Armour Galore

Sun, surf, sand... and a museum jam packed with armour. Peter Jackson journeys to Cairns, Australia, to visit the Australian Armour & Artillery Museum

These big cats still purr
A movie set from the film Fury

From the busy roadway, the long corrugated shed construction seems fairly innocuous. Sure, the massive Stug tank mounted on a concrete plinth on the front lawn area does stand out from your normal garden-type arrangements, and offers a solid clue as to what is inside. The massive sign saying Australian Armour & Artillery Museum also sheds some light on the matter for those a little slow on the uptake. With a pre-school on one side and the Skyrail Rainforest cable car ride on the other, when you look at the site from the front on, its size is deceiving. It’s not until you actually mount the steps and walk inside do you realise that whoever designed the building was clearly a Dr Who fan and drew some space-saving ideas from the Tardis and applied it to an armour museum. Setting foot inside is an armour sensory overload.

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