The Maritime Museum and Shipwreck Gallery are divisions of the Western Australian Museum located in Fremantle. In addition to these, the museum has other divisions in Perth, Albany, Geraldton and Kalgoorlie-Boulder.
The impressive Maritime Museum building is located on the historic Victoria Embankment in Fremantle - housing collections on the Indian Ocean, Swan River (Swan River), fishing, maritime trade and naval defence. One of the museum's most interesting exhibits is the yacht Australia II, which won the America's Cup in 1983. Next to the museum is the Australian Navy vessel Ovens, an Oberon-class submarine, open to guided tours. It is Australia's first submarine to be turned into a museum piece.
Not far from the Maritime Museum, on Cliff Street, is the Shipwreck Gallery, recognised as the southern hemisphere's premier museum of maritime archaeology and a place where shipwreck remains are protected. The museum occupies a building built in the 1850s that formerly housed the town's Commissariat. Exhibits include a reconstructed hull of the Dutch ship Batavia, which wrecked off the coast of Western Australia in 1629, and an engine recovered from the SS Xantho, which sank in 1872. This engine is the only surviving example of a mass-produced high-speed, high-pressure marine engine. Visitors can try to start it by hand. In 1980, the museum began developing a programme called Museum Without Borders, which allows visitors to see the remains of shipwrecks not within the walls of a building, but in a real setting - on the ocean.
