Let the kids drive a bus at the Revolutions Transport Museum Perth

Do you know a young person who’d like to pretend to be a bus driver for a while? I’m pretty sure we all do, and that’s just one of the reasons my son and I loved discovering the Revolutions Transport Museum in Perth, writes Amanda Kendle.

This is just one of many incredibly kid-friendly attractions at Perth‘s Whiteman Park, east of the city, but it’s one that we only discovered by chance one weekend after riding the rails at the Bennett Brook Railway nearby. We’d actually wandered over to use the toilets and once my son caught a glimpse of all the wheels inside, we were soon dropping our donation in the box to discover all the land transport displays at Revolutions.

They run some short films and have some tables with activities for kids, but my son was too keen to explore all the vehicles on display to stop for any of this. His favourite was hopping behind the wheel of an old bus, headed for “Sprawling Suburbs” according to the sign above the driver’s window. The old EJ Holden car that he could climb into and pretend to drive came a close second, and I rather loved the snippets of old radio you could listen to by pushing a few buttons (although I would have loved it more if a certain somebody wasn’t pushing all the buttons at once so I couldn’t hear anything in full!).

I loved that so much of this museum was hands-on fun, and that you could climb onto an old tram and wander into an old train carriage as well. The school bus that looked rather familiar to me made me feel a little old, though, but it was one of the few displays the kids couldn’t climb on so we moved on quickly.

There are also displays of transport types without wheels, like camels and horses – I thought these looked gorgeous but my son was definitely only interested in wheels and tracks! If you’ve got younger kids along there is also a small play area with lots of transport toys to play with while the others have a better look around.

As far as the numerous attractions at Whiteman Park go, the Revolutions Transport Museum is one of the more hidden ones – follow the signs for the Bennett Brook Railway, it’s quite a drive into the park – but at a cost of just a gold coin donation it’s well worth a look with any kid who loves “things that go”.

Amanda Kendle is a born and bred Perth girl who loves to hang around with her rubbish-truck-loving four-year-old son. Amanda has lived and worked abroad in Asia and Europe and has been blogging about her travels at home and abroad for almost a decade at Not A Ballerina.

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Body images © Amanda Kendle