Hotel Australia
former hotel in Melbourne, Australia
The Hotel Australia was a former hotel in Melbourne, Australia. The hotel was built in 1939 on the site of the former Cafe Australia (which had opened in 1916), and was demolished in 1989.
Designed by Leslie M. Perrott Senior, the Hotel Australia was a 12-storey building with 94 rooms, numerous private dining and function rooms, and was the most prestigious hotel in Melbourne in its day.
The hotel included two small air-conditioned cinemas, a restaurant and bar in the basement, and a through-block shopping arcade on the ground floor with 41 shops, which was touted as the largest in Australia, known as the Australia Arcade.
Many of the bars within the new hotel quickly became popular meeting places for homosexual men, particularly the first floor cocktail bar and the basement public bar, which from 1970-80 became the Woolshed. The former hotel site is now occupied by a Novotel hotel and the 260 Collins arcade.
Original hotel
From the 1870s, the north side of Collins Street between Swanston and Elizabeth Streets became the most fashionable shopping area in Melbourne, known as ‘the block’. The Cafe Gunsler was established in 1879, located in the centre of the block, and was one of the most fashionable restaurants and event venues in the city. It was refurbished in 1890 and renamed the Vienna Cafe, which was bought in 1908 by another prominent restaurateur, the Greek-Australian Anthony Lucas. During 1916, World War 1, the cafe was closed due to its German associations.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Hotel Australia” as former hotel in Melbourne, Australia. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as former hotel in Melbourne, Australia. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q98276797. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1939, 1916, 1989 and 1970.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hotel Australia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.