Museum Victoria

The iconic Melbourne Museum is the flagship of Museum Victoria and showcases Australian society, Indigenous cultures, the human mind and body, science and technology and the environment.

The Museum's priceless collections are an irreplaceable resource for understanding the past, reflecting on the present and looking into the future.

The collections contain 16.6 million items and is made up of three major sub-collections:

History and Technology

The History and Technology sub-collection documents Victoria's history in a national and international context, so as to facilitate the community's understanding of the past and engagement with issues affecting our future. It contains 896,000 items.

Indigenous Cultures

The Indigenous Cultures sub-collections comprise significant ethnographic and archaeological material culture, integrated with ethno-historic audiovisual and manuscript material. The origin of the sub-collection lays in Victoria's 19th century cultural organisations, developed throughout the 20th century through field collecting, donations, purchases and loans. The collection spans Aboriginal Australia (especially SE, central and N Australia), the Pacific, Africa and the Americas. It contains 265,000 items .

Natural Sciences

The Natural Sciences sub-collection dates back to 1854, when the Museum's founding Director, Prof Frederick McCoy commenced an active program of acquiring Australian and foreign material. The collection is the repository for specimens collected during scientific studies and surveys by Museum staff, university researchers and students, as well as scientists from government agencies. While specimens are used in exhibitions and education programs, most specimens are maintained as a reference resource for scientists in government and private industry, amateur naturalists, artists, media and the public. They are a vital record of biodiversity. In addition to scientific specimens, the collection includes material relating to Antarctic exploration, astronomy, chemistry, health and medicine, and physics. It contains 15,671,000 specimens .