Cook's ship was Endeavour. There has never been a replica called Discovery here, and the museum has two replicas rather than one — the second is Duyfken, of the Dutch ship that reached the Australian mainland in 1606, a hundred and sixty-four years before Cook. The warship at the wharf did not fight the Second World War either: Vampire is a destroyer commissioned in 1959, and the vessel that did fight it is Krait, a Japanese-built fishing ketch that carried fourteen commandos into Singapore Harbour in 1943. The tall ship moored alongside belongs to somebody else altogether.
Two replicas, and a ship that was never here
The museum's fleet is Vampire, Onslow, Duyfken, Endeavour, Advance, Akarana, Carpentaria, Ena, Krait, Kathleen Gillett, John Louis, Thistle and Tự do. Nothing called Discovery appears in it, or in the museum's collection, or anywhere in its Cook material. Cook's ship on the voyage that charted the east coast in 1770 was Endeavour; Discovery belonged to his third voyage and has no connection to this museum at all.
The HMB Endeavour replica was begun at Fremantle in January 1988 as a gift to the nation, stalled when its corporate backer collapsed in 1990, and was finished by a foundation set up in August 1991. It was launched on 9 December 1993 and completed on 16 April 1994, and ownership passed to the museum when it reached Sydney in April 2005. It has sailed a great deal since: a re-creation of the east-coast voyage in 1995, a circumnavigation of the globe from 1996 to 2000, a second global voyage from 2002 to 2005, and a circumnavigation of Australia from April 2011 to May 2012 — fifteen ports and some 13,300 nautical miles. The most recent blue-water run was to Hobart and back in January and February 2025 for the wooden boat festival.
It is neither a static exhibit nor away at sea. It is alongside and open to visitors, reached by gangway from Vampire's deck, while undergoing a renewal of its standing rigging — its largest overhaul since 2010 — with no voyage dates published.
Duyfken, and 1606
The other replica is the more historically consequential and gets a fraction of the attention. Duyfken is a full-scale replica of the Dutch East India Company ship in which Willem Janszoon made the first documented European landfall on the Australian mainland in 1606. Its keel was laid at Fremantle on 11 January 1997 and it was launched on 24 January 1999. It is under maintenance, with boarding subject to staff availability and no public sails. The museum does not publish the date it joined the fleet or state who owns it.
The warships, and which one fought the war
HMAS Vampire is the museum's largest vessel and is routinely called a Second World War destroyer. She is not. She is a Daring-class destroyer built at Cockatoo Island in Sydney — keel laid 1952, launched 1956, commissioned 1959, decommissioned 1986, lent by Defence in 1990 and transferred to the museum in 1997. She escorted troop transports to Vietnam in the 1960s and the royal yacht on the Silver Jubilee tour in 1977. The museum styles her Vampire (II), which is the clue to the confusion: an earlier HMAS Vampire, a V-class destroyer of the First World War, was lost in 1942, and that is the ship people are thinking of.
The vessel at these wharves that did fight the Second World War is Krait — a gaff ketch built in Japan in 1934 as Kofuku Maru. She evacuated more than a thousand civilians to Sumatra, and then carried out Operation Jaywick in 1943, putting fourteen commandos into Singapore Harbour, where limpet mines damaged some 26,000 tonnes of Japanese shipping. She was commissioned HMAS Krait in 1944 and was present at the Japanese surrender at Ambon in 1945. She is owned by the Australian War Memorial, which took her over in 1985, and lent to this museum, which has displayed and conserved her since 1988. Onboard tours are unavailable; volunteers run wharfside tours instead.
HMAS Onslow is an Oberon-class submarine built by Scotts of Greenock in Scotland — laid down 1967, launched 1968, commissioned 1969, decommissioned 1999 after thirty years, and still close to operational condition.
The lightship Carpentaria is Commonwealth Lightship 4, built at Cockatoo Island in 1917, one of four unmanned lightships to a 1915 design by the Stevensons of Edinburgh. She served mostly in the Gulf of Carpentaria and latterly as a traffic separator in the Bass Strait oilfields. The museum gives her retirement as 1985, where another account gives 1983. She stands wharfside and is free to see.
