Collections
The South Australian Museum houses over five million specimens and material cultural items. These specimens and items provide irreplaceable records with which we are constantly building and modifying our knowledge and understanding of the natural and cultural world. They are a vital part of Australia’s national heritage and play an integral role in the international scientific and anthropological communities' endeavour to document our world.
The South Australian Museum is one of four South Australian cultural institutions involved in the development of a new purpose-built Cultural Institutions Storage Facility (CISF).
As part of this important project, the Museum has started preparing to relocate parts of our collections to the new facility. This work will help safeguard South Australia’s most significant cultural collections for future generations.
To support this, we are temporarily reallocating our resources to the relocation process.
As a result, the Museum will be unable to service outward loans or facilitate access to the collections from the 1 October 2025 to 1 September 2026.
While this is inconvenient in the short term, it will enable us to protect and preserve South Australia’s significant cultural artefacts for future generations.
We acknowledge this may affect your plans and apologise for any inconvenience.
The Museum will honour all commitments which have been agreed prior to the close of the collections.
This project will not impact the Museum’s ongoing Aboriginal Heritage and Repatriation Program.
If you have any questions, please contact us at contact@samuseum.sa.gov.au
Our galleries remain open to the public, 10am-5pm every day except Christmas Day and Good Friday.
Items from the Australian Aboriginal Cultures collection
McCartney bottles containing parasite specimens preserved in alcohol in the Parasitology Collection, one of nine collections in Biological Sciences.
Crocoite, a lead chromate, from the Dundas minerals field, Zeehan district, Tasmania, in the Mineral Sciences collection. The old mines are now worked solely for specimen minerals such as these.