Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery

Tasmania's most significant museum, with natural history, colonial art, and a relocated Chinese joss house

The Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery — known locally as QVMAG — operates across two sites. The Museum at Inveresk, housed in the former Launceston railway workshops on Invermay Road, covers natural history and science, with displays on Tasmanian marsupials including the extinct thylacine (Tasmanian tiger), Tasmanian devils, quolls, and wombats. The planetarium is here. The Art Gallery at Royal Park, on Wellington Street, holds a collection of colonial and modern Australian art in an older building from 1891.

The star exhibit at Inveresk is the relocated Chinese joss house, a temple brought from the northeastern goldfields where Chinese tin miners built it in the 1870s. Both sites are free to enter, though the planetarium charges a small fee. Between the two, allow half a day. The Inveresk site is the more rewarding, especially if you have any interest in Tasmanian wildlife or colonial history.

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The Chinese joss house now on display at QVMAG was built by Chinese tin miners on the northeastern Tasmania goldfields in the 1870s. When the community dispersed, the building was dismantled and eventually moved to the museum, where it was reassembled piece by piece. It is one of the few remaining intact Chinese temples from the Australian goldrush era.