The oldest museum in Australia, with a First Nations gallery that has been substantially rethought.
Founded in 1827, the Australian Museum is the oldest museum in Australia and one of the oldest natural history museums in the world outside Europe. It holds around 22 million objects and specimens.
General entry is free; major temporary exhibitions are ticketed.
A $57 million redevelopment reopened in 2020, adding gallery space and a rooftop, and the building now works far better than it did.
First Nations
The museum’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander collections are extensive and their presentation has been substantially reworked in consultation with communities.
Unsettled, a major exhibition developed with First Nations curators around the 250th anniversary of Cook’s voyage, was widely regarded as a turning point in how Australian institutions handle that history, and elements of that approach now run through the permanent displays.
The museum has also been active in repatriation, returning ancestral remains and secret-sacred objects to communities, and it publishes on the process.
The collections
Dinosaurs — a good hall, with Australian material including Muttaburrasaurus alongside the standard casts.
Garrigarrang: Sea Country, on the marine environment, developed with Aboriginal knowledge alongside the science.
Wild Planet, with around 400 taxidermied animals arranged evolutionarily in a single large hall.
Minerals, in a beautiful nineteenth-century room that has been kept as it was.
The Westpac Long Gallery — Australia’s oldest exhibition space, restored, holding 100 objects and 100 people from the museum’s history.
Practicalities
Open daily. Museum station, on the City Circle, is directly outside — the station itself is worth a look, being one of the 1926 platforms with original tiling.
Allow two to three hours, more with children.
Hyde Park is across the road, with the Anzac Memorial at its southern end — an Art Deco building of 1934 with 120,000 gold stars on the dome, one for each person from New South Wales who served in the First World War. It is free and it is the most affecting war memorial in the country.
More Museums
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Free, doubled in size in 2022, and holding the best collection of Aboriginal art in any state gallery.
Museum of Contemporary Art
An Art Deco maritime services building on the quay, full of contemporary art, free, with a rooftop café.
Australian National Maritime Museum
A submarine, a destroyer, a replica of the Endeavour, and a serious attempt at telling the story from both sides of the shore.