The Australian Museum

Two hundred years, on 30 March 2027

The museum officially marks its bicentenary on 30 March 2027, and the programme — announced in October 2026 as AM200, with Westpac as principal partner — is already substantial.

The run-up is The World's Biggest Dinosaur: Dinosaurs of Patagonia, which opens on 28 November 2026, ticketed, from the Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio in Argentina: more than fifteen life-size replica skeletons including Patagotitan, filling the touring hall, which runs to over thirty-eight metres. No closing date is published.

Then, from March 2027, Our Story with David Attenborough — a fifty-minute, 360-degree cinematic work running eight months, for which this is the first museum outside Europe. 3 and 4 April 2027 brings Treasured Finds, public object identification in the mineralogy collection area, and April 2027 an AM200 festival across four weekends. Dated less precisely within 2027: a major permanent artwork, Kalikina Country by Aunty Lola Greeno and Vanessa Greeno, to be unveiled in Hintze Hall; Message Sticks, on First Nations communication and Lore; Transformations: Art of the Scott Sisters; a refreshed Birds of Australia gallery; an Evolve lecture series; a documentary; and an illustrated history.

1827, and what actually happened in 1857

The origin is a letter. In March 1827 the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Earl Bathurst, wrote to Governor Ralph Darling committing two hundred pounds a year to a "Publick Museum at New South Wales". It was the Colonial or Sydney Museum first, renamed the Australian Museum in 1836, and the Museum Act 1853 created the trustee structure.

The museum describes itself as Australia's first museum, and that is its own claim rather than an independent finding, though the next-oldest claimant describes itself as the country's second-oldest, which is about as close to corroboration as the question gets.

What happened in May 1857 was narrower and more interesting than "first opened to the public": the first permanent gallery opened, and it was the first time anyone could visit without applying or being invited. The museum says that gallery remains the oldest museum gallery in Australia — a claim about the room, not the institution, and the two are routinely merged.

The buildings, and the architect who is wrongly credited

"Three floors" is long out of date: there are five public display and visitor levels, plus a research library by appointment and a dining level.

The sequence, on the museum's own account: the Lewis Wing by the Colonial Architect Mortimer Lewis, built 1846 to 1852 and opened in May 1857 — now the Westpac Long Gallery; the Barnet Wing on College Street, 1861 to 1866, opened January 1868, from an initial plan by Alexander Dawson developed by James Barnet; a third storey on the Lewis Wing, 1890 to 1892; the South Wings by Walter Vernon, 1896 to 1899, their halls opened on 11 April 1910; a six-storey eastern wing of 1959 to 1963 by Joseph van der Steen under the Government Architect Edward Farmer; a collections and research building opened 19 November 2008; and Crystal Hall, the William Street entry, by Neeson Murcutt in 2015.

The common error is to credit James Barnet with the 1857 opening. That building is Lewis's; Barnet's section opened eleven years later. The museum's own pages are not wholly consistent either — the Barnet Wing is given both as 1861 to 1866 and as 1870 in different places, and Crystal Hall as both 2015 and 2016.

It is on the State Heritage Register as item 00805. The listing date usually given is 2 April 1999, from a single source. A consultation on amending the listing — adding information, with no change to the curtilage — closed on 9 April 2025, and whether the amendment has been gazetted is not established.

Project Discover, and free entry

The museum closed on 19 August 2019 and reopened fifteen months later: officially on 26 November 2020 and to the public on Saturday 28 November 2020. The project was Project Discover, by COX Architecture with Neeson Murcutt and Neille, at 57.5 million dollars — fifty and a half million from the state and more than seven million in donations.

It converted over 3,000 square metres of back-of-house into public space, and built a 1,500-square-metre touring exhibition hall across two levels in what had been basement storage, reached by escalator and lift. Three storage levels came out to make it, and a 1988 mezzanine was removed and floor levels rationalised to create the new central hall. That hall is Hintze Hall, named for its donor — pre-opening material called it the Grand Hall, and that name should not be used. The work took the state architecture medallion and awards for heritage and interior architecture in 2021.

Admission went free in two stages. From 2015, under a state scheme, general admission was free for children of fifteen and under and for school excursions. From 28 November 2020 it became free for everyone — and there is no residency or nationality condition, which is worth saying because the opposite is often assumed. Permanent exhibitions, the shop and the Burra play space are free; major exhibitions are ticketed; no booking is needed for the free galleries, and carers with a Companion Card enter free throughout.

