Melbourne

Museum

ACMI

Australia's national museum of screen culture, set inside Fed Square. The permanent exhibition — The Story of the Moving Image — is free, and traces film, television, videogames and digital art across one long interactive hall. Two cinemas screen daily. The Lens, a take-home device handed to visitors, lets you collect what catches your eye and pick it up again online.

Gallery

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art

Wood Marsh's weathered-steel building on the Melbourne Arts Precinct has been ACCA's home since 2002. Inside, the scale is uncompromising — designed for new commissions rather than touring shows. Founded in 1983, the organisation works directly with artists to produce work made for these walls, which means what you'll see here exists nowhere else.

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Banyule Gallery

Banyule Gallery in Heidelberg, VIC has collection and exhibitions that explore fine art, contemporary art. Core activities include exhibition.  Nearby towns include Ivanhoe, Eaglemont, Kew. Admission is free.

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Bayside Gallery

Bayside Gallery is a gallery in Brighton, VIC. The gallery's collection and exhibitions explore fine art, contemporary art. Core activities include exhibition. The venue serves as a community hub. Visitors can enjoy free entry, accessible. Nearby towns include Caulfield, Sandringham, Moorabbin. Admission is free.

Gallery

Bundoora Homestead Art Centre

Bundoora Homestead Art Centre is a Federation-era farmhouse converted into a community gallery, presenting contemporary art exhibitions with a particular emphasis on supporting local and emerging Victorian artists in a leafy northern suburb of Melbourne.

Cultural Centre

Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre

Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre within Melbourne Museum is a dedicated space celebrating the history, art and living culture of Victoria's Aboriginal peoples. The centrepiece First Peoples exhibition uses  multimedia, Aboriginal language and contemporary artworks to tell the story of Aboriginal Victoria from Creation to today, while the Birrarung Gallery showcases three rotating exhibitions of contemporary Koorie art annually and the Milarri Garden features culturally significant plants.

Museum

Chinese Museum Melbourne

Five floors of Chinatown building hold 8,000 artefacts spanning 200 years of Chinese-Australian life. The processional dragon — claimed as the world's largest — anchors the permanent collection; temporary exhibitions range from John Young's archival reckoning with a forgotten 19th-century miner to Chinese Anzac parallels across two world wars. Four hundred thousand school students have come through. The weight of that accumulation shows.

Heritage Site

Como House and Garden

Built in 1847 above the Birrurung (Yarra) on Wurundjeri Woiwurrung Country, Como was the first Australian house museum acquired with its contents. The Armytage family lived here for 95 years, and the interiors, servants' quarters, furniture and decorative arts reflect their tenure. Access inside is by guided tour with National Trust volunteers; the surrounding pleasure garden, retaining elements of its 1850s design, is open free to the public.

Heritage Site

Cook's Cottage

Cook's Cottage in the Fitzroy Gardens is the oldest building in Australia, transported stone by stone from Great Ayton, Yorkshire in 1934. Built by the parents of Captain James Cook in 1755, it stands as a remarkably preserved piece of 18th-century English domestic architecture.

Botanical Garden

Cranbourne Botanic Garden

The Australian Garden at Cranbourne is dedicated entirely to Australian native flora, with dramatic sand-sculpted landscapes, a red sand garden, and 170,000 plants across 25 hectares of bushland.

Cultural Centre

Drum Theatre Dandenong

Corner of Lonsdale and Walker streets in Dandenong, this council-run theatre pulls a broad program — Bluey's Big Play one week, a Fleetwood Mac tribute the next. It's an unlikely cultural anchor for one of Melbourne's most ethnically diverse outer suburbs, and the programming reflects that mix. Open weekdays, 10am to 4pm.

Cultural Centre

Gasworks Arts Park

A former gas plant in Albert Park, now four hectares of parkland threaded with two theatres, two galleries, fifteen artist studios, and a farmers' market that runs twelve times a year. Over 100,000 people move through annually — for circus, cabaret, life-drawing classes, school holiday programs. The industrial bones give it weight; the programming range keeps it honest.

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Gertrude Contemporary

Forty years on from its origins in a Fitzroy textiles factory, Gertrude now occupies a converted furniture warehouse on High Street, Preston. Sixteen studio artists cycle through on two-year residencies, with every resident guaranteed a solo show at the Collingwood satellite, Gertrude Glasshouse. The result is rare: exhibition programs where you can watch the work and the artist form together.

