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Melbourne Kids Activities: How To Explore Australia’s Cultural Capital With The Family

Even the most seasoned travelers can agree that Melbourne is a city with plenty to offer. From its stellar culinary scene to its rich arts and cultural events calendar, visiting Melbourne at any time of the year is sure to provide an abundance of novel experiences and unique opportunities to leave your comfort zone.

But how exactly do you plan a family trip to Melbourne? As you may imagine, there’s a fair bit that goes into putting together a kid-friendly itinerary, including figuring out where to stay in Melbourne that’ll allow you and all the big and little members of your travel party to enjoy total comfort and convenience.

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Today, we’ll be exploring some of the best family-friendly attractions to add to your Melbourne trip itinerary. Read on to unearth some experiences that the whole family will be sure to enjoy.

Melbourne Kids Activities

This is not an exhaustive list of things to do in Melbourne with kids. Instead, I share my favorite highlights that you won’t want to miss. 

aerial view of MCG Melbourne Cricket Ground
Aerial View of the MCG – Melbourne Cricket Ground

Catch a footy match at the MCG

As Melbourne is the home of AFL (Australian Football League), a trip to this city would truly be incomplete without at least catching one footy match at the MCG or the ‘G as the locals call it. The annual AFL season tends to run from March through September, meaning that there are plenty of matches to choose from, especially considering half of the teams in the league actually have their home base in and around the suburbs of Melbourne. 

If footy is completely new to you, consider Melbourne Sports Tours’ Game Package which provides a local host to explain the game, and involves you in the game with fun games, transportation to the stadium, and premium seating. 

Sadly, this means that any travelers looking to come to Melbourne during the summer holiday period will be visiting the city outside of AFL season. Thankfully, Melbourne is still a city that’s renowned across the globe for being jam-packed with other sports events. For example, a trip to Melbourne in the summer (mid-late January) could easily include a day watching tennis pros at the Australian Open!

Kids are guaranteed to have a hoot at a footy match or virtually any other sporting event at the MCG (Melbourne Cricket Ground) or at any of Melbourne’s other fantastic stadiums. If you want to walk onto the pitch at MCG, you can book a special guided tour and get admission to the Australian Sports Museum for less than $30 per person.

It’s important to note, however, that public transport is prone to getting pretty crowded in the lead-up to highly anticipated games. To ensure that you don’t miss out on any of the action, you and your family should secure accommodation as close to the ‘G as possible. Accommodation closer to Jolimont Train Station and Melbourne and Olympic Parks like Batman’s Hill on Collins, is guaranteed to keep your trips to the ‘G, Rod Laver Arena, and other fields as simplistic as possible.

Embark on a family-friendly walking tour

Melbourne is a superb city for exploring by foot, partly because it just so happens to be laid out in a perfect grid. This essentially means that it’s fairly impossible to get lost, that is unless you happen to stumble into one of the city’s many hidden laneways. Unsuspecting travelers can find themselves transported into whole other worlds within the city’s many secret nooks and crannies. 

Urban graffiti street art melbourne
AC/DC Lane and Duckboard Place in Melbourne

If you’d like to discover all that lies within Melbourne’s famous laneways, we highly recommend securing your family a spot in one of the city’s many family-friendly walking tours. Melbourne’s walking tours are likely to be accompanied by their own theme, with popular themes including ‘foodie’-oriented walking tours, street art walking tours, and Indigenous heritage tours. For anyone looking to traverse Melbourne’s many laneways, you’ll be sure to find the city’s ‘Hidden Secrets’ walking tour a veritable delight.

Visit Melbourne Museum and the IMAX Theatre

Melbourne is home to a number of incredibly enriching museums, art galleries, and other cultural attractions that are sure to inspire wonder and curiosity in kids of all ages. If you’ve got a little learner on your hands who may enjoy interacting with family-friendly exhibitions, a trip to the Melbourne Museum must absolutely be added to your itinerary.

Located in the Carlton Gardens just north of the city center, Melbourne Museum boasts an assortment of historical, scientific, cultural, and even Indigenous displays and exhibits, allowing visitors and their younger children to learn all about not just Melbourne’s own history, but the ecological and cultural history of Australia as a whole. Some unmissable displays include their collection of complete dinosaur skeletons, replicas of British colonial ships and 20th-century naval fleets, and the Indigenous, Torres Strait, and Pacific Islander artifacts that map out the wider history of Oceania.

Royal Exhibition Building
Royal Exhibition Building

Get tickets to explore Melbourne’s oldest new exhibit; the Royal Exhibition Building Dome Promenade. This city icon has been closed to the public for 100 years and is now open exclusively during guided tours. The views of the gardens and city skyline are spectacular and considered some of the best in the city.

Melbourne Museum is also the place to be if you’d like to experience the awesome power of an IMAX laser film screening. Melbourne’s IMAX Theatre just so happens to be the most powerful projection system in the world, allowing a crisp 4K laser viewing experience from the cinema’s incredible 7-story screen. IMAX often screens nature documentaries in picture-perfect quality, as well as a collection of classic and new release films, meaning you and your kids can enjoy what will likely be the best cinema experience of your lives right in the heart of Melbourne. 

Indulge your inner thrill seeker at Luna Park

Finally, we can’t explore family-friendly attractions in Melbourne without at least mentioning the city’s inestimably unique Luna Park amusement park in St Kilda. Often referred to as Melbourne’s ‘most iconic amusement park’, Luna Park provides families with a selection of traditional and contemporary carnival rides, including spinning towers, swinging pirate ships, and modern, fast-paced takes on Ferris Wheels.

Aerial view of Luna Park
Luna Park at night

Parents and kids alike are sure to enjoy taking a ride on ‘The Great Scenic Railway’, which also happens to be the world’s oldest continually operating roller coaster, having originally opened up for riders in 1912. Chances are you may have even taken a ride on the ‘Railway’ yourself in your youth. Imagine taking your own kids on the ride decades later!

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Alongside all the attractions we’ve outlined above, there are a variety of parklands, nature reserves, and other natural wonders in and around the metro Melbourne region. Families should absolutely pencil some time into their trip itinerary to visit Phillip Island and watch the Penguin Parade, or perhaps even experience the fantastic beaches and hiking trails that makeup Wilsons Promontory. If you are feeling hungry Melbourne has some of the best buffets in the country

Drives through country Victoria can also yield plenty of family fun, with attractions like Healesville’s native animal sanctuary, the historical Puffing Billy Railway, and the Otway Fly Treetop Adventures for some high-flying, ziplining fun amongst towering redwoods.

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