Australian cultural institutions join world's largest museum

Fourteen major Australian cultural institutions have joined the world’s biggest online museum: the Google Cultural Institute, a collection of artworks and artefacts that currently includes works from 673 international museums, including the British Museum, the Hermitage in St Petersburg and the Palace of Versailles.

The move brings much of Australia’s visual arts cultural product onto the international stage, providing searchability, high resolution images and, in some cases, virtual tours of exhibition spaces.

More than 2000 digitised Australian cultural items join the Google Cultural Institute collection, among them Aboriginal bark paintings, military hardware, portraits of important Australians and contemporary sculpture.

New 360-degree panoramic imagery, captured using Google’s Street View technology, will allow online virtual tours of selected sites and experiences. International viewers will be able to follow a camera walking from Bondi to Tamarama during Sculpture by the Sea and to see inside ‘G for George’, the Lancaster Bomber at the War Memorial.