The galleries, and the one that is newest

Open permanently: Garrigarrang: Sea Country and Wild Planet, both of 2015; the Westpac Long Gallery holding 200 Treasures of the Australian Museum, reopened on 13 October 2017 after a nine-million-dollar restoration by Design 5 – Architects, funded in equal parts by Westpac, the state and the museum's foundation, and recognised in the UNESCO Asia-Pacific heritage awards; Minerals, from December 2022; Dinosaurs and Surviving Australia on Level 2; Wansolmoana, the Pasifika gallery, open to the public from 13 October 2023; Burra, a 700-square-metre learning and play space for children up to fourteen built around the life cycle of the eel and combining First Nations and Western science, opened July 2022 from a bequest; and Birds of Australia.

The most recent change is the one most accounts will miss. Surviving Australia was torn out and rebuilt, and reopened on 15 December 2025 — six hundred square metres, free, with life-sized megafauna including Diprotodon and a thylacine. Any description of that gallery written earlier is void.

Gone, and not to be listed as current: Bayala Nura: Yarning Country and Pacific Spirit, both of 2015, the latter succeeded by Wansolmoana; Spark of 2021; Indigenous Australians: Australia's First Peoples, which ran from 1996 to 2015; and the minerals arrangements below.

Minerals, and where the Albert Chapman collection went

Planet of Minerals was real — it was the gallery of 1986 — but it has been replaced. Minerals opened on Level 1 in December 2022 as the second stage of Project Discover: about 350 square metres and over 1,800 specimens drawn from more than eighty thousand, in five themes.

The Albert Chapman Mineral Collection is 820 specimens, about half of them Australian, bought by the state government in 1988 with industry help and transferred into the museum's care in December 1995. Its dedicated gallery closed on 29 January 2019 and was dismantled; some five hundred and fifty specimens went on an eighteen-month loan to Bathurst from June 2019. Chapman material is now shown within the Minerals gallery, in its section on collecting — so the collection is neither on separate display nor, as the museum's own stale page still says, off display altogether.

Two claims attached to minerals should go rather than be corrected. There is no gallery called the Gem Vault; there are gemstone displays inside Minerals. And the zircon cannot be verified at all: the Jack Hills zircons of Western Australia are about 4.4 billion years old, not 4.2 — the best-known grain is dated 4.374 billion — and no museum page names a zircon on display.

The night parrot, and the upside-down flies

Both of the old account's least believable facts are true.

On the night parrot: the Western Australian Museum states that just twenty-four specimens exist in museum collections, a figure independently echoed as "a couple of dozen" by the head of the national wildlife collection. This museum holds one — specimen PA.8393, from central Australia, registered in 1878 — and it is on display in the Westpac Long Gallery among the two hundred treasures. Around twenty more were collected between 1870 and 1890.

On the upside-down flies: the family Neurochaetidae carries exactly that common name in the Australian Government's own faunal directory, which records three described Australian species in two genera plus an undescribed fourth from the Northern Territory. They are named for holding their heads downwards while walking on vertical surfaces. The family and its type genus were erected in 1978 by David McAlpine, of this museum, whose world revision of the group appeared in the museum's own journal in 1993. It is a research and collection fact rather than a gallery one: whether any is on display is not established.

The funnel-web, which is now three species

The spider is the Sydney funnel-web, Atrax robustus — not the "funnel spider". The museum calls it one of the most venomous spiders in the world; male venom contains robustoxin, which females lack, which is the museum's explanation for why female bites have not killed anyone; males are thought responsible for most of the thirteen recorded deaths; and there have been no deaths since an antivenom was introduced in 1981, developed by Struan Sutherland and his team at the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories using venom from a milking programme. Sutherland also devised the pressure-immobilisation first aid. The museum holds the largest collection of funnel-webs in Australia.

The new fact is a taxonomic one. In January 2025 the museum announced that Atrax robustus is three species, not one: Atrax robustus, Atrax montanus, the southern Sydney funnel-web, and Atrax christenseni, the Newcastle funnel-web, published with the Leibniz Institute in Hamburg and two universities. The museum is emphatic on the point that matters: the existing antivenom works against all three and the first-aid advice is unchanged.

The snails

Australia has over two thousand species of snails and slugs, and the museum's own malacologist puts land snails alone at about two thousand species in more than forty families. The three hundred of older accounts is wrong by nearly an order of magnitude.

