The John and Jacqui Mullen Collection offers a rare window into the European quest to discover and understand the imagined ‘Great South Land’. Through an extraordinary collection of rare manuscripts, books, maps and navigational instruments, visitors can trace how explorers, cartographers and naturalists recorded and interpreted Australia and the wider Pacific region. The exhibition features some of the earliest maps and descriptions of ‘New Holland’ and its First Nations peoples, silver dinner plates that once belonged to Viscount Sydney, after whom the city is named, and lavishly illustrated accounts of two early nineteenth-century French expeditions. Together, these remarkable objects illuminate the curiosity, ambition and shifting understandings that shaped European perceptions of the southern hemisphere. Generously donated by John Mullen AM and Jacqui Mullen through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, the collection is exhibited with the support of the Australian National Maritime Museum Foundation. Image: Six Sheet Map of the World updated with Sir Edmund Halley’s celestial observations (1720)
