MELBOURNE'S GOLDEN MILE Preview

Here are a few simple tips to help you use the tour.

Audio

To listen to the audio press the play arrow button under each image to hear the commentary, the text is also available to read at each stop. To move to the next stop on the tour use the swipe gesture to change to the next screen.

Map

The map is very useful to find your way on the tour and you will need to use it to find the next stop.

Locate the map symbol and tap it to find your way on the tour. You can pinch and zoom the map to orientate yourself.

If your device has GPS (global positioning system) you can tap the GPS symbol to update your location on the map.

Images

You can scroll through the images while you listen to the audio at each stop by tapping the arrow.

To make the images much larger tap the loupe symbol, this will magnify the images and you will see the images all have captions with more information.

When the images are enlarged you can use the pinch and zoom gesture to look at details closely.

List

A list of stops can be used to see all the tour's stops at once. You can tap any of these stops to go directly to that number on the tour.

The tour has been designed so that you can walk the entire length in 2 hours, or if you would like to explore a smaller section at a time you can choose a number of stops on the route.

Walking Safely

To help you enjoy the tour please carry water with you and wear appropriate clothing for the weather, including comfortable walking shoes, hat and sunscreen. As the weather can change suddenly it may be a good idea to have an umbrella or raincoat handy.

Remain aware of your surroundings and personal belongings at all times. Due to high levels of ambient noise along parts of the tour route, we recommend you use ear buds or headphones. When crossing roads, please take off headphones and use the designated pedestrian crossings.

Some pathways on the tour route maybe mixed use (pedestrians and bicycles), so it is best to keep to the left-hand side of the path. Parts of the tour route may not be accessible to prams, wheelchairs or bikes, depending on footpaths. If this is the case, please seek an alternate and safe route.

Toilets

A selection of public toilets can be accessed by checking the National Public Toilet Map: http://www.toiletmap.gov.au/

Getting to Immigration Museum to start the Tour

Public Transport Options

Plan your trip using Metlink's Journey Planner. Transport options include:

• Free City Circle Tram to cnr Flinders Street & Market Street. Tram 48, 55, 70 or 75 to cnr Flinders Street & Market Street
• Train to Flinders St or Spencer St Stations

Cyclists

The Immigration Museum is located close to bicycle routes along William Street and Collins Street.

To find out more about Immigration Museum visit: http://museumvictoria.com.au/immigrationmuseum/

Wominjeka Welcome, my name is Charlotte and I am a Senior Curator at Museum Victoria. On behalf of the museum, I acknowledge that the Boonwurrung and the Woiwurring people are the traditional owners of Melbourne and the land on which this tour takes place.

In 1835 a party of sheep farmers led by John Batman, crossed Bass Strait from Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania). Batman claimed to have made a 'treaty' with the local Aboriginal people. Just a few weeks later, another syndicate, led by John Pascoe Fawkner, established the first permanent settlement on the banks of the Yarra River.

In July 1851, Victoria seceded from New South Wales, and just a few months later gold was discovered in the colony. A city paved with gold! That was how many immigrants imagined Melbourne during the gold rushes of the 1850s. Thousands of eager fortune-hunters poured into Melbourne and the immigrant population rocketed from 29,000 in 1851 to 123,000 in 1854.

In walking the Golden Mile, we trace the story of how migration and the immense wealth from gold shaped Melbourne, from 1835 when the first European settlers sailed up the Yarra River, to 1901 when 'Marvellous Melbourne' became the first capital of Australia.

Disk Number 1:

Our walk begins on the steps of the Immigration Museum, the former Customs House completed by gold rush immigrant J.J. Clark in 1873. Smaller and less grand buildings had done the job previously, but this imposing building shows how the city had grown in the first 40 years of its settlement.

Looking towards the Yarra River, we stand by what was Melbourne’s earliest landing point, used from the settlement’s foundation in 1835.

A rocky outcrop, known as the ‘Falls’, divided the fresh water upstream from the salt water of the lower Yarra. Here the Indigenous people, the Woi wurrung, often crossed the river they called Bay-ray-rung. Downstream the river was made into a turning basin for ships. Private wharves and warehouses grew up along the waterfront, which became known as Queen’s Wharf.

