Our history
The museum resides in Darling Harbour, Pyrmont – a site for millennia that has been linked to the water – by both the Traditional Owners and from the earliest days of the colony. It became the centre of maritime trade to the city before being redeveloped into a cultural and residential area.
The Site's First Traditional Owners
The Australian National Maritime Museum occupies an outstanding harbourside site in Pyrmont close to the centre of Sydney– Australia's oldest city and for a long time the nation's busiest port. It stands on land traditionally owned by the Gadigal who found a rich source of fish and shellfish in the sheltered waters of Darling Harbour and Cockle Bay. They called the land Pirrama, meaning the place of singing stones. Pirrama Road runs alongside the museum.
A Hub of Commerce
Darling Harbour, close to the site of the first British settlement at Sydney Cove, soon became the cradle of the colony's maritime commerce. Later, this inner-city branch of Sydney Harbour served as the industrial and cargo transport hub of New South Wales. Here cargo ships from local ports and across the world docked and departed, immigrants arrived in streams of thousands to start a new life in a new land and waterside workers - wharfies - became engaged in a struggle against work conditions and practices they found increasingly oppressive
Darling Harbour's importance as a transport hub accelerated through the 19th century as NSW's railways reached out into regional areas, drawing more and more primary produce into the capital for shipment out across the seas. Large tracts of land, particularly on the western side of the waterway (where the museum now stands) were given over to railway lines and sidings, storage sheds and workshops.
And then came a period of extraordinary change. With the introduction of new cargo handling technologies, particularly containerisation, Darling Harbour's port activities started to move away from the city centre to Botany Bay and other places. By the 1980s Darling Harbour was almost redundant as an industrial centre and transport interchange. It would soon pass through a remarkable transformation– to become a relaxed and welcoming harbour-side recreation, tourist and residential area.
