Activity 1: Increase visitor engagement with Museum experiences and collections

WHAT WE ACHIEVED

• Annual visitor engagements, including onsite, online and offsite visitation, totalled 4,426,896 and exceeded our target by 36%.
• Visitation to the Museum’s public programs at its Acton site grew to a total of 299,138 visitor engagements.
• 689,547 visits were made to the Museum’s national travelling exhibitions, the highest recorded visitation since 2014–15.

More visitors engaged with the Museum’s experiences and collections in 2018–19, with a total of 4,426,896 recorded visits, compared with 3,956,322 in 2017–18.

Special exhibitions held on-site recorded 207,851 visits, including 150,028 for the blockbuster Rome: City and Empire exhibition, which exceeded the target (125,000 visits) for this exhibition by 20 per cent. Programs and events held both on- and off-site attracted audiences totalling 299,138, with highlights including 5500 visits to The Souq: A Festival of Culture, a celebration marking the end of the ‘So That You Might Know Each Other’: Faith and Culture in Islam exhibition; 4608 visits to the Australia Day Family Festival; and 15,974 visits to the display of the Brabham Repco BT23A-1 racing car at the Melbourne Grand Prix. The Museum’s national travelling exhibition program recorded its highest number of visits since 2014–15.

The Museum’s virtual reality (VR) program also enjoyed considerable success this year, with a marked increase on the previous year’s visitation, including 36,008 visits to The Antarctica Experience, which was launched on 3 January 2019, its first showing on the east coast of Australia. The Antarctica Experience is a 360-degree VR film, created by Perth-based explorer, producer, director and writer Briege Whitehead and BAFTA award-winner Phil Harper, that allows visitors to experience life and work at Davis Station, one of Australia’s permanent research bases in Antarctica.

The Museum attracted an increased number of online visitors in 2018–19. Content relating to the Museum’s Defining Moments in Australian History program continued to be one of the most popular areas of the website, with a million page visits in 2018–19. The Museum’s Collection Explorer recorded 223,000 page views, and 61 per cent of the collection is now represented online (see also Activity 3: Build and maintain our historical collections and make them more accessible).

Analysis

Visitation