A Yarra Ranges rainforest that quietly falls apart unless you stick around to stop it? Yeah, we need to see this.
Gondwana VR is landing at Yarra Ranges Regional Museum, a virtual rainforest that shifts depending on how long you stay.
The free, immersive experience drops visitors straight into the Daintree Rainforest in Far North Queensland, letting them wander through a world that’s equal parts ancient and endangered.
Gondwana VR isn’t your standard headset-and-couch kind of virtual reality. It’s designed to be durational, meaning the experience is different every single day and can never quite be repeated.
As you move through a sprawling digital map of towering trees, jagged mountains and untouched beaches, the weather, seasons and biodiversity all shift around you in real time.
Gondwana VR
- Exhibition on display Wed 15 July – Sun 1 November
- Free entry
- Yarra Ranges Regional Museum
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But there’s a quieter, heavier story running underneath all that beauty. Over the course of each showing, the rainforest slowly degrades, with the artists translating real climate data projections all the way out to 2090.
It’s a pointed nod to the fact that the Daintree, much like the Yarra Ranges’ own natural landscape, is under genuine threat from climate change, with entire ecosystems at risk of vanishing within our lifetimes.
The twist is that visitors themselves hold some power here: the longer people spend exploring Gondwana, the more resilient the forest becomes.
Gondwana VR has been created by artists Emma Roberts and Ben Joseph Andrews, and will be presented at Yarra Ranges Regional Museum as part of the 2026 Burrinja Climate Change Biennale. It’s a rare chance to engage with some seriously confronting climate science in a way that feels more like art than a lecture — no small feat.
Whether you’re after a quiet, reflective wander or just keen to see what a rainforest looks like a few decades into an uncertain future, Gondwana VR offers a strange kind of hope: the idea that simply showing up and paying attention can make a difference, even in a simulated world.
For more information, head here.
This article was made in partnership with Yarra Ranges Council.
