The development of culture-independent high-throughput sequencing has revealed intriguing correlations between traits of the human gut microbiome and a range of diseases. However, translation of microbiome research into mechanistic knowledge and clinical practice has been slow, in part due to difficulties in culturing, sequencing and phenotyping the large proportion of seemly unculturable microorganisms. Recent developments have unlocked the potential to culture a significant part of the human gut microbiome (Forster et al 2019). Here we present the growing Australian Microbiome Culture Collection – AusMiCC – an initiative to preserve, classify and genome-sequence bacterial isolates from metropolitan, rural and indigenous Australians. AusMiCC has already banked over 9000 bacterial strains, from which 400 strains have been whole-genome-sequenced. This collection serves both as a reference database for (meta)genomic studies and as a bank of bacterial strains to support experimental and applied microbiome research. Large-scale metagenomic analyses coupled with genome-informed metabolic models and experimental work enabled by AusMiCC is expected to yield mechanistic insights into the inner ecology of the Australian gut microbiome.