- Alternate use: Saint Kilda, island in Scotland.
St Kilda takes its name from a ship called The Lady of St Kilda, which visited Melbourne in July 1841, five years after the founding of Melbourne. The ship was owned by Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, a member of a prominent British political family, and the main shopping street of St Kilda is named Acland Street after him.
St Kilda is a beachside suburb about 10km south-east of the central city of Melbourne. It was originally settled because the high ground above the beach offered a cool fresh breeze during Melbourne's hot summer months. Within a few years of its founding it became a fashionable and wealthy area. St Kilda became a separate municipality in 1857.
During the Land Boom of the 1880s, St Kilda became a suburb of great mansions and palatial hotels, particularly along the seaside steets such as Fitzroy St, Grey St and Acland St. The inland areas of East St Kilda were not so wealthy.
During the Depression of the 1890s, however, St Kilda began to decline. The seaside area became an entertainment precinct for Melbourne's working classes, and the wealthy people moved further south to more exclusive suburbs such as Brighton. From World War I, parts of St Kilda became notorious for prostitution and other vices.
In the 1930s St Kilda became a centre for Melbourne's growing Jewish community, and since the 1960s it has also become one of Melbourne's leading gay and lesbian residential areas. Today St Kilda is an area of sharp social contrast, with many homeless and other disadvantaged people living among the wealthy and fashionable who crowd its shops and cafes. It is an area of great vitality and excitement.
St Kilda is now part of the City of Port Phillip. See also the St Kilda Football Club.
Many Melbourne people assume St Kilda is named after a saint called Kilda, and indeed a satirical "cult of Saint Kilda" has grown up among the area's many artists and writers. It is of course named indirectly after the island of Saint Kilda in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. The origins of the island's name are obscure (see some suggestions at the Saint Kilda article). But the most widely accepted explanation is that the name is a corruption of the Norse word skildir meaning "shields." The Scottish islands were all settled by the Norse in the early middle ages and were part of the Norse Earldom of Orkney until the 13th century.The name St Kilda
