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

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.

Gallery

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.

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.

Comedy Club

Comedy Republic

A working comedy room in the basement at 231 Bourke Street, opened in 2020, on Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Country. Two spaces — the Theatre for ticketed shows and the Bar for cheaper or free ones — running six nights a week year-round, which is the rare thing: most Australian comedy venues are festival rooms that go dark eleven months of the year. Wednesday's Something Good is long-form improv from the cast of Thank God You're Here, with a different guest weekly (Aaron Chen, Wil Anderson, Zoë Coombs-Marr, Guy Montgomery, Rhys Nicholson have all dropped in). Thursday to Saturday is Main Stage, the signature lineup show. Sundays are Laughternoons, a secret-lineup show where you don't know who's on until they walk out. Cheap Tuesdays in the bar are where new comedians try material and established ones try new sets. Between MICF runs, the room hosts solo hours from much of the working Australian comedy scene — Geraldine Hickey, Claire Hooper, Lloyd Langford, Cassie Workman, Damian Callinan, Laura Davis, Hannah Camilleri, Greg Larsen, Kate Dolan, Frankie McNair, and the Palawa comedian Tarsh Jago among recent and upcoming bookings.

Heritage Site

Como House and Garden

Built in 1847 and expanded over the following decades, Como House is a rare surviving example of Melbourne's Italianate mansions, set in formal gardens with original furnishings intact.

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.

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.

Gallery

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.

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.

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.

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

Melbourne Tram Museum

Melbourne Tram Museum in Hawthorn, VICm explores themes of transport, social history. Core activities include exhibition, education, conservation. The venue is family-oriented and provides immersive experiences and features interactive exhibits.

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.

Museum

NT Chinese Museum

This museum offers visitors a thoughtfully curated exploration of Chinese culture and heritage, enabling visitors to deepen their understanding of Chinese art, history, and traditions.

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 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.

Gallery

Outré Gallery

Outré has been showing pop-surrealism and New Contemporary art in Melbourne for over thirty years, from a CBD gallery at 249–251 Elizabeth Street and a second site at 319 Smith Street, Fitzroy. The roster is the Australian gateway for an aesthetic that runs from Mark Ryden, Audrey Kawasaki, James Jean and Shepard Fairey through to Jeremy Geddes, Ghostpatrol, Greg Mount, Loretta Lizzio, Wen Pham, Beastman and the late Vali Myers. Solo and group exhibitions rotate through both spaces, the gallery publishes art books and limited-edition prints under its own Outré Press imprint, and framing is done in-house. Prints start in the low hundreds, originals run into five figures.

Heritage Site

Polly Woodside (National Trust)

Polly Woodside (National Trust) is a heritage-listed heritage site in Melbourne, VIC. The heritage site explores themes of maritime, colonial history, social history. Core activities include conservation, exhibition. The venue is housed in a historic building and provides immersive experiences. Visitors can enjoy guided tours, accessible, cafe, shop, family friendly. Notable for being long established and major collection. Nearby towns include South Wharf, Southbank, Melbourne CBD.

Museum

Polly Woodside Maritime Museum

Polly Woodside Maritime Museum is a museum in Melbourne, VIC. The museum explores themes of maritime, social history. Core activities include exhibition, education. The venue is housed in a historic building and provides immersive experiences. Visitors can enjoy guided tours, accessible, cafe, shop. Notable for being major collection and long established. Nearby towns include South Wharf, Melbourne CBD, Southbank.

Museum

Public Record Office Victoria

One hundred kilometres of hard-copy records — land grants, cabinet submissions, court files — stacked in climate-controlled storage at 99 Shiel Street, North Melbourne. Open weekdays until 4:30pm, the Reading Rooms draw genealogists, lawyers and historians equally. The on-site gallery rotates temporary exhibitions drawn from the collection. Victoria's paper memory, available to anyone who turns up.

Heritage Site

Rippon Lea Estate

Rippon Lea is one of Melbourne's great 19th-century suburban estates, with a polychrome mansion and 14-acre heritage garden featuring a lake, fernery, and rare plantings.

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.

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.

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.

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.