after lunch — and the path up to the Shrine on the third day is steep enough that the third day already tells you how to come at it from the level side. Day one is about six and a half kilometres, and its longest single stretch is the twenty-five minutes from Gate 3 back to Federation Square. Day two is about five, and its longest is the twenty-five minutes from the market to the Carlton Gardens. The third day is the shortest on foot — under three kilometres between its stops — and the most spread out, and its three rides, two of them down St Kilda Road and one back from Acland Street, are what make it work at all. If the weather turns, which in this city it can do twice between lunch and the tram, the two stretches that survive it best are day one after the shot tower, which is almost all indoors, and the middle of day two.