Perth

Museum

AQWA - Aquarium of Western Australia

Australia's largest aquarium showcasing marine life from Western Australia's 12,000km coastline. Features a 98-metre underwater tunnel and over 200 species across themed zones.

Botanical Garden

Araluen Botanic Park

Araluen Botanic Park in the Darling Range is renowned for its spectacular tulip display each autumn — one of Western Australia's great seasonal garden events — set within a valley of native bushland, a lake and themed garden enclosures.

Museum

Army Museum of Western Australia

The Artillery Barracks in Fremantle, built in 1910, holds WA's military story across heritage buildings that still feel like they're on duty. Uniforms, medals, vehicles and personal artefacts trace more than a century of service, from colonial defence to recent operations — the kind of collection where the objects do the talking.

Museum

Aviation Heritage Museum

Houses one of the largest collections of civilian and military aircraft in Australia. Operated by the RAAF Association WA, with a Lancaster bomber and Catalina flying boat among highlights.

Museum

Azelia Ley Homestead Museum

This 1923 homestead set in Manning Park offers visitors a window into the life of a prosperous settler family in the Cockburn district. Explore period rooms filled with authentic furnishings, clothing, photographs, and artifacts, alongside the adjacent Wagon House Museum showcasing heritage wagons and machinery.

Museum

Berndt Museum of Anthropology

On the UWA campus beside the Swan River, the Berndt Museum holds over 55,000 objects of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art and material culture — one of the largest such collections in the country. Founded by anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt, it remains a serious research institution as much as a public gallery, and among Perth's most quietly substantial cultural addresses.

Gallery

FORM Gallery Perth

FORM operates across gallery exhibitions, creative learning programs, and cultural tourism — with Aboriginal and Islander partnership at the centre of everything. Its Spinifex Hill Studio supports First Nations artists from the Pilbara. The Perth gallery functions as the public face of a broader organisation with reach across Western Australia's communities, schools, and country.

Gallery

Fremantle Arts Centre

A gothic building constructed by convict labour, opened as an arts centre in 1973 under founding director Ian Templeman. Fremantle Arts Centre runs galleries, studios, education programs, and a concert series from its limestone halls. The galleries are currently closed for installation, reopening May 2026.

Museum

Fremantle History Museum WA

Fremantle History Museum presents the layered story of Australia's best-preserved 19th-century port city from the Whadjuk Noongar people to the present, housed in a fine Gothic building built by convicts in 1865 that also served as a lunatic asylum before becoming a beloved museum.

Heritage Site

Fremantle Prison

Limestone walls built by convict labour in 1852, Fremantle Prison held inmates until 1991 — nearly 140 years of continuous use. Death row, solitary cells and gallows remain intact. Now a UNESCO World Heritage site, its torchlight and tunnel tours are the reason to visit: guides work from documented prison folklore rather than polished heritage-speak.

Museum

Gomboc Gallery Sculpture Park

One of Western Australia's oldest privately owned galleries, established in 1980 across 4.5 hectares in the Swan Valley. The sculpture park features continuous outdoor installations alongside five large indoor exhibition spaces showcasing established and emerging artists from Australia and internationally.

Gallery

Heathcote Museum and Gallery

Heathcote Museum and Gallery occupies a charming colonial hospital building overlooking the Swan River in Applecross, presenting local history collections alongside rotating art exhibitions in a garden setting that reflects the tranquil character of this riverside Perth suburb.

Gallery

John Curtin Gallery

Since 1998, John Curtin Gallery has anchored Perth Festival's visual arts program, bringing figures like Lisa Reihana, Isaac Julien and Lindy Lee to Bentley's Curtin University campus. The programming bridges art, science and academia in ways a commercial gallery rarely attempts — three MAGNA Awards suggest the approach lands. Ambitious without being self-congratulatory.

Museum

Joondalup Library Local History Collection

A dedicated local history collection preserving the heritage and cultural development of the Joondalup region through diverse formats including photographs, maps, manuscripts, and newspapers. The collection serves researchers, historians, and community members seeking to explore family history and regional records in a climate-controlled, well-equipped research facility.

Botanical Garden

Kings Park & Botanic Garden Perth

On the Whadjuk Noongar country overlooking Perth, this 400-hectare park is both a working botanical collection and the city's communal backyard. The Botanic Garden of Parks and Wildlife Authority manages it as a conservation site — not just a lawn for picnics, though it is that too. Free entry, year-round.

Botanical Garden

Kings Park and Botanic Garden

Four hundred hectares of bushland on a ridge above the Perth CBD and Swan River, managed by the Botanic Gardens and Parks Authority on behalf of Whadjuk Noongar country. The Western Australian Botanic Garden sits within it, making the case that native flora doesn't need exotic company to hold attention. It does.

Gallery

Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery

The Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery on the University of Western Australia campus presents an ambitious contemporary art program alongside the management of significant public artworks across the UWA grounds.

Museum

Mandurah Community Museum

Community museum preserving the heritage of the Peel region. Housed in a restored 1900s limestone building, it covers Aboriginal history, early settlement and the fishing industry.