In the 1850s Queen’s Wharf became the gateway to the gold fields. Standing here you could have heard the babble of tongues – English, Scottish, Irish, American, German, Chinese – as the newcomers claimed their baggage and set out to look for lodgings in the nearby hotels and boarding houses.

Today, Customs House is home to the Immigration Museum. Telling real-life stories of coming to Australia, the museum uses a variety of interpretive techniques – including multimedia, historic objects, interactive displays, original documents, personal and community voices, and still and moving images. From the reasons for making the journey, to the moment of arrival and the formation of personal identity, immigration stories are sometimes sad, sometimes funny, but always engaging. Immigration is a theme central to the Australian story, and remains a vital issue of our times.

Disk Number 2:

Melburnians long believed that John Batman came ashore ‘near this spot’ on the corner of Flinders and William Street and established ‘the place for a village’.

Modern scholars believe he was actually up the Maribyrnong River making his ‘treaty’ with local Indigenous people when other members of his party reached this part of the river and came ashore, probably near Southbank.

Disk Number 3:

Heading up William Street to the corner of Flinders Lane, we reach the site of Fawkner’s Hotel, Melbourne’s first permanent house (1835).

Patrons complained that it offered only bad rum and river water, with nothing to eat and nowhere to sleep. But its proprietor, the cantankerous John Pascoe Fawkner, became Melbourne’s first newspaper owner and a prominent politician as well as its first publican.

Watch a short video about John Fawkner and the first newspaper published in Melbourne

Disk Number 4:

In 1890, Melbourne was still unsewered, and male tenants were obliged to relieve themselves in corrugated iron urinals at the back of the ornate, Gothic-styled Rialto Building.

Bad smells and rampant typhoid inspired one wit to re-christen the city ‘Marvellous Smellbourne’! The Rialto urinals were saved from demolition by order of the Victorian Heritage Council.

Watch a short video about 'Marvellous Smellbourne'

Disk Number 4(a):

In 1852 Danish immigrant John Zander began his storage business in Rutherglen House, the bluestone warehouse on the right of Highlander Lane. Zander died in 1858, leaving his widow Cecilia to run the business and raise their nine children. By 1873 her premises covered most of the block.

Along King Street we pass more 1850s bluestone warehouses before turning into Collins Street.

Disk Number 5:

Thirty years after the first gold strike, Melbourne witnessed a second rush to get rich, this time through land and share speculation.

‘Marvellous Melbourne’ – as an English journalist dubbed it – became the fourth largest city in the British Empire. At the giddy peak of the boom, land in Collins Street sold for as much as land in London’s Regent Street!

In the late 1880s, shipping moved downstream towards the new Victoria Dock, and businessmen began to look for new compact offices, with typewriters and telephones, rather than the old bluestone warehouses. Irishman Patrick McCaughan bought up the southern frontage of this block on Collins Street and began to build some of the city’s most ornate buildings.

He sold the three middle allotments for Record Chambers (1887), the New Zealand Insurance Company (1889) and the Winfield Building (1891) and developed the ‘bookends’ himself, as the Olderfleet (1889–90) and the Rialto (1890–1).

By 1893 it was all over. Melbourne’s banks crashed and many of the tenants of the new buildings were ruined.

Disk Number 5(a):

The Intercontinental at Rialto, formerly the Rialto (1890–1), was one of the most magnificent 1880s office buildings. Young Australian-born architect William Pitt drew inspiration from its namesake, the Rialto business quarter of medieval Venice.

Pitt arranged leasehold offices and sample rooms along an internal gallery, and embellished the façade with multicoloured bricks, pointed arches and a candle snuffer shaped tower.

Disk Number 5(c):

The Winfield Building (1891) was built to house the Melbourne Wool Exchange. But after the crash of 1893 the business was hit hard.

One of the partners, Thomas Fallon, lost everything including the £50,000 his wife had inherited from her father. As the ship bearing her back from England neared Melbourne, Fallon shot himself dead in a Fitzroy boarding house.

Disk Number 6(a):

On William Street, two early 20th century commercial buildings lead to the grey stucco façade of the Australian Club. In late 19th century Melbourne, this was the world of the gentleman, where money spoke softly but powerfully.

Founded in 1878, the Australian Club was originally ‘rich, Presbyterian and pastoral’, but lawyers and businessmen soon outnumbered squatters (sheep farmers). The building, designed by Lloyd Tayler, was twice extended in the buoyant 1880s. Captains of industry, including the founders of the mining giant Broken Hill Proprietary (BHP), met here.

