About

Coffs Harbour’s brand new Regional Museum in the Old Courthouse on Harbour Drive is now open to the public.

The Museum has been divided into exhibition spaces with different themes that take the visitor on a journey from the area’s earliest days, right up to the present. Coffs Harbour’s maritime history will literally wash over visitors through the coastal soundscape that will greet them as they learn about life as a Solitary Island lighthouse keeper and enjoy a huge range of exhibits that show how our early city forebears lived. 

Local Indigenous culture also takes pride of place in the new Museum with important objects from the museum collections and a new short documentary on Tony Hart, who is considered to be one of the area’s finest Indigenous artists and craftspeople.

There is also a ‘Communications Room’ that houses a Morse code machine, phonograph rolls and a phonogram, a stereoscope and the magnificent ,and quite enormous, projector from the famous TASMA cinema – to show the way we’ve listened, watched and learned has changed over time. Also on display are many of the unique and beautiful clothes collections from the nineteenth century onwards that local families have donated and, of course, our important archive of objects related to the city’s ‘founder’ Captain John Korff. 

The Museum has now converged with the Coffs Harbour library and gallery and this will enable us to provide a more professional and upgraded resource for our local community in the future. We will be able to move forward with digitising the collection and making it accessible to all. We have already been working with the library on our Picture Coffs Harbour project. We have been scanning and cataloguing our large collection  of over 10,000 photographs.