Just outside the tiny town of York sits a piano graveyard, where the majestic instruments are taken to die.

It began as an art installation, and has become a tip-of-the-hat to Buddhist ideology.

The project began with composer and musician Ross Bolleter, who works solely with ruined pianos; instruments that are anywhere between the first and final stages of decay.

Bolleter ran an art installation in Perth that allowed the public to experiment with 16 ruined pianos, and at the end, was left with nowhere to keep them.

A call from a mutual friend to the owners of Wambyn Olive Grove in Western Australia resulted in a home for the instruments on a property just outside of York, a town about 100km out of Perth.

From that point onwards, Penny and Kim haven't looked back, accepting pianos from those who can't bear to dump their beloved instruments on the rubbish tip.

Since the early 2000s, the couple have collected over 35 pianos, placing them at random spots around their property, allowing the pianos to live out the rest of their days in the middle of the bush.

"A ruined piano sounds extremely out of tune. It doesn't function quite normally; some of the keys don't make any music at all, they just make drumming and clicking sounds. It really does sound like something that's very derelict," says Kim.

Though they are left to decompose naturally, the pianos are still used to perform; Bolleter visits for spontaneous concerts, tourists discover the sanctuary and improvise, and Penny and Kim tap the keys and pluck the strings as they wander past.

Kim explains that the idea behind allowing the pianos to decay out in the bush comes from Bolleter's Buddhist beliefs.

"They're very much into facing the reality of ruin - we're all going to die, and everything we've got, and everything we can see in front of us is going to disappear eventually. So I think his philosophy of putting what was once an absolutely beautiful instrument out in the bush, instead of just throwing it invisibly into a dump, putting it out in the bush where it can be seen to disintegrate, is sort of parallel to the philosophy of being realistic about the fact that everything passes away," he says.

Though it's often difficult to believe that the pianos were once glossy, conventional instruments, it's perhaps more fascinating to view them in a ruined form.

"They gradually make their way back down into nature again," says Penny. "As they get more and more ruined, they become more and more beautiful in a way, a part of the surrounding environment."