Mutt has a real backstory. In 1963, a grazier named Doug Langdon found fossil bones in the dry country near the town of Muttaburra, in central Queensland. The museum's palaeontologists studied them and, in 1981, described a new dinosaur: Muttaburrasaurus langdoni, named for the place it was found and the man who found it. It was an ornithopod, a member of the plant-eating, "bird-footed" group, and one of the most complete dinosaur skeletons ever unearthed in Australia at the time. The state took it to heart. In 2023, the Queensland Parliament made Muttaburrasaurus the official state fossil emblem, a piece of deep time formally adopted as a symbol of the modern state, and its cast still anchors the museum's Dinosaurs Unearthed gallery.

Not every treasure here is millions of years old. In a quieter corner sits Mephisto, a hulking, riveted German tank, the only surviving A7V from the First World War anywhere on Earth. The Germans built fewer than two dozen of these machines, and Australian and Allied troops captured this one near the French village of Villers-Bretonneux in 1918, hauling it home as a trophy of a war that cost the country dearly. To stand beside it is to stand beside the men who took it, and the far greater number who did not come back. Mephisto has become one of the museum's best-known objects precisely because it is singular: a survivor that outlived its own kind, kept and cared for on the far side of the world from the fields where it fought.

The museum has been gathering Queensland since 1862, when the Queensland Philosophical Society founded it, with the naturalist Charles Coxen among its principal movers. Its early holdings, just over six thousand objects, lived in borrowed rooms, starting in the windmill on the hill above town and later in a purpose-built home on William Street. It has moved several times since, settling at South Bank in 1986 as part of the Queensland Cultural Centre, and in 2023 it added Kurilpa, a name from the Aboriginal people of this riverbend, to its own. The collection has grown past 15 million items, spanning natural history, science, and the cultural heritage of Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, and Pacific peoples. Its medal for scientific achievement has gone to figures from David Attenborough to the conservationist Steve Irwin.

Part of the museum's modern work is undoing the harm of its own past. Between 1870 and 1970, like museums across the world, it collected the ancestral remains of Indigenous Australians, taking the dead from communities that never gave them up. Since the 1970s the museum has run a program to return and rebury those ancestors, working with the communities they belong to. As of late 2018 the remains of 660 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people still waited in a dedicated, restricted room at the South Bank site, held in trust until they could go home. It is slow, careful work, an institution acknowledging that some things in its keeping were never rightfully objects at all, but people, owed a return.