Docklands

This guide to Docklands in Melbourne opens at four in the morning on a pier, as a warehouse wall slides open over a thousand dancing bodies at a rave called Shed Fourteen sometime in the 1990s. It traces this ground back to Batman's Lagoon and the Victoria Dock that opened in 1892, once handling nine in ten of Victoria's imports before the shipping container emptied it out. The guide follows how an abandoned working harbour became, briefly, a stage for something nobody planned.