Book Direct with the Owner at Queenscliffe Maritime Museum with Attractions Sydney in Queenscliff, for all your Attraction and travel needs.
The Queenscliffe Maritime Museum was built in 1986 to display Queenscliff's last Lifeboat. Since then, the Museum has expanded to cover the fascinating maritime history of Queenscliff and Southern Port Phillip. This history includes the Bay Steamers Weeroona, Hygeia and Ozone. Old post cards of Queenscliff and Point Lonsdale, artefacts from shipwrecks, a display of early diving equipment including a divers suit and helmet air compressor and early scuba equipment.
The Museum houses a unique hydrographic model of The Rip which shows the underwater contours at Port Phillip Heads and the shipping channel, a display which tells the fascinating history of the Port Phillip Sea Pilots and a work boat from the Pilot cutter Wyuna. An extensive history of Victorian Lighthouses including flashers, lamps globes and intact fresnel lenses are also displayed.
Queenscliff's fishermen with their distinctive couta boats are featured, with a restored Fisherman's Cottage to visit, also. The boat shed contains the history of the early Queenscliff boat builders, couta boats, boat building tools, outboard and early marine motors and an oar making machine, with volunteers restoring wooden boats on Mondays and Tuesdays at the museum.
A highlight of a visit is seeing the heritage-listed Fishermen's Waiting Shed from the old fisherman's pier which holds the world- renowned ship paintings by Henry Zanoni. The museum's grounds feature not only the deck house from the Shandon, an iron sailing ship built in 1883, but an array of channel markers, buoys and anchors. And buried in the grounds is the hull of the torpedo boat Lonsdale, once belonging to the colonial Victorian Navy.
Museum volunteers conduct tours of Point Lonsdale Lighthouse every Sunday morning between 9.30am and 1.00pm at half hourly intervals (children under five years not admitted). Lighthouse tour bookings can be made by contacting the Queenscliffe Maritime Museum.
