Museum After Dark: Creatures of the Night takes over Yarra Ranges Regional Museum on 28 August.
Running as part of the 2026 Burrinja Climate Change Biennale, Museum After Dark: Creatures of the Night is built around Country, rainforest ecosystems and the creatures that call them home. The museum stays open past closing for one evening of talks, workshops and after-hours wandering.
DJ Pebbles takes the dancefloor, the project of Noongar sisters and RRR broadcasters Bumpy and Emmy. Their set moves through funk, soul, hip hop, R&B and groove-driven house, leaning on feeling over flash.
Museum After Dark: Creatures of the Night
- 28 August, Yarra Ranges Regional Museum, Lilydale, Victoria
- Tickets: $30 full, $52 double pass, free for under-18s with a guardian
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Snuff Puppets send their roaming, hand-made giant animals out among the crowd, built to shrink the gap between performer and audience. Over at the craft table, Trash Puppets run a workshop where you make your own creature with puppet maker Jess Knight and environmental scientist Lucy Hedt.
Zoos Victoria’s Leadbeater’s Possum Field Officer, Arabella Eyre, gives a talk on one of Victoria’s most ambitious threatened-species conservation programs. It’s a fitting anchor for an evening themed around the animals of the rainforest.
Plus, the Gondwana VR exhibition
The current Gondwana VR exhibition is open through the night, a virtual ecosystem you can help pull back from the brink. Somewhere in the museum’s shadows sits Rufus Ninox, a forest fortune teller who might read your future if you can find him and ask nicely.
There are temporary rainforest tattoos from Melbourne’s Airbrush Co., an Art Cart mask-making station aimed at grown-ups, and a best-dressed contest with door prizes for the night’s sharpest looks, courtesy of Global Ballooning, Experience the Wonder, Zoos Victoria and Kuranga Nursery.
After-hours access covers current shows including yalingbuth yalingbu yirrimboi yesterday today tomorrow and Connections. Pop-up stalls round things off, with Healesville’s Verso Books, Kallista collective Leaf Studios and the museum’s own shop trading late.
For more information, head here.