The submarine that is not here
The Gallipoli story the museum tells is HMAS AE2, one of Australia's first two submarines. On 25 April 1915 she penetrated the Dardanelles and reached the Sea of Marmara, the first Allied submarine to breach the Turkish defences there, and the signal of her success arrived while headquarters was debating withdrawal. On 30 April mechanical failure and Turkish fire forced her crew to scuttle her. All thirty-five survived the sinking; three later died as prisoners of war. The wreck lies off Turkey — what the museum holds is the archive, not the boat, much of it transferred from the Australian War Memorial.
The tall ship that is not the museum's
The barque James Craig, built in 1874, is berthed here and usually open, and is owned by the Sydney Heritage Fleet, a community non-profit — which is why she sits on a page of her own rather than on the museum's fleet list, and why sailing enquiries go to the fleet rather than to the museum. Recovered as a rusting hulk from Recherche Bay in Tasmania, she was restored over some three decades, set all twenty-one sails for the first time in nearly eighty years in 2001, and took the World Ship Trust's maritime heritage award in 2003. She is described as one of only four nineteenth-century barques still able to sail, and the only one in the southern hemisphere that regularly takes the public to sea.
Tự do
The refugee boat is named, and the name should be given with its diacritics. Tự do is a Vietnamese wooden fishing boat of the Phú Quốc Island type, 18.25 metres long, built for the escape of Tân Thành Lu, a thirty-year-old businessman. She left on 16 September 1977 with his family, relatives and neighbours, sailed about 6,000 kilometres by way of Malaysia, Indonesia and the Timor Sea, and reached Darwin on 21 November 1977 with thirty-one people aboard. The museum acquired her in 1990, and her full story only emerged in 1995 when a curator traced the original owner to a country town in New South Wales. She is out of the water for conservation and can be seen beside the building, with a free exhibition about her announced in June 2026.
The record-breaker, and the first object in the collection
Spirit of Australia holds the world water speed record at 511.11 kilometres an hour, set at Blowering Dam near Tumut in 1978 by Ken Warby, who died in 2023 and who built the jet-powered wooden hydroplane in his suburban Sydney back garden around a military-surplus engine. He had first taken the record in 1977 at 464 kilometres an hour. The precise day in 1978 is not safe to state: the record-keepers give 8 October in their text and a date in November 1977 in their own summary field, and two slightly different speeds.
The detail worth having is that this boat was the very first object acquired into the National Maritime Collection, through the Commonwealth government in April 1986 — five years before the museum opened.
The Olympic boat is also named: Barcelona 92, a ten-metre double sculling shell built in 1992 by Jeff Sykes in Geelong, about twenty-six kilograms of Kevlar and carbon over a honeycomb core, in which Peter Antonie and Stephen Hawkins took gold in the men's double sculls at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, a second ahead of the Austrians.
The building, and the galleries nobody can count
The museum is Philip Cox's, and it opened to the public on 30 November 1991; construction had finished in November 1989 and the building was handed to the Commonwealth in October 1990. The comparison with the Opera House's sails is journalistic rather than the architect's. Whether the building is heritage listed could not be established either way, so nothing is claimed. The newer Waterfront Pavilion on the site is by a different practice and should not be attributed to Cox.
The museum publishes no gallery count, and the six or seven in circulation cannot be sourced to it. Its permanent displays are Shaped by the Sea, Passengers, Navy and Under Southern Skies, and it organises its material by theme — First Nations, migration, maritime archaeology, ocean futures, navy and fleet, society and water — rather than by numbered rooms.
The USA Gallery, which was never the Smithsonian's
It was funded by America's Bicentennial Gift to Australia of 1988, and opened on 1 January 1992 by President George H. W. Bush — the only gallery in an Australian national museum paid for by another country. The Smithsonian had nothing to do with it, and the museum's own account of the gallery never mentions it. Nor is the gallery a recent addition: it no longer exists under that name, its space now holding Shaped by the Sea, though the American collection remains in the national collection and an American supporters' body still operates. When the name was dropped is not published.
The Yolŋu and the Makassans
The trade the museum describes was not with generic "Asian neighbours". It was between the Yolŋu, of north-eastern Arnhem Land, and Makassan fishermen from Makassar in Sulawesi, who sailed annually in perahu to catch and process trepang — sea cucumbers, boiled and dried or smoked and sold into China as food and medicine — and who brought metal and cloth in exchange.
