Cooks’ Cottage, Melbourne: History & museum entry price

No, Captain James Cook never lived in Cooks’ Cottage, which can be found in Melbourne’s Fitzroy Gardens. Cook’s parents lived there, and it was shipped to Melbourne in 1934. There is a small museum inside.

Perhaps the oddest Melbourne attraction lies in the Fitzroy Gardens just to the east of the central grid.

The gardens themselves are majestic when the sun so much as threatens to show its head. Come lunchtime, office workers swarm out to eat their packed lunches on the grass.

Cooks’ Cottage in Fitzroy Gardens

In the middle of the park, however, is a building that really doesn’t belong. This is Cooks’ Cottage, and the important thing about it is the apostrophe.

Cooks’ Cottage originally came to life in 1755, in the North Yorkshire village of Great Ayton. It was the home of James and Grace Cook. Their son – a rather more famous James – possibly never set foot in it. That didn’t stop the whole cottage being shipped to Victoria and reconstructed brick by brick in 1934, however. In return, Great Ayton got a replica of the obelisk at Point Hicks, the first place in Australia spotted by Cook’s crew.

So a cottage that Captain Cook never lived in, sited in a city he never went near, has become a memorial to the great explorer. It is by some distance Melbourne’s oldest building. Good trivia; dubious attraction.

Captain Cook Museum in Melbourne

Inside there is a small museum about James Cook’s life. It’s hardly the best museum in Melbourne, but it’s worth nipping into.

For all his adventures mapping the coast of Newfoundland, monitoring the Transit of Venus in Tahiti and getting killed by native Hawaiians, the most striking thing is the effect Cook’s travels had on his family life.

Cook’s marriage to his wife Elizabeth lasted 16 years, but they only spent four of them together. He missed the births of all six of his children, three of which died in infancy. The other three didn’t fare much better. One drowned in a hurricane, one succumbed to scarlet fever and the other drowned on his way out to his ship after his brother’s funeral. Poor Elizabeth outlived her husband by 56 years and the last of her children by 41 years.

Cooks’ Cottage fits a day-long itinerary around several Melbourne CBD attractions, even though it’s just outside the Free Tram Zone. A walking route can include the Eureka Skydeck, the Immigration Museum, street art-filled laneways, the heritage buildings of Collins Street and Victorian-era Block Arcade. Finish off the day with a Peruvian feast at Pastuso.

Melbourne hotels with a pool include the apartment-style Mantra on Russell, the Intercontinental Rialto on Collins Street and the family-friendly Novotel Melbourne on Collins.

More Australian oddities

The Harold Holt Swim Centre in Melbourne.

The Hobart hotel Roald Amundsen stayed in.

The debris of the Skylab space station on the Nullarbor Plain.

Schooners, and Australia’s other baffling beer sizes.

Riverboat Postman cruise on the Hawkesbury River.