The Melbourne Museum and The Shrine of Remembrance

Melbourne Museum is a natural and cultural history museum located in the Carlton Gardens in Melbourne, Australia, adjacent to the Royal Exhibition Building.

It was designed by Denton Corker Marshall Architects and finished construction in 2001. Situated in the Carlton Gardens, it was commissioned by the Victorian Government Office of Major Projects on behalf of Museums Victoria. The museum is a rich response to Melbourne’s urban condition, and provides a place for education, history, culture and society to engage with each other in a contemporary setting. It is now an important part of Melbourne’s soft infrastructure.

It is the largest museum in the Southern Hemisphere, and is a venue of Museum Victoria, which also operates the Immigration Museum and Scienceworks Museum.

The museum has seven main galleries, a Children's Gallery and a temporary exhibit gallery on three levels, Upper, Ground and Lower Level and was constructed by Baulderstone Hornibrook.

The Touring Hall is where temporary exhibits are displayed. Past exhibits include mummies from Egypt and dinosaurs from China. The Big Box is part of the Children's Gallery.

The Shrine of Remembrance is Victoria’s largest and most visited war memorial of National Significance. It is Melbourne’s most recognised landmark. It was built in remembrance of those who served and those who died in the Great War of 1914-1918 and armed conflicts and peacekeeping duties since.

The Shrine of Remembrance was built between July 1928 and November 1934 in remembrance of the 114,000 men and women of Victoria who served and those who died in the Great War of 1914-1918 - 89,100 of them served overseas and 19,000 did not return.

The people of Victoria felt that their debt to these volunteers, who had defended them at such great costs to themselves and their families, should be recognised by a worthy permanent monument of remembrance. Although the country was faced with frightful unemployment and financial difficulty in the late 1920s and the 1930s, so great was the gratitude of the people that the huge amount required to build the Shrine was raised or promised within six months from the opening of the appeal in 1928.

The design for the Shrine of Remembrance was selected by competition among Australian artists and architects. Eighty-three designs were submitted and the winning design was by two Melbourne returned-soldier architects, Philip Hudson and James Wardrop. The inspiration for the external outline came from one of the seven wonders of the ancient world—the mausoleum at Harlicarnassus to Mausolus, King of Caria in South West Asia Minor.