6 July 2025
Would you believe Hoddle Street and Punt Road weren’t connected by road until 1938? It must have been so quiet up on the hill. Punt Road got its name from a punt established in 1842, which was joined (or replaced) by a footbridge in 1895. The first photo is 1922, which clearly shows the misalignment (perhaps laid out at different times with no idea that one day they might be joined). As car and truck traffic increased hugely in the next 30 years, a bridge was commissioned, and rather surprisingly the footbridge trusses were reused across the Maribyrnong as a stock bridge near the cattle yards, still there as a footbridge.
The new Punt Road bridge was named the Hoddle Bridge, after the increasingly famous founding surveyor Robert Hoddle. Architects Hughes & Orme were employed to ‘harmonise …it into one pleasing structure’, and the balustrade and pylons have nice Art Deco lines (and rather incongruous lamps matching the 1920s CBD ones).
The whole slightly scary steep slope and S-bend arrangement is something modern traffic engineers wouldn’t allow, but gives you a brief nice view of what’s left of the silos. All pics via Facebook, old ones mostly @library_vic.
Storey of Melbourne 