Museum

Museum of Perth

The Museum of Perth works through the city's social, cultural, political and architectural past from a single floor on Murray Street. It mounts changing exhibitions, runs a research library and family history service, and holds archives from the Art Deco Society of WA to historic streetscapes of Fremantle and Bunbury. Open Monday to Saturday, free, with donations welcome.

visual_art

PICA — Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts

Perth's oldest contemporary art institution — incorporated in 1989, built on the bones of Praxis before it — occupies the former Perth Central School in the Cultural Centre. The program runs across dance, experimental theatre, new music and live art, not just gallery walls. Thirty-plus years in, PICA remains the place where Western Australian artists road-test ideas before the rest of the country catches up.

Museum

Revolutions Transport Museum

Western Australia's only land transport museum, housing the remarkable Whiteman Collection of diverse historical objects and memorabilia. Explore the evolution of land transport through interactive exhibits, climb aboard historic vehicles, and discover the captivating Singing the Train exhibit celebrating Aboriginal stories of the Pilbara.

Museum

Scitech

Three decades of hands-on science in West Perth, and Scitech still builds every exhibit in-house. The planetarium — Australia's largest — immerses visitors in the night sky, while live shows run daily from the Science and Puppet theatres. The kind of place where the doing and the learning become indistinguishable.

Archive

State Library of Western Australia

The Battye Library of West Australian History sits within these walls — a genealogy collection, photograph archives and newspaper records spanning the colonial era to the present. For anyone tracing a family line or digging into the state's past, this is the primary source.

Museum

Submarine Force Museum HMAS Ovens

Cold War steel, close quarters. The 89-metre Oberon-class HMAS Ovens sits on Fremantle's WWII submarine slipway, where volunteer guides lead you through the torpedoes, sensors and bunk arrangements of a vessel that once housed 63 people. Nine metres of scaffolding stairs and several tight hatchways separate the curious from the comfortable — plan accordingly.

visual_art

The Art Gallery of Western Australia | AGWA

Founded in 1895, AGWA occupies three heritage buildings in Perth's Cultural Centre, including the former Perth Police Courts. The main gallery, opened in 1979, draws on the pavilion-and-courtyard logic of Mexico City's Museum of Anthropology. The permanent *I AM* gallery focuses on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander work from the State Art Collection. Free guided tours run regularly.

Museum

The Railway Museum

Rail Heritage WA has been running this Bassendean museum since 1959, making it the state's oldest preservation group. Volunteers do everything — restoration, archiving, publishing. The collection spans rolling stock to records, with ongoing work on diesel locomotive GM 1 and the Leschenault Lady vintage train down at the South West Rail & Heritage Centre in Boyanup.

Museum

The Rockingham Museum

The Rockingham District Historical Society keeps its collection in the town's former Road Board building, an Art Deco civic block from the late 1940s that absorbed the old library next door in 1999. Displays trace the district from the wreck of Thomas Peel's ship Rockingham in Cockburn Sound to the jarrah timber once shipped out of the port, alongside a section on the area's serving sons. Open five afternoons a week; cash only.

Heritage Site

The Round House

Western Australia's oldest surviving public building, this twelve-sided limestone structure has stood above Fremantle Harbour since 1831 — first as a colonial lock-up, now staffed by volunteer heritage guides. Come at the right time and you can book a slot to fire the cannon.

Museum

WA Maritime Museum

Perched on Victoria Quay Road with the Indian Ocean directly behind it, this Fremantle institution holds Australia II — the yacht that broke the Americans' 132-year grip on the America's Cup — alongside Jon Sanders' *Parry Endeavour* and a Cold War Oberon-class submarine, HMAS Ovens, moored on the adjacent slipway. The building itself frames the harbour like a ship's prow. Under-15s enter free.

Museum

WA Museum Boola Bardip

Over 120 years old and holding more than eight million objects, Boola Bardip — 'many stories' in Noongar — is WA's state museum, spanning natural history, human history and First Peoples cultures. The collection alone justifies the visit; the contemporary building makes it easy to spend half a day inside without noticing.

Museum

WA Museum Shipwreck Galleries

Housed in a convict-built colonial store, the Shipwreck Galleries hold the remains of the Batavia and other historic shipwrecks, documenting Western Australia's maritime heritage.

Museum

WA Shipwrecks Museum

Free entry to one of Fremantle's most quietly compelling buildings — convict-built Commissariat stores from the Swan River colony era, now housing the reconstructed hull of the *Batavia*, the VOC vessel that became the site of one of history's deadliest mutinies in 1629. The maritime archaeology here has genuine international standing. Go on a weekday; the 10.30am highlights tour is worth timing your visit around.

Museum

Wadjemup Museum

Wadjemup Museum explores the rich and complex history of the island — from its significance to the Noongar people to its time as a penal colony for Aboriginal men and its evolution into one of Western Australia's most beloved island retreats.

Gallery

Wanneroo Regional Gallery

Wednesday to Saturday inside Wanneroo Library and Cultural Centre on Rocca Way, this small gallery rotates local, national and touring contemporary visual arts shows for one of Perth's fastest-growing outer suburbs. Free entry, wheelchair accessible, and genuinely useful to a community where arts infrastructure is still catching up with population growth.

Heritage Site

Woodbridge Historic House

Woodbridge is a beautifully preserved Victorian mansion built in 1885 on the Swan River, featuring original furnishings, a colonial garden, and ferry access from Perth — one of WA's finest historic homes.