Under Southern Skies

Photo showing the entrance to a museum gallery, there is a large print of a painting on the left and 2 bark paintings on the right.

This gallery is temporarily closed from 6 July to 22 July 2026

From the observation of the transit of Venus, to the importance of the night sky in Torres Strait Islander navigation and voyaging – planets and stars unite the long history of all navigators around Australia.

Incredible feats of navigation were not the sole preserve of the Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese or British, but were part of a global current of trade, migration and voyaging – all made possible by skills and technologies that understood wind, water and stars. This new gallery space tells the stories of all these navigators under the southern skies using more than 500 objects from the National Maritime Collection - many never shown publicly before.

John and Jacqui Mullen Collection

On display from 23 July in the Under Southern Skies gallery.

Learn about early European interest in finding the ‘Great South Land’ through a collection of rare manuscripts, books, maps and instruments donated the Australian National Maritime Museum.

The exhibition includes some of the earliest maps and descriptions of ‘New Holland’ and its First Nations peoples, silver dinner plates that had once belonged to Viscount Sydney after whom our city is named, and lavishly illustrated accounts of two early 19th century French expeditions.

The collection was donated by John Mullen AM and Jacqui Mullen through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program and exhibited with the support of the Australian National Maritime Museum Foundation.

Photo of a museum display case featuring a large number of small objects from a shipwreck.

Photo of a display case in a museum exhibition, displaying suspended models of different first nations and pacific watercraft.

Ranging from bark paintings that depict Makassan fishermen trading with Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory, to sextants, compasses and telescopes that show the technological advancement in navigational instruments, modern indigenous art to historic portraiture, objects recovered from infamous Dutch shipwreck the Batavia and James Cook's HMB Endeavour, model ships and digital touchscreen technology – this fascinating exhibition travels across history.

From the Pacific to the Islands of Indonesia, ocean voyagers had been traversing and navigating around the coasts of Australia for centuries before Europeans arrived. The first navigators were Aboriginal people who crossed the seas to arrive in Australia over 60,000 years ago – the oldest known ocean migration in the world. From Muslim Makassan traders to the Chinese Grand Fleet of Zheng He to Polynesian sailors, the oceans around Australia were a swirl of cultural contact long before the first Europeans set foot on what they had called the Great Southern Land.