Summary

Scale model depicting a street cart coffee stall typical of gold rush era Melbourne of the early 1850s, including two male figurines and a dog.

The model was commissioned in 1999 from the Melbourne model maker Michael Molesworth, for use in the Exhibition `Melbourne: Stories from a City', which was one of the inaugural exhibitions at the new Melbourne Museum, when it opened in September 2000. The model remained on display until the exhibition closed for redevelopment in 2007. Since 2019, the model has returned to public display in the exhibition Mini Mega Model Museum, at Melbourne Museum.

The model is based on an illustration of a street vendors' coffee cart that appears as an etching captioned '6 o'clock', created by the artist & lithographer Henry Heath Glover (1828-1904), and reproduced on page 1 of a small booklet/pamphlet entitled '12 Hours Road Scraping in Melbourne', published by Edgar Ray & Co., 23 Collins Street East, Melbourne, in 1857. The booklet contains twelve illustrations of typical scenes of Melbourne street life during the gold rush years of the early 1850s, observed at different daytime and nightime hours around the clock.

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