Primary sources
What are Primary Sources?
Created by witnesses or recorders who experience first-hand the events or conditions being documented, primary sources are first-hand testimonies that provide direct evidence from a particular period of history. Primary sources may be everyday items produced whilst an event or phase is occurring, such as photographs, letters, periodicals and manuscripts, but can also include artefacts compiled later, such as memoirs and oral histories.
Primary Source Databases
- Australian Dictionary of Biography OnlineThe online database version of the Australian Dictionary of Biography published in print by Melbourne University Press. Freely available via the World Wide Web, ADB Online includes over 10,000 scholarly biographies of significant Australians who died before 1980.
- Australian Federation Full Text DatabaseContains the key texts (primary sources) that record the making of the Australian Commonwealth. It includes the digitisation of the Debates of the Federal Conventions of the 1890s as well as a large selection of the writings of contemporaries of Federation.
- Chronology of Australian Historic and Current Events (via Informit)Provides a listing of significant events in Australian history with emphasis on current happenings, and covering all topics from politics and law to the arts and sport.
- Gale Primary SourcesAn interface that allows searching across any combination, or all, of Griffith University's Gale Primary Sources holdings. These 27 primary source databases can be searched individually or using this interface: Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Nineteenth Century Collections Online, The Making of Modern Law, Archives of Sexuality and Gender, British Library Newspapers, Women's Studies Archive, Refugees, Relief and Resettlement, American Civil Liberties Union Papers, The Times Digital Archive, Archives Unbound, China and the Modern World, Financial Times Historical Archive, Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals, Slavery and Anti-slavery, The Times Literary Supplement, Brazilian and Portuguese History and Culture, Crime Punishment and Popular Culture, Indigenous Peoples of North America, Political Extremism and Radicalism, The Economist Historical Archive and the Making of the Modern World.
Public Domain Primary Sources
- The Koori History Website"information on Black Australia's 240 year struggle for justice". Includes primary sources relating to Indigenous history in Australia, including videos, newspaper cuttings, cartoons and images.
- AUSTLANG: Australian Indigenous Languages DatabaseAUSTLANG provides information about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages. The core of AUSTLANG is a database which assembles information about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages from a number of sources.
- To Remove and ProtectThe state and territory government legislation on this website was originally compiled for the Bringing Them Home Report in documenting "the strength and struggles of many thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people affected by forcible removal"¹.
- A M Fernando NotebooksIn 1929, an Aboriginal man — Anthony Martin Fernando — was living at the Salvation Army hostel for men in Middlesex Street, in the East End of London. It was in this setting that he documented his experiences as a toy trader in these three digitised personal notebooks.
- Documenting the Freedom RideAnn Curthoys' diaries have become an essential piece of historical material that tells the story of the 1965 Freedom Ride. Members of the Student Action for Aborigines (SAFA) organisation also produced many useful items that provide insight into this watershed moment in Australian history.
- Aborigines' Inland Mission newslettersThe Our Aim and Evangel newsletters were published by the Aborigine's Inland Mission between 1907 and 1966. They are written from the point of view of Evangelical missionaries and, at times the writing questions or dispels some rudimentary understandings and viewpoints on the capacity of the ‘Aborigine’. The collection also includes images from the Aborigine's Inland Mission photo gallery.
- The Koori MailThe Koori Mail digitised collection is the only complete online archive for the Koori Mail – Australia’s fortnightly national Indigenous newspaper since 1991.
- Dawn and New DawnThe Dawn and New Dawn digitised collection is the only complete online archive of these magazines which were issued between 1952-1975 by the New South Wales Aborigines Welfare Board.
- AIATSIS Collections onlineFeatures a selection of AIATSIS online exhibition highlights, listed for research access purposes, ranging from notebooks, diaries and portraits to legislation.
- Collaborating for Indigenous Rights 1957–1973Primary sources and historical material relating to movements for Indigenous civil and land rights in Australia. Includes photographs, Government documents and documents created by rights activists.
- Daisy Bates Online
Daisy Bates (1859-1951) was a remarkable and quite controversial ethnographer who spent all of her adult life living in Aboriginal communities around parts of Western Australia and South Australia. In collaboration with the National Library of Australia (NLA), these web pages make accessible this extremely valuable collection of over 23,000 pages of wordlists of Australian languages, originally recorded by Daisy Bates in the early 1900s, made up of the original questionnaires and around 4,000 pages of typescripts. This will enable reuse of the collection by Aboriginal people searching for their own heritage languages and by other researchers. - Bates CollectionListing of items in the Daisy Bates collection at the National Library of Australia with Indigenous significance in respect of languages.
- National Archives of Australia - First Australians"The National Archives holds a significant number of records about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and history. We have records on individual Indigenous people as well as Australian Government policies on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs."
