Keep your wits about you. In island nations such as Australia, maritime museums are everywhere. It is a fact that all 250 of the pigeons released during the opening ceremony of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games soared straight into maritime museums, many of them dying instantly as their freedom-loving pigeon-heads smashed into the sides of a continent-sized coastal wall of reproduction colonial explorer ships and defunct submarines.

If you do not stay alert at all times in Australia, you can easily get sucked into the bowels of a colonial replica vessel, where nasty little children will be swinging off replica ladders, weeing in replica cabins and lisping annoyingly about 'port and thtarboard'. You will stumble in a hellish echo chamber of creepily pointed pronouning ("The HMS Explorer might be 200 years old, but with her decks  freshly scrubbed, she doesn't look a day over 21!") BLURGH.

Know the danger zones. As you can see from the map, coastal areas are dangerous. This is because captains will typically park their boats against the side of the country, rather than inland. Historial port towns will often boast a proud tradition of maritime commerce and sometimes they'll set up museums especially to brag about it. Avoid them.

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Go to the Northern Territory. When you cross the  border into the territory from any another state, the first thing you will notice is the easy, loose-limbed stride of the territorians. It is the fluid, flexible and free-flowing gait of a people unstiffened by proximity to a taxpayer-funded institution celebrating maritime heritage. The Northern Territory is a 1,349,129 square kilometre maritime museum-free zone. (Unfortunately, they do have something called a 'Pearling Exhibition' at the Darwin's Wharf Precinct - which could be even more dull than a maritime museum. Give it a wide berth if you visit - obviously.)

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