Culture-Hop Iconic Australian Collections (From Home)

Can’t wait? Visit our Virtual Travel page to start your tour now or let us weave a tour for you…

In-depth virtual exhibition tours at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne will have you navigating your way through exhibitions and in some cases connecting with the artists as you go. Select from Keith Haring | Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines and Kaws: Companionship in the Age of Loneliness. Home-grown options include Marking Time: Indigenous Art from the NGV and Top Arts 2020. There are also curator and artist talks, workshops and more.

The Melbourne Cricket Ground has 35,000+ items to discover online, from the collections of the Australian Sports Museum, Australian Gallery of Sport and Olympic Museum, Melbourne Cricket Club Museum, and Melbourne Cricket Club Archives.

Sovereign Hill Outdoor Museum (Ballarat) invites us to experience the gold rush period in Australia through the people who bring the 1850s to life at Sovereign Hill in a range of fascinating, behind-the-scenes videos. There are also craft activities, recipes and educational materials to explore.

Visit some of Canberra’s greatest highlights with a click of the mouse (or a tap of the screen). Australian Parliament House takes viewers on a virtual tour of the building itself and has a comprehensive online gallery showcasing its important collections and online exhibitions telling the stories of the 235 women who have entered Federal Parliament and Australia’s precious Magna Carta, dating from 1297.

Next stop in Canberra is the Australian War Memorial for a tour of its galleries using Google Street View, an interactive digital experience, or the opportunity to research a family member from their Museum At Home hub. While the National Museum of Australia’s digital content includes such highlights as ‘Motoring Monday’, focusing on their collection of historic vehicles, ‘Fun@Home’ craft projects and ‘Live@the Museum’ gallery tours.

The National Gallery of Australia’s website is now a treasure trove of exhibitions, podcasts, video, articles and learning resources. The video collection alone includes over 300 short form videos with artist interviews and informative outlines of many key works in the collection. Start in the studios of Ben Quilty and Jackson Pollock, then dive deep from there.

Go one-on-one (virtually) with Alex Gaffikin, Head of Interpretation and Design at the Australian National Maritime Museum (Sydney), as she shares her insights and highlights of two exhibitions: Elysium Arctic – a marriage of art and science, capturing the threatened icons of the polar north; and Wildlife Photographer of the Year to find out about the stories behind the stunning images, on loan from London’s Natural History Museum.

The Sydney Opera House worked with the Google Cultural Institute to collate 53 online exhibits. The collection allows audiences around the world to explore the living story of Australia’s iconic Sydney Opera House as never before. The exhibits weave together rare archival photography, celebrated performances, early architectural drawings, historical documents, little-known interviews and Street View imagery to tell the story of the Opera House in an entirely new way.

WA Maritime Museum invites us to delve into ‘Distant Discoveries’. This series of videos, photography and stories brings together content from across the Western Australian Museum collection, home to millions of items, some of which can be traced back almost to the beginning of the Earth. Read, watch and listen for insights and highlights, from wherever you are.

While direct from Hobart, Mona is broadcasting a livestream of Ryoji Ikeda’s spectra on Saturdays from sunset to sunrise, until the museum reopens.

So, go ahead and choose your own cultural adventure, it all starts here.