Discover Australia’s smallest museums, and the strange treasures they hold

For German-born artist and photographer Simone Rosenbauer, photography has always been a way of moving through the world – a lens through which she is able to explore “memory, perception, and the quiet poetry of observation”. When it comes to what she documents, the photographer often finds herself focusing on the more overlooked everyday narratives, ones that might take a little more digging to find. That’s why her latest photo series took her on a journey across every state and territory in Australia to capture the country’s smallest (and most quirky) museums.

This project took the photographer four years to complete, covering thousands of kilometres across the country to visit museums in every state – a mission that she took on alongside her partner Ralph Kente. The pair carefully mapped their routes, “often driving 300–400 km between museums”, selecting places through a combination of research and direct outreach to museum communities. Their destinations included everything from Australia’s Apple and Heritage Museum to the Carnaby Collection of Beetles and Butterflies – places nestled in rural communities, filled with “personal collections and deeply held narratives that may not appear in larger institutions, yet hold profound cultural significance”, shares Simone.

Years of travel around the country produced 3,000 photographs that built on in-depth interviews Simone conducted with the people keeping these museums alive: “The extended interviews were a critical component of the project. They provided invaluable context, uncovering local histories, diverse identities, and personal stories often hidden within the spaces themselves,” she shares.

Much like the project itself, many of these museums were a labour of love, “maintained by passionate individuals committed to keeping their community histories alive”, Simone shares. What began as simply an aim to document these spaces, became what the photographer described as a much deeper exploration of “how lived histories and cultural nuances are held, honoured, and passed on”.

These conversations and images were compiled into Small Museum, a photo book published by Gost, that saw the series come together in four key parts: a showcase of the buildings, the people, the collections and the objects behind each of Australia’s smallest museums. The first section, The buildings, gives us a glimpse at the diverse range of structures that house these collections: repurposed telegraph stations in the outback, restored 19th century jails saved from demolition, and apple warehouse, to name just a few locations. Simone’s portraits of museum custodians frame volunteers, teachers, nurses, policemen, mayors, social workers, senior lecturers in Geology and surfboard painters – people of all ages and all walks of life intent on preserving Australia’s local history.

Her interior and still life images of these community collections are really not what we might expect of the traditional archive, museum or gallery space. An elephant’s foot sits atop a podium, worn out shoes have been saved for years and different apple varieties line a wall of shelves, all at different stages of decay. Many of these unformalised, personal collections redefine what a museum can be: places where objects are not selected “for academic, historical or monetary worth but due to the value to the individual story of each museum”.

Each photograph in the book has a Small Museum exhibit and artefact number, creating an archive-like structure to the publications pages to preserve the spaces Simone encountered in print. This book is like my own museum, she says: “a small museum about small museums”. Perhaps grown from a desire to understand the place she now calls home more closely, Simone hopes Small Museums offers new audiences the same chance to engage with stories that sit on the edge of cultural memory by forefronting some of the country’s more memorable people and landscapes, as many of these museums are disappearing.

“These museums might be small in scale, but they carry profound cultural value. Together, they form a richly textured portrait of Australia – one that invites readers into the intimate worlds of communities, where memory and meaning are preserved with care,” she ends. “This book was a way of bringing these stories closer, making history feel personal, tangible, and alive.”