Five days in Melbourne: the laneways matter more than the landmarks

Start where every Melburnian starts, under the clocks. Flinders Street Station came out of an architectural competition in 1899 and its front steps have been the city's meeting point ever since, which is why the phrase is still "meet me under the clocks" and not a street address. It is the busiest suburban station in the southern hemisphere, and the inside is a good deal shabbier than the outside, so admire it from the corner.

Directly across the intersection is Federation Square, which Melbourne argued about for years and then adopted completely. It is a hard-edged plaza of angular sandstone and zinc with a big screen on one side, and there is usually something free happening on it.

Then walk fifty metres to Hosier Lane and see what the city actually looks like. Melbourne runs on a distinction between its wide official streets and the bluestone service lanes behind them, and the lanes are where the art, the coffee and the small bars are. Hosier is repainted constantly, so nothing you photograph will be there next year.

Get to Queen Victoria Market early, ideally before nine, because it is a working market rather than a tourist one and the good stalls sell out. It opened officially in 1878 and covers several blocks at the top of the grid: sheds of fruit and vegetables outside, a long deli hall of cheese and smallgoods inside, and a meat and fish hall that is loud in the way markets used to be everywhere. Buy breakfast there and eat it standing up.

Walk ten minutes south-east afterwards to the Old Melbourne Gaol, which is small, grim and much more interesting than its size suggests. Ned Kelly was hanged in it in 1880, and the scaffold is still there.

Finish in the State Library, which is free, open late and one of the great public rooms anywhere. It also holds Kelly's armour, so the day closes the loop it opened.

Everything today sits on one axis running south from the river along St Kilda Road, and you can walk the whole of it.

Start in the Royal Botanic Gardens while it is cool. They are large, informal and English in layout, running down to an ornamental lake, and they hold something like ten thousand species across thirty eight hectares. The Aboriginal heritage walk that leaves from the visitor centre is the one guided thing here worth booking.

Walk up the hill to the Shrine of Remembrance, which dominates the skyline from the south in a way no photograph prepares you for. It opened in 1934 and was designed so that a shaft of sunlight crosses the stone in the inner sanctuary at eleven o'clock on the eleventh of November. There are galleries underneath, added in 2014, and the view north from the balcony runs straight up the boulevard to the city.

Then the National Gallery of Victoria, back down the hill, behind a wall of water you are supposed to put your hand through.

Phillip Island is about two hours south-east by car, and the day is built backwards from sunset, because that is when the penguins come in. Leave late morning rather than early: there is not enough on the island to fill eight hours, and the last two are the ones that matter.

Spend the afternoon on the western end. The koala centre puts boardwalks up at eye level in the gum canopy, which is the difference between squinting at a grey lump forty feet up and actually watching one move. Out at the tip, a free boardwalk runs along the cliff above Bass Strait, with Australia's biggest seal population hauled out on rocks well offshore.

Then the Penguin Parade. Little penguins, the smallest species in the world and about thirty centimetres tall, come out of the surf at Summerland Beach after dark and cross the sand to their burrows while a few thousand people watch from tiered seating. Arrival time swings from about quarter past five in June to quarter to nine in January, so check the date before you book anything. Bring more clothing than you think, because the seating is outdoors and the wind comes off Bass Strait with nothing in the way.

Eat before the parade, not after. Everything on the island shuts while it is on.

Melbourne's relationship with sport is not a hobby, and the Melbourne Cricket Ground is the clearest way to see it in a spare morning. It holds just over a hundred thousand people, it has been on the same ground since 1853, it hosted the first cricket Test match in 1877 and the 1956 Olympics, and on a non-event day you can walk out through the players' race onto the boundary. The National Sports Museum is in the same building and the combined ticket is the one to buy.

Walk back to town through Fitzroy Gardens, fifteen minutes west, where a small stone cottage sits looking thoroughly out of place. It belonged to James Cook's parents, in Yorkshire, and a Melbourne businessman bought it in 1934, had it dismantled brick by brick, packed into barrels and shipped fourteen thousand miles as a centenary present to the state. Whether Cook ever slept in it is a matter of opinion.

That puts you back at the top of the grid with time for a last coffee before the airport bus.