Cooks' Cottage

Cooks' Cottage was built in 1755 in Great Ayton, Yorkshire, as the home of James Cook's parents, and was purchased, dismantled brick by brick and shipped to Melbourne in 1934 as a gift marking the centenary of Victoria's founding. The small two-storey stone cottage, with its steep gabled roof and low timber-beamed ceilings, is furnished with 18th-century period pieces to recreate the domestic interior of an 18th-century English farming family, including a kitchen with an open hearth and simple upstairs bedrooms. Each ground-floor room is arranged to reflect everyday rural English life of the mid-1700s, and the surrounding garden is planted with herbs and vegetable varieties consistent with the period, echoing an English kitchen garden of Cook's era rather than native Australian planting. The curatorial approach is straightforwardly chronological, moving visitors through the ground-floor kitchen and parlour before the narrow original staircase to the upper bedrooms, with interpretive panels explaining both the Cook family's life and the building's 1934 relocation. Conservation work since reconstruction has focused on preserving the original stone and timber fabric brought from Yorkshire, with the cottage's authenticity as an intact relocated structure, rather than a replica, forming the basis of its heritage listing.