The museum records the consequences rather than just the commerce: Yolŋu songlines about the visits, Makassan loan words in Yolŋu languages, and evidence of cross-cultural marriages. It does not date the beginning, saying only that it predates European charting of those waters. It does date the end: the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 stopped the exchange, and the last Makassan traders came in 1907. Note the museum's own spelling is Makassan rather than Macassan.
Who owns it, and who runs it
It is a Commonwealth body under the Australian National Maritime Museum Act 1990. It has no trustees. Its governing body is the Council of the Australian National Maritime Museum: a chairperson, the director, an officer of the Royal Australian Navy, and between six and nine other appointed members. The Governor-General appoints the chairperson, the other members and the director — the members for terms of up to three years and no more than nine years in all, the director for up to seven — while the naval member is appointed by the Chief of the Defence Force and serves at that officer's pleasure.
The chair is the Hon Hieu Van Le AC, whose appointment was announced in August 2025 after a period as acting chair, succeeding John Mullen AM. The director and chief executive is Daryl Karp AM, in post since July 2022, who followed Kevin Sumption. Individual appointment and expiry dates are not published.
How many come, and the figure to be careful with
For the year to June 2024 the museum reported total visitor engagement of 6,814,221 — but that is a composite including the website, social media and touring exhibitions, and quoting it as visitors would be badly misleading. Onsite visitors were 912,695, only 87 per cent of target, a shortfall the museum attributes to the Harbourside redevelopment next door. Its own forward targets were revised sharply down for the same reason. No annual report for 2024–25 could be found.
Visiting, and why the vessels are the hard limit
The address is 2 Murray Street, Darling Harbour, on Gadigal land, for which the museum uses the place name Pirrama. The old anmm.gov.au address now redirects to the museum's current site.
General admission to the permanent galleries and to selected exhibitions is free, with a ticket collected at the desk. What is charged for is the vessels, on two tiers — one covering everything including the ships, one covering exhibitions and play spaces but excluding them. So the old description of paying per ship is wrong: it is tiered, not itemised. Open daily from ten to four, with last boarding at ten past three; longer in school holidays; closed on Christmas Day.
The building is well served: ramp access at the entrance, lifts or ramps to every exhibition space including the wharves and the outdoor viewing platform, accessible toilets on two levels, courtesy wheelchairs on loan against photo identification, induction loops in the theatre and ticket areas, sensory backpacks, early-access sensory-friendly mornings, an Auslan self-guided tour by QR code, and free entry for carers to both museum and vessels.
The vessels are a different matter, and this is the most important practical fact about the place: there is no wheelchair access on any of them, which the museum attributes to their design and walkways, offering 360-degree virtual tours instead. Boarding also requires being taller than ninety centimetres, is limited to ten people aboard at a time, excludes backpacks and large bags, involves headroom under 120 centimetres in places and decks that are slippery when wet — and the vessels close once the temperature reaches 36 degrees. Krait in particular is described by the museum as unsuitable for children or for anyone with limited mobility.
What is coming
The most significant acquisition in years is also the oldest object. The Barangaroo Boat — the earliest known Australian-built vessel, recovered during excavation for the Barangaroo metro station — was handed into the national collection on 18 May 2026, with a permanent exhibition expected in mid-2027 and further findings announced that October.
Action Stations closed on 19 October 2026 and is being rebuilt as a Navy Pavilion, announced to open in December 2026 — the museum's visitor pages say only "late 2026", so the two do not quite agree. Vessel access was expected to vary through the installation period.
The May 2026 federal budget allocated 10.1 million dollars over two years to remediate age-related deterioration of the Pyrmont Bay wharves, with no scope or schedule published; repairs to Wharf 7's piers and to the north and south wharves are planned subject to funding, and a ten-year fleet strategy is being developed. Site master planning runs to a business case in 2028–29, and the renewal of the Journeys gallery is phased across about four years.
2026 was the 125th anniversary of the Royal Australian Navy, marked across the year, including the seventieth anniversary of Vampire's launch on 27 October. The museum also hosted the International Congress of Maritime Museums in September 2026, the first held in Australia. 30 November 2026 was its own thirty-fifth anniversary, and nothing was announced for it.
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