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Glen Eira City Council Gallery

Glen Eira City Council Gallery is a gallery in Caulfield, VIC. The gallery's collection and exhibitions explore fine art, contemporary art. Core activities include exhibition. The venue serves as a community hub. Visitors can enjoy free entry. Nearby towns include Glen Waverley, Bentleigh, Ormond. Admission is free.

Gallery

Heide Museum of Modern Art

Set on the former farmstead of John and Sunday Reed, Heide is an outdoor sculpture park and gallery dedicated to modern and contemporary Australian art, with three gallery buildings among 16 hectares of gardens.

Museum

HMAS Castlemaine

Victoria's restored Bathurst Class Corvette offers visitors an immersive experience of Australian maritime history. Explore how crews lived and worked during wartime, witness the original engines in action, and discover the remarkable story of the only Australian corvette from the 1940s still afloat.

Gallery

Ian Potter Museum of Art

The Ian Potter Museum of Art is the University of Melbourne's principal art museum on the Parkville campus, housed in a 1998 award-winning building designed by Nonda Katsalidis. Custodian of Australia's largest university art collection with over 18,000 works spanning classical antiquities to contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, the museum reopened in 2025 with the landmark exhibition spanning 65,000 years of Australian art history.

Museum

Immigration Museum

Housed in the Old Customs House, the Immigration Museum explores the journeys of people who came to Victoria from around the world, telling personal stories of migration across two centuries.

Gallery

Incinerator Gallery Moonee Ponds

Incinerator Gallery Moonee Ponds collection and exhibitions explore contemporary art. Visitors can enjoy free entry, accessible. Nearby towns include West Melbourne, Essendon, Northcote. Admission is free.

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Islamic Museum of Australia

The Islamic Museum of Australia sits on Anderson Road in Thornbury, in Melbourne's north. It holds permanent galleries, among them the Australian Muslim History Gallery, alongside changing exhibitions: recent shows have included "A Common Word" by Leslie Eastman, which works through light, video and drawing, and "Sakinah", drawn from the domes of Istanbul. The museum runs an education program with school tours and incursions, and its Boundless Plains project, showcasing Australian Muslim stories, has travelled to the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi. A café, gift shop and venue hire round out the site, which marked ten years in 2024.

Museum

Jewish Museum of Australia

On Balaclava Road in St Kilda, this museum sits at the intersection of art and Jewish culture — tracing Australian Jewish life through rotating exhibitions and a permanent collection. It positions itself as a place for all people, not just the community it documents. The Bunurong Country setting adds a layer of shared storytelling that the museum takes seriously.

Cultural Centre

Koorie Heritage Trust

The Koorie Heritage Trust at Federation Square is Victoria's only public collection dedicated solely to Koorie art and culture, holding over 100,000 items including artworks, artefacts, photographs and oral history recordings. Established in 1985, the Trust presents rotating exhibitions of Aboriginal art across multiple floors, offers guided Aboriginal Cultural Walking Tours of Melbourne, and runs educational programs for schools and corporate groups, all with free admission.

Cultural Centre

Koorie Heritage Trust Melbourne

On the banks of the Birrarung — the Yarra, or River of Mists — this free-entry not-for-profit sits inside Fed Square's Birrarung Building, running exhibitions, a shop, and programs that keep Aboriginal Victorian culture firmly in the present tense. Current shows include *Blak Design - Treading Lightly* and *occupation studies: ngayanhurra bayarral*, both running into 2026.

Heritage Site

La Trobe's Cottage

La Trobe's Cottage is a prefabricated timber dwelling shipped from England in 1839 as the first home of Victoria's inaugural Superintendent Charles La Trobe. Nestled in the Kings Domain, it offers an intimate window into the colony's earliest days.

Heritage Site

Labassa Mansion

Labassa is the most opulent surviving Victorian mansion in Australia — a palace of 35 rooms completed in 1890, with a breathtaking interior of painted ceilings, gilded mouldings, ornate fireplaces and richly patterned wallpapers that showcase the excess of Melbourne's land boom era.

Museum

Lyon Housemuseum

Architect Corbett Lyon designed his own family home in Kew as a working museum, folding gallery walls, storage and living space into a single building so that art and domestic life share the same rooms rather than being kept apart. He and his wife Yueji opened it as a public museum, then in 2018 added a freestanding gallery building next door, and in 2024 folded both into one integrated institution housing the Lyon Collection — paintings, sculpture, video and photography by more than sixty contemporary Australian artists. The original house is shown only on pre-booked tour days, led by members of the Lyon family themselves, who talk through works installed exactly where the family once lived with them; the newer galleries next door run a changing public exhibition program Thursday to Sunday. A 2010 survey of private museum architecture worldwide named the building one of the ten most exciting of its kind. It remains, unusually, both a home and a public collection at once — the tension between the two is the point, not an inconvenience to be designed away.

