Ashburton is a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 12 km (7.5 mi) southeast of Melbourne’s Central Business District. Its local government area is the City of Boroondara. At the 2016 census, Ashburton had a population of 7,751.

Ashburton is known for the Ashburton Village shopping strip, the Ashburton Community Centre and the Ashburton Library on High Street, along with the Ashburton Pool and Recreation Centre on nearby Warner Avenue.

Ashburton, a mostly postwar residential suburb, is 12 km south-east of central Melbourne. The locality’s name arose when the station on the Outer Circle railway line (1890) was named Ashburton, at the suggestion of a former local councillor, E. Dillon who had lived in Ashburton Terrace, Cork, Ireland.

An unrealised objective of the railway line had been to stimulate residential development, but the locality was best known for the Ashburton forest, overlooking Gardiners Creek, as a site for picnics. The Outer Circle railway, originally from Oakleigh to Melbourne via Fairfield, was abbreviated to spur lines from Camberwell within a few years, northwards to Deepdene and southwards to Ashburton, and no other fixed rail transport was provided for Ashburton. The residential development of Ashburton awaited Melbourne’s postwar metropolitan expansion and increased car ownership.

In the 1920s Ashburton had a few shops, orchards and market gardens, supporting sufficient population for a primary school to be opened in 1928 (549 pupils, 2014). There was a public hall in High Street near Johnston Street where Catholic and Presbyterian church services were held in the late 1920s. In 1948 the railway line was extended by one station to Alamein, a postwar suburb with almost entirely wartime street names such as Victory Boulevard, Benghazi Avenue and Tobruk Road. Much of the housing was built by the Housing Commission.