Disk Number 7(a):

The Savage Club, founded in 1894, was named after English poet Richard Savage. Inside, amidst shields, masks and other specimens of ‘savagery’, the club maintains a convivial tradition of ‘arguing and singing, eating and drinking and fraternising’.

Australia’s first baronet, Sir William Clarke, built the house in 1884–5. His son, Sir Rupert, whose mistress Connie Waugh reputedly lived here, sold it to the Club in 1922.

Disk Number 7(b):

The Mitre Tavern, long a favourite meeting place for Melbourne lawyers and sporting men, has occupied this site since the 1860s, although the present façade dates from the 1920s.

Sir Redmond Barry, the judge who sentenced bush ranger Ned Kelly to death, rubbed shoulders here with members of the Melbourne Polo Club, who played Australia’s first game at Werribee Park. The Mitre Tavern is still a popular haunt for young lawyers and stockbrokers.

Disk Number 8:

Banks, building societies and brokers once clustered near this intersection. Its original centre was the Hall of Commerce, near the south-east corner of Collins and Queen Streets, where business was done face-to-face under the building’s verandah.

The land boom of the 1880s transformed the scene, creating a landmark location. New banks, building societies and stock exchanges were built in a dazzling mix of Classical and Gothic styles.

The classical Bank of Australasia, erected on the north-west corner in 1878, contrasts with the Gothic extravagance of the English Scottish & Australian Bank (1880–3), William Pitt’s new Stock Exchange of Melbourne (1889) (now the ANZ Banking museum) on the north-east corner, and the National Mutual Life Company (1891-93) (now the Bank of New Zealand) on the south-west corner. Why did Melburnians build their banks like churches or temples?

Perhaps, as one architect suggested, banks are ‘our temples, for they represent the worship of that god which presides over us at least six days of our week’.

Disk Number 8(a):

In his headquarters for the new English, Scottish and Australian Bank (ES&A), gold rush immigrant and architect William Wardell created what experts later acclaimed as the finest Gothic Revival building in Australia.

General manager George Verdon lived like a Venetian magnate in a private suite above his new bank. Be sure to look inside at the magnificent banking chamber, with its iron columns and gilded heraldic decoration.

Disk Number 8(b):

The former Stock Exchange of Melbourne was designed in the English Gothic style by William Pitt (1889). You can walk through the banking chamber to the adjoining Great Hall (Cathedral Room).

The Hall superseded the verandah of the old Exchange as a meeting place for brokers and their clients; the main trading floor was upstairs. The ANZ Banking Museum, entered from 380 Collins Street, has excellent exhibits on the city’s financial history.

Disk Number 9:

Behind the modern façade of 333 Collins Street is the astonishing domed banking chamber of the former Commercial Bank of Australia, designed by Lloyd Tayler and Alfred Dunn in 1891. Manager Henry Gyles Turner, who had ridden with the gold escorts in the 1850s, and with the land boomers in the 1880s, rued his optimism when the bank was forced to close in 1893.

The foyer is open to the public from 8 am-6:30 pm, Monday to Friday.

Disk Number 10:

Elizabeth Street once marked the social boundary between the business end of town and the retail centre.

Beyond Elizabeth Street, warehouses, banks, and offices gave way to dress salons, milliners, photographers and music shops. This was ‘The Block’, the city’s most fashionable shopping street. ‘Doing the Block’ – walking up and down this section of Collins Street in the late afternoon or on Saturday morning – was a favourite pastime between 1870 and the First World War (1914–1918).

The Block is famous for its arcades, modelled on those of London and Milan. We detour from Collins Street through the Block Arcade and Block Place, pass Royal Arcade and return to Collins Street via Howey Place and Capitol Arcade.

Disk Number 11:

Block Arcade (1892–3), designed by David Askew for the land-boomer Benjamin Fink, was the grandest arcade of all. Look out for the 1907 ceiling murals in Chelsea Design at the entrance to the arcade, formerly the Singer Sewing Shop. And the ‘little man’ who taps on the window of Haigh’s Chocolate Shop. The arcade's intricate mosaic floor is the largest in Australia.

