Gas streetlights in Melbourne

In the early days of Melbourne, streets were dark and dangerous. The only lights that enabled you to see your way along the street were the oil lights that publicans were obliged to have outside their hotels. 

But in 1857 a major improvement occurred when gaslights were introduced. This transformed town life by making the streets safer to traverse at night.

The gas was produced by burning coal, initially at a gas works on Batman’s Hill in West Melbourne, now Docklands. This was then piped to the light poles in the streets of the town. These new lights were very popular and demand for them increased rapidly. 

By 1870 there were 414 gas lights illuminating the streets of Melbourne and what are now its inner suburbs, and three companies supplying gas for street lighting. 

By 1900 there were 50 gasworks in Victoria, including 16 in the greater Melbourne area.

One drawback of these gas streetlights was that every one of them had to be lit of an evening by a lamp-lighter, and turned off again the next morning. The city lamp-lighter often had trouble keeping all the lamps lit because of the unreliable technology and the unpredictable weather.

By the 1880s, however, gas lighting was being out-shone by a new technology – electric street lighting. 

In 1883, experimental electric lighting was installed in the Public Library in Melbourne, and in 1888 the Melbourne City Council replaced two gas lamps at a city intersection with electric lights. 

From the 1890s onwards, electric street lighting gradually replaced gas, and lamplighters became redundant. In 1912, the Metropolitan Gas Company had employed 132 lamplighters, but by 1933 there was only one left.

One of the many cast-iron gaslight bases that can still be seen in the streets of inner suburban Melbourne.

As the gas streetlights were replaced by the new electric lights, the old light poles were removed. However, the lower half of the poles were often left in place as they were heavy pieces of cast iron embedded in the asphalt of the footpaths. 

Many of these old gaslight bases can still be seen around the streets of Melbourne’s inner suburbs, often mistaken for hitching posts for horses or sewerage vent pipes. •