Australian National Maritime Museum

You have to pay to go on the boats, but admission to the museum part is free. They have quite a few interesting artifacts in the museum, including one of the boats from Darwin’s annual beer can regatta. Unfortunately, going to a free museum on Australia day was probably not the best planning – the place was really packed. The boats which are available to tour vary, so I may go back to tour the Endeavor or some other historic ship.

For me the highlight of this museum is the museum ships that are docked there. The HMAS Vampire is a very well preserved destroyer from the post WWII era. They also have submarine HMAS Onslow and an replica of James Cook’s HM Bark Endeavour. A lot of times when you see museum warships they have been chopped up a lot and “museumized” to an unfortunate extent (to some degree this is obviously necessary for safety reasons). I thought this was pretty minimal on these ships. I enjoyed walking though.