Botanical Garden

Maranoa Gardens Balwyn

Maranoa Gardens Balwyn is a long-established botanical garden in Balwyn, VIC. The garden showcases collections focused on environmental, natural history, agriculture. Core activities include exhibition, education, community. The venue features outdoor spaces and is family-oriented. Visitors can enjoy free entry, picnic area, gardens, accessible. Nearby towns include Camberwell, Nunawading, Box Hill. Admission is free.

Gallery

Maroondah Art Gallery

Maroondah Art Gallery is a gallery in Ringwood, VIC. The gallery's collection and exhibitions explore fine art, contemporary art. Core activities include exhibition. The venue serves as a community hub. Visitors can enjoy accessible, family friendly. Nearby towns include Croydon, Heathmont, Melbourne outer suburbs.

Museum

Melbourne Holocaust Museum

Now operating as the Melbourne Holocaust Museum, this Elsternwick institution holds an extensive collection donated largely by Holocaust survivors who settled in Melbourne. The core exhibition, Everybody Had a Name, traces Jewish life before, during and after the Holocaust. Education programs for school and adult groups run alongside survivor talks, film screenings and panel discussions. Open Tuesday to Friday and Sunday, 10am to 4pm.

Museum

Melbourne Museum

Melbourne Museum is one of Australia's largest and most visited museums, covering natural history, science, technology, and Victorian culture across vast galleries in Carlton Gardens.

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Melbourne Tram Museum

Set within the heritage-listed Hawthorn Tram Depot, this museum traces Melbourne's tramway history since 1885, when the city became one of the world's great tramway cities. A fleet of historic trams sits within the original depot building, alongside exhibitions on the cable tramways of 1884 to 1940 and the wider social history shaped by trams. The volunteer-run museum opens on scheduled days and publishes The Bellcord.

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Monash University Museum of Art

MUMA presents a dynamic program of contemporary Australian and international art, with particular strengths in conceptual and experimental practices across its two gallery spaces on campus.

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Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh)

Monash Gallery of Art (MGA) holds Australia's most significant public collection of Australian photography, with over 4,000 works spanning documentary, artistic and conceptual photography from the 1940s to the present in a purpose-built gallery in Melbourne's southeast.

Museum

Museum of Chinese Australian History

Five floors of a restored 1890s Chinatown warehouse hold 8,000 artefacts tracing 200 years of Chinese Australian life. The centrepiece is Dai Loong, the world's largest Chinese processional dragon. Current exhibitions range from a goldfields elegy built around archival documents to a reckoning with Chinese service in both World Wars. Serious history, seriously kept.

visual_art

National Gallery of Victoria

Founded in 1861, the NGV holds more than 76,000 works across two Melbourne buildings — NGV International and The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia. Oil on panel from the 15th century sits alongside contemporary design and fashion. The permanent collection is free. A third building, The Fox: NGV Contemporary, is on its way.

Heritage Site

Old Melbourne Gaol

Built from bluestone in the 1840s, Victoria's oldest surviving prison held over a hundred executions within its walls — Ned Kelly among them in 1880. Day tickets cover self-guided audio tours and the women and children's cell block. After dark, the Hangman's Night Tour moves through the same corridors by lamplight. Russell Street has rarely felt further from the present.

Museum

Old Post Office Museum

Run by the Mornington & District Historical Society, formed in 1964 with Leslie Moorhead as its first president, this museum occupies the old post office on the corner of Main Street and Esplanade, opposite Mornington Park. Its collection covers the history of Mornington, Mt Eliza, Mt Martha and Moorooduc, with photographs, maps, documents, clothing and other artefacts, alongside postal, telegraph and telephone items. Displays are rotated as exhibitions, with a winter recess while the next one is curated. Entry is a few dollars.

Museum

Old Treasury Building

Nineteen-year-old JJ Clark designed this Spring Street building in 1858. Beneath its Renaissance Revival facade, the original gold vaults still hold the weight of the rush era — visitors can descend into them, handle documents from Public Record Office Victoria, and, apparently, earn a gold licence. Free entry, closed Saturdays.

