page_title: Cooranbong, New South Wales
section_title: South Sea Islands Museum
hierarchical_section_title: Cooranbong, New South Wales / South Sea Islands Museum
caption_attribution_description: English: Polynesian war canoe, the largest of the exhibits held in the South Sea Islands Museum in Cooranbong, New South Wales
context_page_description: Cooranbong is a town in a suburb of the City of Lake Macquarie in New South Wales, Australia, west of the town of Morisset off the Sydney-Newcastle Freeway. Cooranbong is surrounded by the Watagans National Park.
  The town's name is derived from the Aboriginal word "Kour-an-bong", meaning "rocky bottom creek" or "water over rocks".
context_section_description: The South Sea Islands Museum is located at 27 Avondale Road in a historic house adjacent to the Sunnyside Historical Home built and occupied by Ellen G. White. The museum contains a collection of historic South Sea Island artefacts gathered by Seventh-day Adventist missionaries during their work on Pitcairn Islands, Cook Islands, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia and Kiribati. Its centerpiece is an enormous war canoe. The records of the missionaries' work in Australia and in the South Sea Island region dating from the 1880s are held in the Adventist Heritage Centre at Cooranbong. According to the Australian Department of the Environment and Heritage, "these rich and diverse records of provenance add to the significance of items in the museum."
caption: Solomon Islands war canoe, the centrepiece of the South Sea Islands Museum
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