Billed as Australia's first immersive trick-art gallery, ArtVo turns the usual museum rule of look-but-do-not-touch on its head and asks visitors to climb into the artwork instead. It opened at The District Docklands in 2016 and spreads over roughly 1,400 square metres on a single level, divided into themed zones filled with large-scale murals painted directly onto the walls and floors. Each scene is built using forced perspective, so that when a visitor stands on a marked spot and a camera is h.....

One of Melbourne's oldest and most storied cultural buildings, the Athenaeum stands on Collins Street in the heart of the city and houses Athenaeum Theatre, a much-loved venue for theatre, comedy, music and live events. The institution traces its roots to the 1830s, and the present building, with its distinctive facade crowned by a statue of the goddess Athena, has been a centre of Melbourne intellectual and artistic life for well over a century. Athenaeum Theatre One, the main auditorium, seat.....

Few nations wear their sporting obsession as openly as Australia, and the Australian Sports Museum gathers that passion under one roof inside the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Reached through Gate 3 of the stadium, it holds the country's largest collection of sporting memorabilia, covering cricket, Australian rules football, the summer and winter Olympics, tennis, rugby league and union, soccer, basketball, boxing, netball and horse racing. The Sport Australia Hall of Fame, the Australian Racing Mus.....

Strap on a headset and the walls of a studio above Bourke Street fall away, replaced by tumbling spaceships, jungle temples or haunted rooms; that switch is the whole point of Entermission Melbourne, a virtual-reality escape room venue in the centre of the city. Teams are equipped with VR gear that tracks their hands as well as their movement, and real-life special effects are layered into the experience, so players physically reach for objects, solve puzzles and work together inside fully digit.....

Hosier Lane is Melbourne's best-known canvas for street art, a narrow bluestone laneway off Flinders Street where almost every surface, from walls and doorways to drainpipes and bins, is layered with spray paint, stencils, paste-ups and stickers. The cobbled lane and its offshoot Rutledge Lane sit in the heart of the city opposite Federation Square, and they have come to symbolise Melbourne's embrace of street art as a defining part of its cultural identity rather than simply vandalism to be scr.....

Kept at a constant minus ten degrees and built from more than thirty tonnes of sculpted ice, IceBar Melbourne offers a frozen experience that the venue promotes as the only one of its kind in Australia. Found in The Atrium at Federation Square, in the middle of the city's arts and sporting precinct, it invites guests to rug up in supplied capes and gloves before stepping through the doors of a themed entrance into a room where the bar, seating, glasses and decorative sculptures are all carved fr.....

Housed in the grand Old Customs House on the bank of the Birrarung, or Yarra River, the Immigration Museum tells the story of the millions of people who have travelled from across the world to make Victoria their home. The building itself, a Renaissance-revival landmark completed in stages through the nineteenth century, was once the administrative heart of immigration and trade for the colony, which gives the subject matter a fitting setting. After standing vacant for years, it was restored and.....

Part bar, part competitive sport, MANIAX in Melbourne lets groups throw axes at wooden targets in a purpose-built basement venue on Elizabeth Street, between Collins and Little Collins Streets in the heart of the city. One of several MANIAX locations around the country, the Melbourne site is among the larger venues, with a mix of group lanes and single lanes able to handle sizeable parties of throwers at once. Sessions begin with a safety briefing and coaching from trained staff, who teach the .....

Known to locals simply as the G, the Melbourne Cricket Ground is the largest stadium in Australia and one of the most storied sporting arenas in the world, seating just over one hundred thousand people. The Melbourne Cricket Club selected the site in 1853, and the ground has been in continuous use ever since, hosting the first Test match in 1877 and the first one-day international in 1971, both between Australia and England. The MCG is the spiritual home of both cricket and Australian rules foo.....

The largest museum in the southern hemisphere, Melbourne Museum stands in the Carlton Gardens beside the World Heritage-listed Royal Exhibition Building, a striking modern complex of blades and volumes designed by Denton Corker Marshall and opened in 2000. Run by Museums Victoria, it gathers natural history, science, culture and the social story of the state under one expansive roof, having moved from cramped quarters in the State Library building. Its galleries range widely, from dinosaur skel.....