Macleay Museum, Natural history museum at University of Sydney, Australia

The Macleay Museum was a natural history museum at the University of Sydney holding about 79,000 objects, including insect specimens, ethnographic items, scientific instruments, and historical photographs. Its entire collection has been permanently relocated to the Chau Chak Wing Museum on the same campus, where visitors can now access all these materials.

The Macleay Building, which housed the museum, was built off Science Lane on the Camperdown campus in 1887. The collections came largely from the Macleay family, notably Alexander, William Sharp and William John Macleay. The museum closed in 2016, and its holdings were amalgamated into the Chau Chak Wing Museum when that opened in 2020.

The collection holds materials from Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, and Pacific Islander communities gathered during early scientific expeditions. You can see handcrafted tools, textiles, and everyday objects that reflect how these people lived.

The original building is on the University of Sydney campus, but visitors now head to the Chau Chak Wing Museum, where all the collections are housed today. This new location is also on campus and easy to find, with clear signage and open galleries to explore the different exhibits.

Some specimens in the collection were gathered by explorers Charles Darwin and Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay, the Russian-born naturalist who worked in New Guinea and Australia. The museum also held rare or extinct biological specimens, and its natural history and ethnography holdings were second in Sydney only to the Australian Museum.