Disk Number 11(a):

Lady Hopetoun, wife of the popular Victorian governor Lord Hopetoun, founded a Victorian Ladies’ Work Association which established tearooms at number 6 Block Arcade in 1893. The Association disbanded in 1907 but the tearooms, named after its founder, have survived in their original location to this day.

Disk Number 12:

Every arcade had its special attractions. Royal Arcade (1869) has been guarded since 1892 by the legendary giants, Gog and Magog, who, inside this southern entrance, strike the hour in time with jeweller Thomas Gaunt's great clock.

Disk Number 12:

This laneway was once part of E.W. Cole’s famous Book Arcade, which operated between 1883 and 1929. With over three million books along its galleries, as well as a fernery, tearoom and monkey house, Cole's Book Arcade became a much-loved Melbourne institution. Cole also commissioned and sold a wide range of self-improving souvenirs, such as plates and tokens that encouraged his customers to put aside differences arising from race, religion and nationality.

You can learn more about Cole, and see a to-scale recreation of his arcade, in Melbourne Story at Melbourne Museum.

Watch a video about the Little Men who advertised Cole's Book Arcade

Disk Number 14:

The gold rushes made Melbourne rich. They also made it democratic and respectable. The new settlers built churches, libraries and public halls as well as banks and warehouses. Soon the city was as famous for its high-minded intellectual life as its sober Sundays. ‘It is impossible for a man to walk the length of Collins Street up by the churches and the club to the Treasury Chamber[...] without being struck by the grandeur of the dimensions of the town’, wrote the English novelist Anthony Trollope in 1871.

We first pause beside the Town Hall (1867-1870). It was built after citizens petitioned the Town Council for a hall to accommodate those ‘who may wish to assemble for political or other purposes’. To the west is the Manchester Unity Building, Melbourne’s tallest building when it was erected in 1932. Nearby, Charles Summers’ 1865 statue commemorates Victorian explorers Robert O’Hara Burke and William Wills who died as they were returning to Victoria on the first overland crossing of Australia.

Disk Number 15:

The Athenaeum was founded on this site in 1839 as the Melbourne Mechanics’ Institute: a society 'for the promotion of science [...] particularly among the young, as well as the operative classes'. To achieve these aims, the Institute opened a lending library and theatre, both of which continue to operate to this day.

In 1873, the Institute changed its name to the Melbourne Athenaeum. The façadeas we see it today, was altered in 1885-1886.

Disk Number 16:

From 1838 to 1845 Baptists congregated in a tent pitched on the opposite side of the road. The first chapel on this site was built in 1845. The classical portico was added in 1862, when the chapel was enlarged following designs drawn by the architect Joseph Reed.

Disk Number 17:

Joseph Reed was the designer of these two churches on either side of Russell Street: St Michael's, in the Romanesque style (1866) and its Gothic neighbour, Scots' Church (1873). David Mitchell, Scottish stonemason, gold rush immigrant and father of diva Dame Nellie Melba, built Scots' Church. Mitchell and Reed also collaborated to design and construct the Royal Exhibition Building in Carlton Gardens (1879).

Disk Number 18:

Collins Street East was once a fashionable residential address. Even today a handful of town houses and terraces remain. In the 1870s the residents of Collins Street led the movement to shade city streets with elms and plane trees, and wooden paving blocks made for a smooth and quiet roadway. Trams pulled by underground cables floated by, almost noiselessly.

‘Doctors’ Commons’, as the top end of Collins Street was sometimes called, was once synonymous with the medical profession. The former Alexandra Club (1887), opposite St Michael's Church, was originally the residence of surgeon James Beaney, who flaunted his rejection of antiseptics by operating in a blood-soaked coat.

Collins Street East remained partly residential into the early 20th Century. Baroness Maie Casey, the daughter of a doctor who grew up at number 37 Collins Street, recalled lying in bed listening to the sounds drifting from the houses across the street.

Disk Number 19:

Doctor’s Brass plates hung outside the terrace houses at 86-88 Collins Street, built in 1873 for doctor and pastoralist Robert Martin, and the townhouse on the corner of Exhibition Street, built by surgeon John Wilkins in 1867.

Disk Number 20:

The Melbourne Club was founded by young squatters (sheep farmers) in 1839 and moved to this London-style clubhouse designed by Leonard Terry in 1858. The Club at first looked down on the gold generation ‘the wealthy unwashed’, but quietly welcomed many of them in later years. This is the headquarters of the Melbourne Establishment, and – according to legend – a powerful backstage influence in national life.

Disk Number 21:

Grosvenor Chambers (1887) at number 9 Collins Street, was built for the decorative painter Charles Stewart Paterson. The sky-lit studios on the second floor were used by several of the famous ‘Heidelberg School’ of landscape artists in the late 1880s and 1890s. Tom Roberts' ‘Shearing the Rams’ was painted here, and Arthur Streeton exhibited his newly completed ‘Golden Summers’ in the house’s studio in 1889.

Disk Number 22:

No. 1 Collins Street is the townhouse designed by Leonard Terry and built in the 1870s by pastoralist, riverboat owner and politician William Campbell. After 1901 it was turned into offices for the new Commonwealth government. Prime Ministers Alfred Deakin, Andrew Fisher and Billy Hughes had their offices here. Here too the War Cabinet heard the news of the Australian troops’ landing at Gallipoli.

Disk Number 23:

Since 1851 Melbourne has been Victoria’s capital city. From its position at the top of Bourke Street, Parliament House has witnessed many dramatic moments in Australian history. In 1856 stonemasons working on the building went on strike in support of an eight hour working day. Four years later the building was besieged by working men calling on parliament to ‘unlock the lands’ from the grip of the squatters. From 1901 to 1927, when Melbourne was Australia’s first capital city, the building housed the Commonwealth Parliament.

Spring Street symbolises the power and dignity of the state. Parliament House and the Old Treasury Building, now the City Museum, dominate the precinct. In the distance are the bluestone spires of St Patrick's Catholic Cathedral (commenced in 1858, consecrated in 1897).

Across the street is the Windsor Hotel, the last of Melbourne’s opulent Victorian hotels. It opened in 1883 as the Grand, and three years later was turned into a Coffee Palace, or temperance hotel. As the Windsor Hotel it has played host to many of the rich and famous, including Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies, members of the royal family and countless English cricket teams.

Disk Number 23(a):

Old Treasury (1857) is widely regarded as the finest 19th century public building in Australia. It was designed in the Italian palazzo style by gold rush immigrant and architectural prodigy J.J. Clark who signed the plans while still a teenager. Upstairs, treasury officials kept the colony’s accounts, while in the basement gold sent by government escort from the gold fields was stored in bluestone vaults.

Disk Number 24:

In 1854 miners at Eureka near Ballarat staged Australia’s most famous rebellion when they called for every man to be given the vote. Two years later Victorians elected their first democratic parliament. Gold rush immigrants J.G. Knight and Peter Kerr designed a new Parliament House, erected between 1856 and 1892. Peter Lalor, leader of the rebels, later became Speaker of the Legislative Assembly. From 1901 to 1927 the Commonwealth Parliament met here.

Disk Number 25:

In 1855 the miners’ favourite entertainer Lola Montez was performing her sexy ‘spider dance’ at the Royal Amphitheatre. The Royal later became the Princess Theatre. The present Empire style building, designed by William Pitt, was completed in 1886. In 1888, 38 year-old singer Federici collapsed and died while playing Mephistopheles in Gounod’s ‘Faust’. According to legend, his ghost still haunts the theatre.

Disk Number 26:

Turn down the narrow side-street beside the Princess Theatre to Little Bourke Street. Chinese immigrants settled here in the 1850s, creating the oldest continuous Chinatown in the Western world. Bars and hotels behind the Bourke Street theatres were pick-up haunts for prostitutes.

In China, Melbourne became known as the capital of ‘The New Gold Mountain’. The first immigrants from southern China established boarding houses and provision stores in Little Bourke Street for their countrymen en route to the diggings. By 1900 Chinese businesses occupied much of the north-east quarter of the city, a character the area retains today. A little further down Little Bourke Street will take you to the heart of Chinatown and the Chinese Museum.

Following Punch Lane we turn into Lonsdale Street and down to Exhibition Street. Here you will find the Comedy Theatre built by theatrical impresario J.C. Williamson in 1928, and across Exhibition Street Her Majesty’s Theatre, built in 1886 as the Alexandra and renamed by Williamson in 1900.

Learn more about Little Lon in the Melbourne Story Exhibition at Melbourne Museum.

Watch a short video about Frozen Charlotte doll excavated from 'Little Lon'.

