Jervis Bay Maritime Museum

Most people come to Huskisson for the water, which makes this the town’s answer to a wet Saturday. It is also the one attraction here that explains why the town exists at all.

Huskisson was a shipbuilding town before it was a holiday one. Boats were built on the banks of Currambene Creek, and the museum sits on that same creek, on the corner of Woollamia Road and Dent Street. The street name is not a coincidence. Joseph Dent built the Lady Denman here in 1911, a wooden inner-harbour ferry that then spent sixty-seven years carrying passengers around Sydney Harbour until she was taken out of service in 1979.

In 1981 local volunteers towed her back down the coast to the town that made her. She was restored, a building was put up around her, and she is now the centrepiece of the collection. She is the only wooden vessel of her kind left in New South Wales and she is on the State Heritage Register. Standing under a Sydney ferry a few hundred metres from the spot it was built is a genuinely odd and good experience, and it is the sort of thing that does not survive a rainy afternoon anywhere else on this coast.

There is a gallery alongside the maritime collection, so the visit is not purely boats.

Two practical things. Children under 16 get in free with an adult, which makes this cheap for a family. And the museum does not take cash, for entry or in the gift shop, so bring a card.