Urban Exploration in Australia: A Destination Guide

Urban Exploration in Australia: A Destination Guide

As Australia’s major cities continue to expand upwards and outwards, we tend to forget about the phenomenon that is urban exploration. I’m talking of course about all those forgotten urban spheres, preserved in time as monuments to their city’s ever-eternal growth. These destinations exist humbly in the underlying fabric of larger cities like Melbourne, to the point where a lot of Melburnians can live their whole lives without even knowing they exist. But if you’re looking to tread the path less travelled and check out some of your local haunts, here are three absolute must-sees across Australia!

Urban Exploration in Australia: A Destination Guide

Larundel Mental Asylum, Bundoora (VIC)

You’ll definitely want to bring your LED Lenser along for this one! A quaint and evergreen red brick building standing tall and ominous over this sleepy suburb in the outer northern region of Melbourne, Larundel Mental Asylum has everything that you could possibly want from an abandoned building. Its wide corridors, large broken windows, and cold ‘facility-like’ atmosphere make exploring this decommissioned psychiatric hospital truly feel like you’re walking through a video game (think ‘Last Of Us’).

Urban Exploration in Australia: A Destination Guide

Larundel originally opened its doors as a psychiatric institution in 1953, despite construction being believed to have begun as early as 1938, a fact which is supported by the building’s early-twentieth-century facade. Construction of the site was said to have been interrupted by WWII, with the building’s earliest bays being used as a makeshift hospital operated by the U.S. military, and also later as a training depot for the W.A.A.F. and R.A.A.F.. Following WWII, the entire site was expanded and transformed into a psychiatric institution, operating from 1953 to 1999. Larundel is also infamously renowned for being the birthplace of the medicine lithium, which was developed to treat bipolar disorder.

Atlantis Marine Park, Two Rocks (WA)

There’s just something about abandoned theme parks that really transports you to another world entirely, and that’s exactly what you should expect upon arrival at Perth’s famously abandoned Atlantis Marine Park. Everything about this site, from its gauche quasi-Roman decor to its concrete dolphins hovering over strikingly empty pools, really prompts you to think about mankind’s relationship to the natural world, and the place that these semi-educational/semi-recreational spaces hold in our own development as a species. In fact, the park’s slogan was ‘Atlantis Marine Park – for the enrichment of mankind’.

Urban Exploration in Australia: A Destination Guide

Out of fear of getting too philosophical, the basic story of Perth’s ‘Atlantis’ is that the park was originally intended to serve as a west-coast alternative to Queensland’s Gold Coast, offering families an opportunity to get up close and personal with dolphins, from birth to death. But the bottlenose dolphins born in captivity at ‘Atlantis’ demonstrated a startling inability to acclimate to life on the outside world, failing to pick up behaviour like hunting and foraging that biologists had at one point considered to be innate behaviour. It became evident that ‘Atlantis’ wasn’t fulfilling its mission statement for humankind or dolphinkind alike, and so the park was shut down in the late ‘90s. Staying true to their intention to deliver an educational space, the city of Perth decided to incorporate informative signs throughout the dilapidated park as a means of sharing the park’s personal history with the everyday public.

St. John’s Orphanage, Goulburn (NSW)

When someone says ‘Goulburn’, a lot of us would immediately think of fruits, food, and wine, but even Australia’s most idyllic destinations can have their very own secret past. In the case of Goulburn, that past is preserved in time in the form of the remains of St. John’s Orphanage, also commonly referred to as the Goulburn Boys Orphanage as the facility primarily cared for boys between the ages of five and sixteen. This orphanage was actually in operation for the greater part of the twentieth century, only closing its doors in 1978 following a consistent decline in residents.

From 2014 to 2016, the facility experienced a slew of fires all suspected to have been created by squatters. A particularly nasty fire in 2016 caused severe damage to the building’s main facade, but thankfully there are still a plethora of graffitied rooms and corridors for bold urban explorers to venture through. It must also be said that the site’s current owner has expressed interest in redeveloping the site into a hotel, so it’s worth seeing this gem while you still can.

Although we’ve just outlined three of our favourites here, rest assured that there’s hardly a shortage of abandoned urban spaces across all of Australia’s major cities that are there for open exploration! If you’re interested in seeing what else is out there, be sure to stay in the loop with community groups like Urbex on Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit.