How to Make Friends in Melbourne When You Know Nobody

Here is something you will not read in many city guides: Melbourne is genuinely easier than most places for this. Not easy, but easier. If you have moved here and it is not working yet, the problem is almost certainly where you are going rather than the city itself.

Why Melbourne is easier than it looks

Three structural things work in your favour, and they are worth knowing because they tell you where to spend your effort.

Density beats sprawl. Sydney spreads out around a harbour, so people stay in their own suburb and a friend across the water is a friend you see twice a year. Melbourne's inner north is flat, walkable and connected by trams. Fitzroy, Collingwood, Carlton and Brunswick run into each other, which means the people you meet actually live near enough to see again.

Small rooms everywhere. Melbourne's laneway and small bar culture is not just good for tourism. In a room of forty people somebody will eventually talk to you. In a room of four hundred you are furniture. Melbourne has hundreds of the first kind, which changes the odds of every night out.

A constant supply of new arrivals. Melbourne carries one of the largest international student populations in the country, plus a steady flow of interstate movers and working holiday makers. Every semester a new wave arrives knowing nobody, which means you are never the only person looking.

The two things to sign up for this week

1. Parkrun, Saturday morning

Free, 5km, run or walk, every Saturday morning at locations across Melbourne, and the important part happens afterwards: the group goes for coffee. That coffee is where the friendships form, not the run.

Nobody cares how fast you are, plenty of people walk it, and turning up alone is completely standard. It is the single best value social commitment in the city because it costs nothing and repeats every seven days forever.

2. A weekly social or language night

Melbourne has an unusually strong scene here, built specifically for people who arrived alone:

• Linguas runs relaxed weekly language exchange and international social events in the CBD, aimed at locals, international students, travellers, backpackers and expats.
• International Friends in Melbourne is a large Meetup group running around four socials a month, mostly towards the end of the week so people can come straight after work.
• Meet People Social Melbourne runs a regular Friday evening event from 5:30pm at Dom's Social Club.
• Study Melbourne, a Victorian government service, runs programs and events specifically for international students.

The advantage of all of these is the same: nobody arrives with a group, so there is no closed circle to break into. Everybody there is doing what you are doing.

Run clubs if Parkrun is not enough

• Bundha Run Club, a free social run club based in North Fitzroy.
• Bridge Road Brewers Run Club in Brunswick East, an inclusive social club with the brewery attached, which is the format that works.

Where to be, neighbourhood by neighbourhood

Pick one area and become a regular in it. Spreading yourself across Melbourne is the most common way to end up knowing nobody anywhere.

• Fitzroy and Collingwood. The inner north cultural centre, running along Brunswick Street, Gertrude Street and Smith Street plus the laneways between them. Indie bars, live music, vintage pubs and small rooms. This is the highest concentration of solo friendly venues in the city.
• Brunswick. Slightly cheaper, heavily student and young professional, strong cafe and live music culture, and the sort of place where the same faces recur.
• Carlton. University adjacent, so the population turns over every semester and nobody is surprised by a newcomer.
• The CBD and its laneways. Best for after work, and where most of the international social meetups are held.

Going out alone here

Melbourne is arguably the best city in Australia for this, and the reason is architectural.

The small bar licensing culture filled the city with rooms holding a few dozen people, often up a staircase or down a laneway, usually with counter seating. That counter is the whole thing. A table for one reads as waiting for somebody. A seat at the bar reads as having arrived. It also puts you next to the bartender, whose job includes talking to you, and next to the other people who came in alone.

Fitzroy's Brunswick Street has long running small bars, including Polly, one of Melbourne's earliest cocktail bars, and Collingwood has intimate rooms like Above Board on Easey Street, an eight seat bar where conversation with whoever is next to you is essentially unavoidable.

Pick a weeknight between 5pm and 8pm rather than a Saturday at 10pm. Early crowds are still forming and people are open. Late crowds are sealed into groups that arrived together and will leave together. Our guide to drinking alone without feeling like a loser covers the mechanics in more depth, and almost all of it applies here.

If you are an international student

One warning, because it is the single most common way a year in Melbourne gets wasted socially.

Your university and your course will hand you a ready made group, and there is a strong chance it will consist mostly of people from your own country speaking your own language. That group is genuinely valuable in month one, when arriving is hard enough without doing it in a second language.

By month four it becomes the thing keeping your English exactly where it was and your circle exactly as small. The fix is not to abandon it. It is to make sure at least one of your two weekly commitments is not student only and not your own language. Parkrun, a run club, a volunteer shift or a sports team all qualify. Our guide for international students deals with the language side properly.

A realistic first three months

Weeks 1 to 4. Pick your suburb and your two weekly commitments. Do not evaluate anything yet. Learn names, turn up, go for the coffee afterwards even when you would rather go home.

Weeks 4 to 8. You are now a familiar face rather than a new one, which is the point at which conversations get longer. Start suggesting small things: "a few of us are getting food after, come along."

Weeks 8 to 12. Be the one who invites. Everyone waits to be invited and almost nobody does the inviting, so this is where a newcomer has an actual advantage.

On timing: research by Jeffrey Hall at the University of Kansas found it takes roughly 50 hours together to move from acquaintance to casual friend and around 90 hours to reach real friendship. At a weekly run plus coffee, that is months rather than weeks. Feeling friendless at week eight is the normal rate, not a failure.

Mistakes people make here

• Trying every meetup once. Ten events attended once leaves you with nobody. One event attended ten times leaves you with a group.
• Skipping the coffee or the drink afterwards. The run is the excuse. The coffee is the actual event, and leaving early means doing the hard part and missing the payoff.
• Living far out to save rent. A cheaper room forty minutes from anywhere costs you every spontaneous invitation, and eventually people stop making them.
• Choosing large venues on solo nights. Melbourne is full of small rooms. There is no reason to walk into a four hundred person venue by yourself.
• Waiting for winter to end. Melbourne weather is famously unreliable in every season, so a plan that depends on good weather is a plan that will not happen. Commit indoors.

Frequently asked questions