Museum

Polish Museum and Archives in Australia

Established in 1991 and incorporated the following year, this organisation collects and preserves documents, medals, objects, photographs and other materials reflecting the individual and community life of Polish immigrants in Australia, making them available to the public and to academics for research and exhibitions. Its work centres on post-war migration. The Polish Soldier Migrant Project documents former members of the Polish military who arrived in 1947 and 1948 aboard the Asturias and the Strathnaver, some of whom worked on the Hydro-Electric Scheme in Tasmania. An oral history programme records the pre-war lives, wartime experiences and early years in Australia of these now-elderly pioneers.

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Polly Woodside Maritime Museum

Launched in Belfast in 1885, the Polly Woodside is an iron-hulled barque that made seventeen circuits of the globe before ending up a Melbourne coal hulk. The National Trust took her on in 1968 for a single cent, by which point she was the last square-rigged deep-water commercial sailing ship still afloat in Australasia. She now sits in her original timber dry dock at South Wharf, open to board on the first and third Sunday of each month.

Museum

RAAF Museum Point Cook

The RAAF Museum at Point Cook is Australia's only national museum dedicated to Royal Australian Air Force history, located at the birthplace of the Australian Flying Corps. The museum houses one of the finest collections of historical military aircraft in the world, from a World War I Maurice Farman Shorthorn to an F-111, with live flying displays of heritage aircraft including a Mustang and Tiger Moth on selected days.

Heritage Site

Rippon Lea Estate

A polychrome brick mansion completed in 1868 for Frederick Sargood, who named it after his mother's maiden name, Rippon, and the English word for meadow. The house has grown to 33 rooms and sits within seven hectares of Victorian pleasure gardens, taking in a lake, fernery, rose gardens and an orchard of historic fruit varieties. Guided house and garden tours run alongside a tea room, nursery and gift shop.

Botanical Garden

Royal Botanic Gardens Cranbourne

The Gardens Victoria arm that focuses squarely on native plants and conservation science rather than ornamental beds. Two sites operate under the one organisation — Melbourne and Cranbourne — with the latter backed by the National Herbarium of Victoria's State Botanical Collection. Rare and threatened species research happens here alongside visitor programs. Bring a picnic; the outdoor spaces are the point.

Botanical Garden

Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria

Thirty-eight hectares on the Yarra's edge, the Melbourne gardens hold more than 50,000 plants across 8,500 species — a working research institution as much as a park. The National Herbarium of Victoria sits within its grounds, anchoring programs in rare and threatened plant conservation. Come for the landscape; stay because the science running underneath it is genuinely worth your attention.

Museum

Schwerkolt Cottage & Museum Complex

A historic museum complex established in 1884, set across 2.25 hectares of bushland at Mitcham, adjoining the Yarran Dheran bushland park. The grounds hold historical buildings, walking tracks, a cottage garden, a barbecue area and a family playground, and trace early colonial history in Whitehorse. Group tours are run for all ages, from school-aged children to senior citizens.

Museum

Scienceworks

Scienceworks is an interactive science and technology museum in Melbourne's west, featuring hands-on exhibits, a planetarium, and the historic Pumping Station from 1897.

Museum

Seaworks Maritime Museum

On the Williamstown waterfront, where the Yarra River meets Port Phillip Bay, this volunteer-run maritime precinct occupies former industrial sheds, piers, and slipways. The Ocean Photographer of the Year exhibition has shown here; the Winter Solstice Festival fills the yards. It's heritage infrastructure still in use — which makes it more convincing than most museums.

Museum

SECAN Art Gallery

A contemporary art network for artists living or working in South East Melbourne, open to emerging, mid-career and professional makers as well as anyone who likes to create. The group gathers on the first Saturday of each month, with an exhibition opening in the afternoon that anyone can attend. The gallery sits at Gate 6 of Akoonah Park in Berwick and shows work on weekends, closing over January and February.

Archive

State Library Victoria

Free, public and housed in a 19th-century building, State Library Victoria holds over two million items — among them Ned Kelly's armour. It's an institution in the truest sense: the kind of place that rewards an unplanned afternoon as much as deliberate research.

Museum

The Johnston Collection

Fine and decorative arts occupy a historic East Melbourne townhouse at 192 Wellington Parade, visited by guided tour only — sessions run at 10am, noon and 2pm, Wednesday through Sunday. The program around each exhibition is serious: curator walk-and-talks, afternoon lecture series, even a book club. Currently showing *Taste Temptation*, an exhibition exploring food, feasting and the decorative arts.

Gallery

Town Hall Gallery Hawthorn

Town Hall Gallery Hawthorn is a heritage-listed gallery in Hawthorn, VIC. The gallery's collection and exhibitions explore fine art, contemporary art. Core activities include exhibition. The venue serves as a community hub and is housed in a historic building. Visitors can enjoy free entry, accessible. Nearby towns include Camberwell, Kew, Balwyn. Admission is free.

