Description of the attraction
Founded in 1891, the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery is one of the main cultural attractions in the city of Launceston and Australia's largest museum outside the capital city. The museum houses an excellent collection of items of colonial and modern art, exhibitions devoted to the history of Tasmania and the history of natural sciences, the zoological collection is of particular value.
One of the most interesting exhibits is a real Chinese temple, which was built in the 19th century by Chinese workers of the tin mine. There is also a functioning planetarium and a whole railway depot of the 19th century. The museum holds a unique Victoria Cross - the highest military award of Great Britain, which was awarded posthumously to an Australian sergeant during the First World War, Lewis McGee.
The museum's collections are located in two buildings: in a specially built building in the Royal Park and in the town of Inveresk, where the railway depot was located earlier. One third of the former depot's impressive space is now occupied by an art gallery, while the rest is given to the Academy of Arts, a joint brainchild of the University of Tasmania and the Polytechnic University. Here you can see the skeletons of dinosaurs, death masks of the aborigines of Tasmania and the constellations of the southern sky.
