News archive 2003

Multicultural Australia Trail - Australians come from a wide range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Well over 25 percent of Australians were born overseas. Over 200 languages are spoken. Our cosmospolitan national outlook is reflected in the way we dress, in the food we eat and in the traditions we maintain. A selection of images have been chosen to create the Multicultural Australia trail.

Indigenous Dance Trail - Dance has always been important in the cultural life of Indigenous Australians. Follow the Indigenous dance and dancers trail for images, old and new, showing how photographers and artists have captured and imagined Indigenous dancing.

Indigenous Australians should note that this trail may include images or names of people now deceased.

The images from PictureGoldCoast have been recently added to Picture Australia.

This database contains over 6,500 images from the extensive photographic collection contributed to the Local Studies Library by the community and local organizations.

The collection provides evocative glimpses of the rich history and cultural heritage of the Gold Coast, from its pioneering past to the more recent boomtown times of the late 20th century.

Welcome PictureGoldCoast!

Today's launch of the John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library is a landmark occasion for Picture Australia, adding our first collection from Western Australia.

The John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library (JCPML) collection contains over 600 photographs relating to Australia's war time prime minister, John Curtin (1941 -1945), and to those aspects of the history and politics of Australia that are most closely connected with his life and work.

The JCPML has digitised material in its own collection and dispersed John Curtin-related materials held around the world and provides electronic access to these items through the Electronic Research Archive.

We have now put an online survey on the Picture Australia homepage to help us find out how we can make Picture Australia even better.

It should only take you a few minutes to complete, and will provide us with valuable information about who you are and why you have used Picture Australia. We will also ask you where you were when you used the website, and what you used the image for.

We hope you'll participate in the survey to help us better meet your needs.

The number of images in Picture Australia continues to grow, with more participants joining the service all the time.

Use the table below to discover how many images each participant is contributing towards Picture Australia. New participants are listed in bold.

The War Memorial were a foundation member of Picture Australia with about 17,000 images when the service was launched in September 2000. The new images have been harvested using the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) protocol for metadata harvesting.

Redcliffe City Council Library have now joined Picture Australia, adding more than 1100 images to the service. Their Photographic collection is a unique visual record of the Redcliffe area dating from the 1880's. The collection features photographs of events, industry, people and places in the greater Redcliffe area.

Providing access to these images online has been made possible by a Federation Grant from the Commonwealth Government as represented by the Departmant of Communications Information Technology and the Arts.

The Library is happy to receive donations of photographs relating to Redcliffe. We would be happy to have copies made and return the original prints if necessary. To donate, just contact the Redcliffe City Library.

Maroochy Libraries join Picture Australia today with over 1500 images from their Picture Maroochy database. These images are a snapshot of the early history of the Sunshine Coast with emphasis on the Maroochy Shire. The collection covers local industry, agriculture, places and landscapes, social and formal events, early European civilisation, pioneering families, buildings, schools and lots more.

View the new Maroochy sugar industry trail and see the development of the sugar cane industry and life as a cane farmer in the late 1800's.

The National Archives recently launched its new PhotoSearch database, allowing users to search almost 400,000 photographic captions and browse some 60,000 digital images online. These images are also available through Picture Australia.

A further 30,000 images will be loaded to the database over the coming months which is just a small proportion of what is estimated to be over 3 million photographs in the National Archives' collection.

The images currently displayed in PhotoSearch were taken between 1860 and 1996 and document a broad spectrum of Australian city and country life. The many subjects represented include people, fauna and flora, sport, science, industry, transport, defence, war, the arts, natural disasters, entertainment, commerce, architecture and politics.

PhotoSearch includes links to a feedback form and an order form for those wishing to purchase copies. Users can also submit a free online request for the digitisation and display on PhotoSearch of images that have not yet been digitised.

Participants who have recently joined Picture Australia have been highlighted in the table below.

This afternoon the State Library of South Australia will launch their participation in Picture Australia.

The Library has contributed over 56,000 images, making them the fourth largest contributor to the Service. These images include donations from people living in South Australia, and as such provide a rich texture of life in the State.

If you would like to view only images from the State Library of South Australia use the Advanced Search screen and select the Library in the 'all agencies' drop down list.

This month we welcome the Maroochy Libraries to Picture Australia with the contribution of their Picture Maroochy Collection.

Officially launching their participation in the service in September, the Maroochy Library Local Studies Collections feature images of floods, fires, councillors, farmers, hoteliers, beachgoers, train travellers, holiday makers, bullockies, timber getters and school children. An invaluable local history collection, now available on Picture Australia.

Freshwater Trail - The International Year of Freshwater has inspired the Freshwater Trail. Water is used for so many activities in our lives and plays such an important role that it was easy to draw together this collection of images.

The CSIRO Land and Water collection has many interesting images relating to water, but you may also be surprised to find so many other collections represented in this trail.

For more information about issues surrounding our use of freshwater, see the official International Year of Freshwater website.

Women and Dance Trail - There are so many great dancing images available through Picture Australia and the new Women and Dance trail trail helps us to show you some more!

This trail covers many different forms of dance, from ballet to children playing in the street and helps us see the important role it plays in the lives of women.

Watch this space in the future for another dance trail featuring Indigenous dance.

Recent additions to the image collections of our participants, plus the addition of Picture Maroochy images, has boosted the total images available in Picture Australia to 651,539.

