Alexandra Gardens

This guide to Alexandra Gardens in Melbourne recalls the days when this riverbank, once known as Henley Lawn, drew crowds of three hundred thousand for the Henley-on-Yarra regatta each spring, a floating carnival of decorated punts and brass bands. You'll hear how engineer Carlo Catani spent four years turning a flooded swamp and brickmaker's pit into this ground before 1896, and about the star-shaped rose bed he and curator George Cooper planted to mark Federation. Watch the rowers slide out from the timber boathouses that still line the water.