Collins Street in the 1900s was a product of the building boom twenty years earlier, when ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ was Australia’s leading city. The north side of Collins Street between Elizabeth and Swanston Streets, known as The Block , boasted an array of coffee houses, booksellers and music shops which served Melbourne’s middle classes. Doing the Block was a particularly fashionable pastime for the well-to-do on Thursday and Saturday afternoons. It is hard to believe that only thirty years earlier, this intersection had been part of a natural river which ran along Elizabeth Street, which swept people and animals alike downstream in times of flood.