Key Digital Collections of Primary Sources Focused on Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands:

• SOAS Digital Collections of Primary Sources about the Pacific Islands and Australia https://digital.soas.ac.uk/rpoa

Relevant to Australia -

• National Library of Australia, Choose “Add Limits,” “NLA Digital Material” when you search to see results that are available digitally https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/

• Papers of the Phipps Hornby Family, National Library of Australia, https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/1715464

• Two memoirs by Watkin Tench, a member of the “First Fleet,” which was the first British settlement in Australia at Botany Bay (now Sydney). Tench wrote two accounts of his time in Australia in the 1780s that became best sellers: A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay and A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Tench%2C+Watkin%2C+1759-1833%22

• Returning Photos: Australian Aboriginal Photos from European Collections. Please read the Cultural Protocols section on this project site before using the database to explore the historical photos. https://ipp.arts.uwa.edu.au/

• Colonial Australian Popular Fiction Digital Archive, via the University of Melbourne https://www.apfa.esrc.unimelb.edu.au/home.html

• Convict Records of Australia database, database with info on individuals sent to Australia after being convicted of crimes in Britain https://convictrecords.com.au/

  • Covering similar material is Digital Panopticon, also a database on convict transportation https://www.digitalpanopticon.org/

• *Not a collection of primary sources: Colonial Frontier Massacres in Australia 1788-1930, which identifies and visualizes sites of frontier massacres of Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and non-Indigenous people across Australia. This project uses primary sources to inform its analysis, but isn’t a database of primary sources. https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/introduction.php

• *Not a collection of primary sources: Western Australian Legacies of British Slavery. This academic sponsored project seeks to document how the legacies of enslavement and financial compensation paid out to enslavers by the British government shaped the settlement of Western Australia. This project uses primary sources to inform its analysis, but isn’t a database of primary sources. https://australian-legacies-slavery.org/

  Relevant to New Zealand -

• Papers Past, New Zealand Government Collection, includes newspapers (see above), but also Parliamentary Papers, Magazines, and the letters of Don McLean (British official who negotiated land agreements with the Maori) https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/

• Te Papa Tongarewa, Museum of New Zealand Digitized Collections. “Browse 800,000 artworks, taonga, photographs, collection objects, and botanical and zoological specimens from Te Papa’s collections.” https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/

• Sir Donald McLean Papers, an early officer in the Native Land Courts in 19th c British Colonial New Zealand https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/manuscripts/the-papers-of-sir-donald-mc-lean

• Early New Zealand Books Digital collection, of digitized 19th century books, via the University of Auckland https://www.enzb.auckland.ac.nz/

• New Zealand Electronic Texts Collection. Browse by People/Projects/Works/Subjects using the right-hand menu. Via Victoria University of Wellington https://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/