See the table below to find out where all these images come from and watch this news page to discover when new collections are added.

This month we welcome the University of Melbourne to Picture Australia with the contribution of their University of Melbourne Archives Image Collection (UMAIC).

This online collection consists of approximately 1400 images that capture the evolving landscape and buildings of the University, ceremonies and celebrations, as well as many past staff. The images also feature the John Ellis Photograph Collection of Peace and Protest Movements in Melbourne (1971-1996).

The University of Melbourne is the third university to join Picture Australia, and the first in Victoria.

We look forward to bringing you more images from Victoria as the University of Melbourne adds various collections to Picture Australia, particularly those from the Ian Potter Museum of Art, the Medical History Museum and the Grainger Museum.

New Picture Australia postcards are hot off the press. You'll see them free in Avant Card stands in cafes, galleries, community centres and so on around Australia, or contact us for the complete set. You can also see them online.

With an initial 6,000 images the State Library of Queensland has now joined Picture Australia with their new Picture Queensland service. Launched on 2 June 2003, Picture Queensland aims to provide access to Queensland images from a variety of collections throughout Queensland.

The State Library of Queensland is the 25 participant to join Picture Australia and the fourth from Queensland. This significantly increases the number of Queensland images available in Picture Australia.

The images in Picture Queensland are from the State Library's John Oxley Library, the major research and reference library of Queensland culture and heritage responsible for preserving a comprehensive collection of materials and resources relating to Queensland's heritage and history.

Selecting from a collection with over 1,000,000 images, the State Library of Queensland will gradually add images to Picture Queensland over the coming years.

This new trail takes a peek at the life of ballet dancers in Australia. It draws from the W.F. Stringer collection held by the National Library of Australia.

The total collection, not all of which is digitised, documents over 100 dance performances by the Ballet Rambert, National Theatre Ballet, Borovansky Ballet, Victorian Ballet Guild, Ballet Victoria, and the Australian Ballet over six decades in Australia. Some of the performances include Giselle, Le carnaval, Les sylphides, Swan lake, Nutcracker, Aurora's wedding, Graduation ball, Le beau Danube, Coppelia, Firebird, Sleeping beauty, The merry widow, Façade and Don Quixote pas de deux.

The W.F. Stringer collection contains photographs of the following dancers in performance: Kelvin Coe, Kathleen Gorham, Marilyn Jones, Maina Gielgud, Garth Welch, Margot Fonteyn, Paula Hinton, John Meehan, Katherine Lamb, Natalia Makarova and Gary Norman.

More information about the Australian Ballet is available from the AUSTRALIA dancing website.

Use the table below to help you find out which institutions are participants of Picture Australia and how many images they are contributing.

Search within results

Picture Australia is now able to "Search within results" allowing you to continue searching within your last set of search results. This gives you the ability to narrow the focus of your search one step at a time. Once a search has been conducted, simply tick the 'in these results' box beneath 'Search for images:' to narrow the search further.

Browse

With the new browse feature you can browse the 'title', 'creator', 'subject' and 'date or place' fields. You can browse through the index and find items even when not sure of the correct spelling.

Favourites

You'll love the new 'favourites' feature. You can now build a temporary file of favourite images. Simply click on the 'add to favourites' link on the search results page to create the temporary file.

• Use the 'View favourites' button to take you to a page which displays thumbnails of your favourites. This page also displays the title of the image and the contributing institution.
• Display more information about the image by using the 'more information' link.
• View the full sized image by clicking on the thumbnail.

Favourites are available for the current user session only.

Email your favourites

At the bottom of the favourites page is another great new feature which allows you to email a list of your favourite images. The list can be a text version of the metadata for the favourite images, URL links to the favourite images or HTML text.

We are really excited about the new features that Picture Australia now has and hope you will become familiar with and use them. We are always happy to hear comments from you about the Picture Australia site, so please contact us to provide feedback.

The James Cook University joins Picture Australia, bringing a selection of images from two of their collections. James Cook University is the third University to join the service.

The Daintree Forest Campaign collection contains images of the Daintree Blockade in 1983.

The second collection depicts Townsville life, showing historic buildings, structures, ships, stationlife, industry and people in North Queensland in the early 19th century.

More of these collections can be seen online in the James Cook Digital Archive which will gradually be added to Picture Australia.

The addition of the Ballets Russes picture trail provides an insight into the wealth of material in Picture Australia dealing with dance.

The Ballets Russes visited Australia during 1936 and 1940 and this picture trail shows images from these visits to Australia.

More information about Ballets Russes is available from the PROMPT collection and on the AUSTRALIA dancing website.

Picture Australia collections continue to grow - with 21 Agencies now participating.

The Powerhouse Museum provides online access to images from the Tyrell Collection through the web service of Picture Australia. The sample of approximately 300 images is a subset of the larger Tyrell Collection stored at the Museum.

The Tyrell Collection consists of 7903 glass plate negatives from the studios of Charles Kerry (1857-1928) and Henry King (1855-1923) that had two of Sydney's principal photographic studios in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

The Collection provides an important record of city and country life at the time, with a number of broad themes: Sydney and suburbs; south coast; Blue Mountains; transport; rural New South Wales; shipping; caves; sports; Indigenous peoples of Australia and the South Pacific.