Disk Number 26(a):

Somerset Gordon Place occupies the former Gordon House at 22–34 Little Bourke Street. It was built by philanthropists influenced by English slum reformers in 1885 as a model tenement for working class families. But poor Australian families disliked tenements so the scheme failed. It was turned into a lodging house for homeless men and named in memory of imperial hero General Gordon.

Disk Number 27:

Diagonally opposite Punch Lane at 32–34 Lonsdale Street is the site of a brothel run by Melbourne’s most fashionable madam, German-born Caroline Pohl, aka ‘Madame Brussels’. In 1891 the gold-plated Mace of the Legislative Assembly mysteriously disappeared. The rumour – never confirmed – was that it had been left in a Lonsdale Street brothel by drunken parliamentarians.

Disk Number 28:

Walk to the corner of Exhibition and Lonsdale Streets, then turn right at the Comedy Theatre into Little Lonsdale Street. Here two buildings illustrate the colourful history of the area. Cooper’s Inn (1853) was in turn a lodging house, Chinese factory and Melbourne City Mission. Opposite, Trunk Bar and Restaurant occupies the Mickvah Yisrael Jewish Synagogue (1859), later a Salvation Army Labour Bureau and from 1909, one of Melbourne’s first free kindergartens.

Disk Number 29:

When the first gold-seekers left England for Victoria, London was celebrating its industrial might at the Great Exhibition of 1851. British immigrants brought the ideals of the exhibition with them, founding mechanics institutes and scientific societies in the new land. When Melburnians wanted to celebrate their coming of age, they too decided to mount a great international exhibition. The (Royal) Exhibition Building was built expressly for the purpose. Designed in 1879 by Joseph Reed and built by David Mitchell, it was home to Melbourne’s two International Exhibitions – the 1880 Melbourne International Exhibition and the 1888 Centennial International Exhibition – and also hosted the opening of the first Commonwealth Parliament of Australia in 1901.

Disk Number 29(a):

Founded in 1854, The Royal Society of Victoria laid the foundations of science and technology in the colony. Shortly after completing their building in 1859 the gentlemen decided to fund an expedition to cross the Australian continent. Four years later, the expedition’s leaders Burke and Wills lay in state here. Visitors paying their respects were able to view their bones through a glass slide that let light into their coffins.

Disk Number 30:

As you walk through the gardens observe the axial paths radiating from the fountain. These join a series of serpentine pathways around the garden’s perimeter, remnants of the 1850s layout by Edward LaTrobe Bateman. The current design of the southern garden was created by architect Joseph Reed in 1880, and the planting scheme was planned by Melbourne horticulturist William Sangster.

Disk Number 31:

Joseph Reed’s design for the Exhibition Building, World Heritage listed in 2004, combined the church like plan of earlier exhibition buildings with an architectural style known as Rundbogenstil (round arch style). The Exhibition Building is the only 19th century Great Hall to survive largely intact, still in its original landscape setting, and still used as a palace of industry. It is also a physical reminder of the passion for innovation and improvement that existed across the developed world in the late 19th century.

Disk Number 32:

The stone ‘obelisk’ at the south-east corner of the Royal Exhibition Building was erected by politician John Woods. He hoped to show the lasting qualities of sandstone from his Stawell electorate rather than the New South Wales stone that had been selected for extensions to Parliament House.

Disk Number 32(a):

In 1888, the year of Melbourne’s Centennial International Exhibition, gold rush merchant and historian William Westgarth made a return visit to Australia. He presented ‘to the people of Victoria’ the picturesque drinking fountain erected in the gardens near Nicholson Street, equipped with troughs for people, horses and dogs. Just across the street is the bluestone Royal Terrace (1853–58), a fine example of regency-style terrace housing.

Disk Number 33:

The plaza between Melbourne Museum and the Royal Exhibition Building continues a century-old tradition of hosting community events. At both International Exhibitions, the area on the northern side of the Royal Exhibition Building was covered by temporary annexes. In the 20th century the area was variously occupied by an oval, an immigrant hostel and car parking.

In October 2000 Melbourne Museum, designed by architects Denton Corker Marshall, opened on the site. Melbourne Museum is the largest museum complex in the southern hemisphere. Using innovative technology and interpretive techniques, the museum’s eight galleries cover the natural and physical sciences, history and technology, and indigenous cultures in new and captivating ways.