Example Australian Wooden Boat Festival

The 2019 Australian Wooden Boat Festival, held in Hobart from 8–11 February, attracted more than 200,000 visitors over four days.

The museum sailed the Endeavour replica to Hobart for the festival, at which more than 2,700 festival-goers paid to go aboard. All available berths for both legs of the voyage were sold.

The museum also sponsored the festival’s International Wooden Boat Symposium, at which 2,400 people attended free presentations by speakers including the museum’s Emily Jateff, David Payne and John Dikkenberg. The museum also contributed three banner exhibitions, which were displayed in the foyer of the venue during the symposium.

As well as fulfilling outreach goals, attendance at the festival and symposium enabled the museum to promote its 2020 Classic & Wooden Boat Festival and Endeavour voyaging opportunities in 2020 to a targeted market.

Achievements

• Attended Australian Wooden Boat Festival with Endeavour replica
• Toured our travelling exhibitions to 82 venues and reached more than 1.09 million visitors nationally and overseas
• Completed the national tour of The Art of Science: Baudin’s Voyagers 1800–1804 (to NSW, TAS, WA, SA, ACT) with total visitation exceeding 150,000
• Exhibited Undiscovered – Photographic works by Michael Cook at the Western Plains Cultural Centre, Dubbo, attracting nearly 17,000 visitors and bringing total visitation for the tour to date to 95,633
• Showed Container: the box that changed the world in Wollongong, attracting more than 41,000 visitors and bringing total visitation for the tour to date to 62,082
• Toured Submerged: Stories of Australia’s shipwrecks to 45 venues in six states, attracting almost 100,000 visitors
• Completed the four-year national tour of War at Sea: The Navy in WWI, bringing total visitation to 115,722
• Leased our interactive exhibition Voyage to the Deep to an industry-leading international exhibition management team
• Attracted a phenomenal 270,000 visitors to Voyage to the Deep over ten days in April, when it was displayed at the Sharjah Children’s Book Fair in the United Arab Emirates
• Welcomed announcement by the government of the 2020 circumnavigation by the Endeavour replica
• Sailed Endeavour to Noumea, New Caledonia. Both legs of the journey were fully subscribed and more than 4,000 people visited the ship while it was in port.