Gallery

Trocadero Artspace

A volunteer committee of practising artists has run this Footscray space since 2005, incorporating as a not-for-profit two years later and building it into one of the west's longer-running artist-run initiatives. Four distinct rooms — two galleries for solo and group shows, a stairwell space called Nooky for performance and experimental work, and Wallspace, a free zone for painting, drawing and paste-ups — let the program run several exhibitions in parallel, changing roughly monthly. Current shows move between textile-based work, a study of transparency and preservation, and a group exploration of desire and change, typical of the emerging and experimental practice the space favours over anything overtly commercial. It sits two minutes from Footscray station, on the corner of Leeds and Chambers streets, wheelchair accessible with all-gender bathrooms. Thursday to Sunday, it is an easy add-on to a visit to Footscray's markets — proof that Melbourne's artist-run scene extends well past the inner-north postcodes usually associated with it.

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Walker Street Gallery & Arts Centre

Walker Street Gallery & Arts Centre is a gallery in Dandenong, VIC. The gallery's collection and exhibitions explore contemporary art, fine art. Core activities include exhibition. The venue serves as a community hub. Visitors can enjoy accessible, shop. Nearby towns include Springvale, Keysborough, Noble Park.

Heritage Site

Werribee Mansion — Werribee Park

Werribee Mansion is a magnificent 60-room Italianate mansion built in 1877 by the wealthy Chirnside brothers on their pastoral estate along the Werribee River. The house and its formal gardens, reopened after major restoration, are among the grandest expressions of colonial pastoral wealth in Australia.

Heritage Site

Werribee Park

Werribee Park is a spectacular 19th-century Italianate mansion set in formal and informal gardens on the Werribee River, built by the Chirnside pastoral dynasty in 1877.

Heritage Site

Werribee Park Mansion

Werribee Park Mansion is a grand 60-room Italianate estate built between 1874 and 1877 by Scottish pastoralists Thomas and Andrew Chirnside from their wool fortune. Victoria's only major freestone mansion features ornamental carvings, heritage gardens designed by Royal Botanic Gardens curator William Guilfoyle, a heritage orchard dating to the 1870s, and the Victoria State Rose Garden, all set within a sweeping parkland 35 kilometres west of Melbourne.

Gallery

Whitehorse Art Gallery

Part of the Box Hill Town Hall, this public gallery opened in 2007 and holds the Whitehorse Art Collection, established by the former City of Box Hill in 1927 and now numbering over 2100 items. Holdings span Australian Impressionism, ceramics, printmaking, photography and sculpture. The yearly program pairs collection works with touring shows and local artists, alongside floor talks and educational tours.

Botanical Garden

Williamstown Botanic Gardens

Williamstown Botanic Gardens is a heritage-listed botanical garden in Williamstown, VIC. The garden showcases collections focused on environmental, natural history, architecture. Core activities include conservation, education, community. The venue serves as a community hub and features outdoor spaces and is family-oriented. Visitors can enjoy free entry, picnic area, gardens, accessible, parking. Notable for being long established and state significant. Nearby towns include Newport, Footscray, Melbourne CBD. Admission is free.

Museum

Williamstown Historical Museum

Housed in a converted sailmaker's store dating to 1856, Williamstown Historical Museum tells the story of one of Victoria's oldest port towns through maritime artefacts, photographs and local history collections.

Botanical Garden

Wilson Botanic Park Berwick

Thirty-nine hectares of basalt lake, birdhide, and walking tracks on the southern fringe of Melbourne. Over 1,000 plant species share the grounds with 80 bird species, plus turtles, frogs and snakes. The birdhide sits right at the lake's edge — bring patience. Free entry, open daily until 9pm in summer.

Gallery

Wyndham Art Gallery

Wyndham Art Gallery is a long-established gallery in Werribee, VIC. The gallery's collection and exhibitions explore contemporary art, fine art. Core activities include exhibition. The venue serves as a community hub. Visitors can enjoy cafe, shop, accessible. Nearby towns include Melton, Sunbury.

Cultural Centre

Wyndham Cultural Centre

Wyndham Cultural Centre is a cultural centre in Werribee, VIC. The cultural centre explores themes of contemporary art, multicultural. Core activities include exhibition, performance, education, community. The venue serves as a community hub. Visitors can enjoy workshops, events, cafe, accessible. Nearby towns include Altona, Williamstown, Footscray.