The National Museum has announced the opening of a new “Australian Journeys” gallery, sorry, make that “a major new permanent gallery”.

Australian Journeys explores Indigenous trade and connections of exchange and ceremony sustained across the Australian continent and into the Pacific for thousands of years, the voyages of European explorers, including Captain James Cook, and details the experiences of people who flooded to the Australian colonies in search of gold in the 19th century. It features exhibits about migrants, tourists and travellers who journeyed to and from Australia in the twentieth century, as well as the stories of sportsmen and women, artists and scientists working on the world stage in the twenty-first century.

The gallery includes significant purchases made by the National Museum including the First Fleet table, made of beefwood collected near Port Jackson for the First Fleet Surgeon General John White in the early 1790s, and a rich collection associated with Captain James Cook including Cook’s plane table surveying frame, a striking marble bust and copy of Banks’ Florilegium. Other highlights from the Museum’s collection include a motion picture camera used by Frank Hurley in Antarctica, a Little Red Riding Hood wall hanging given to an Australian aid worker in a German Displaced Persons camp in the aftermath of World War II, and tokens left behind in Britain by convicts transported to the Australian colonies.

It actually sounds interesting to me.