WA Museum Boola Bardip

Stand under a whale, travel through time and be thrilled by dazzling design at Perth’s hottest museum before exploring more of the city’s riches.

Perth

Otto the blue whale has come a long way. By train. And horse-drawn carriage. Right to the centre of Perth.

Otto – or more accurately, Otto’s 24-metre-long skeleton – is the centrepiece at the city’s revamped WA Museum Boola Bardip (museum.wa.gov.au). Suspended from a three-storey-high ceiling and arranged as though about to lunge through a swarm of krill, Otto is “older than the heritage-listed building it is housed in”, says the museum’s CEO, Alec Coles. “It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up when I’m underneath it,” he adds, before sharing a little of the whale’s history. (After washing up near the mouth of WA’s Vasse River in 1897, Otto was discovered by the young Daisy Locke.)

Otto’s story is one of many worth uncovering at the museum, which reopened in November 2020 after a fouryear, almost $400-million makeover. In the language of the Noongar people, the traditional custodians of WA’s south-west region, Boola Bardip means “many stories”.

Kids will love the interactive displays in the Reflections collection. A stand-out? The biscuit-sorting conveyor belt – a homage to the erstwhile Mills and Ware factory, which was once one of the largest industrial employers of women in WA. Simply turn the wheel to send toy biscuits flying.

Grown-ups, on the other hand, will enjoy a trip through time with the Changes exhibition. Look out for the tiny Mandu Mandu beads – at more than 32,000 years old, they are one of world’s oldest examples of ornamental jewellery.

But it’s possible that the thing you’ll linger over longest is the museum itself, a dramatic marriage of old and new with five heritage-listed buildings wrapped in a shimmering glass and steel edifice. “Of all the things that are on display here,” says Coles, “I think the design and architecture are the most breathtaking.”

Explore

See the city from the water with a GoGo Active

Tours (gogoactivetours.com.au) kayaking session. Matt and Sue Baldock reveal different sides of Perth through small-group excursions. During the summer watch the CBD twinkle at sunset from a vantage point in the South Perth Foreshore area or join a tour of the Canning River Wetlands, about 20 minutes south, to discover its narrow waterways and diverse birdlife. The couple’s recently launched Cliffs and Caves experience in Bicton is a particular favourite of locals, taking in centuries-old rock formations over a two-hour journey.

Sleep

Next to Perth’s iconic Bell Tower and on the banks of Elizabeth Quay, Australia’s only

Ritz-Carlton hotel (ritzcarlton.com) is the pick for water views. Walls of glass can be blacked out with the flick of a button but when the surrounds are this stellar it seems sacrilege to do so. Book into the hotel’s spa for the Transformative Kimberley Ritual – it runs at a dare-you-to-feel-any-tension-after-this 135 minutes – and swing by restaurant Hearth, where chef Jed Gerrard enlists only local produce as well as fire to turn out fare such as smoked lamb tartare with toasted cumin.