The Gondwana Garden enables visitors to travel through time, providing opportunities to touch replicas of bones, teeth and claws of ancient creatures.  Displayed in five sections – Living Country of Today, Resilient Bushland (12,000-40,000 years ago), Megafauna Shrubland (40,000-120,000 years ago), Ancient Rainforest (40 million years ago), and Prehistoric Valley (120 million years ago) – the journey encapsulates the mysteries of deep history and the cultural connections of the Wurundjeri People.  Landscape expressions were carefully curated for each section of time.   

Fitted within two existing Museum buildings, an accessible ramp winds down the site, creating ‘slices of time’.  Each slice features a distinctive landscape, interactive elements, and art pieces to engage and excite visitors of all ages.  The journey through the Gondwana Garden is colour-coded to enable the user to easily connect with the interactive digital application developed by the Museum and understand the context of the replica fossils within the exhibit.

The collaboration with the Melbourne Museum was integral to developing both the design and the interactive interpretive elements—core components of this outdoor exhibition. The museum’s interpretation team worked closely with TCL and DCM as design partners, embedding stories, fossils, sound, and interactive features throughout the project. This iterative and parallel design process fostered a rich dialogue around ‘Gondwana,’ culminating in a physical expression of the five distinct slices of time, supported by a rigorously validated fossil-based selection of species. The design process consulted with Traditional Owners regarding the upper terrace, ensuring that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artefacts used throughout the exhibit were appropriately validated and respectfully incorporated