First Nations collections and repatriation

The museum's position is set out in a First Nations Restricted Collections and Repatriation Policy, effective 2 May 2025 and due for review around May 2028. It covers Ancestral Remains and Secret or Sacred Objects whether accessioned or not, and states that the museum supports unconditional repatriation — transfer of custodianship with no conditions on any party — describing the purpose as promoting healing and reconciliation. Restricted collections are stored separately, not displayed and not loaned; the museum aims to act within twelve months of a request; invasive testing requires free, prior and informed consent and is prohibited where no community can be identified; and accessioned material additionally requires the approval of the Governor of New South Wales.

The record is concrete. In January 2024 two Tongan ancestors, Palu 'Ata and Tupou 'Ata, were returned to Tonga, with the ceremony conducted by King Tupou VI. On 15 and 16 July 2026, seventeen Tupuna were returned to Rapa Nui, a hundred and forty-four years after their removal from burial sites at Rano Raraku in September 1882, following consultation begun in June 2024 and a delegation to Sydney in June 2025. On 23 April 2026 a sacred object held since 1948 went back to the Bunurong community. And seventeen sacred objects have been returned to Warlpiri authorities after a five-year consultation begun in July 2021.

Alongside the policy sit an Innovate Reconciliation Action Plan for 2026 to 2028 — the museum's third — an Indigenous cultural and intellectual property protocol of 2019, and a First Nations division led by a Director, First Nations.

Who runs it, and how many come

It is a corporation constituted as the Australian Museum Trust under the Australian Museum Trust Act 1975, with statutory objectives in biology, anthropology and geology. There are up to eleven trustees, appointed by the Governor of New South Wales in consultation with the arts minister, for three-year terms capped at nine consecutive years, and the Act requires at least one trustee each with knowledge or experience in science, in education, and in Australian Indigenous culture.

The president is Brian Hartzer, a trustee since January 2021 and president since January 2023. The director and chief executive is Kim McKay AO, in post since 2014 and the first woman in the role.

The collection is given as more than 22 million specimens and cultural objects, which the museum describes as the largest in the southern hemisphere. Visits for the year to June 2024 were more than 1.5 million onsite, up some sixty-three per cent on the year before — against 320,000 a decade earlier. The figures for 2024–25 could not be read for this account.

Getting there, and access

The museum names Museum, St James and Town Hall stations at about seven minutes' walk, and — new, and absent from older accounts — Gadigal metro station about five minutes east along Park Street. Both Museum and St James are step-free on the transport authority's own information, each with lifts; Museum's three lifts came with an upgrade completed in 2016, which the authority described as making the last of the city stations accessible.

The museum's own routing advice is more useful than any of it: from St James use the St Mary's Cathedral crossing, from Museum the corner of College and Liverpool Streets, and avoid the College and Park Streets corner, which has stairs and is unsuitable with a pram or a wheelchair.

The bus advice in older accounts is obsolete and should simply be dropped. George Street was closed to buses in October 2015 for the light rail works, with city services moved onto Elizabeth, Castlereagh, York and other streets; George Street now carries the light rail, with stops at Town Hall and the Queen Victoria Building. The museum itself names no bus route.

There is no on-site public parking. Among the commercial car parks the museum points to, the one on Cathedral Street is described as step-free with eleven accessible spaces. There is an accessible drop-off in the William Street bus bay immediately outside.

Inside: step-free entry by the Museum Walk ramp with automatic doors, ramps through the exhibitions and two lifts serving all floors; wheelchairs sometimes available on arrival and bookable ahead; accessible toilets on four levels and a Changing Places adult change table on Level 2; accredited assistance animals welcome, though not pets or emotional-support animals; Auslan interpretation at flagged events and a hearing loop in the theatre; Early Birds sensory-friendly mornings and Night Owls sensory-friendly evenings for adults; a published visual story; Sunflower lanyards at the desk; and free audio-description tours on visitors' own devices for Dinosaurs, Wild Planet and the two hundred treasures. The quietest times are given as two to four in the afternoon, Tuesday to Thursday, in term time. The museum's published accessibility plan covers 2023 to 2025 and no successor has appeared.

One caution: the museum's own pages disagree about which street the entrance is on, variously naming William Street and College Street for the main and accessible entries. The address is 1 William Street, the building stands on the corner of the two, and the reliable instruction is the Museum Walk ramp.