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 HMASVampire is a very well preserved destroyer from the post WWII era. They also have submarine HMASOnslow 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.