Australia
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are advised that this archive contains images, names and voices of people who have died. A country told through objects, documents and dates rather than landscape. Stone channels cut into a lava flow in western Victoria to farm eels, one of them carbon dated to six thousand six hundred years, and a World Heritage listing that arrived in 2019. A dictation test that could be given in any European language and was designed to be failed. Boards painted at a settlement west of Alice Springs in 1971, on which the dots were added to cover what outsiders were not meant to see. A hoist in a back yard that the man it is named after did not invent. Eight thousand seven hundred and nine dead at Gallipoli and a legend built afterwards by a war correspondent. An apology delivered in a chamber in Canberra in February 2008, and a referendum that failed fifteen years later with only one territory voting yes.
A chronological documentary of 2,125 moments spanning 1777–2026 on Loreline.
Curated by Olivier · last updated 2026-09-20
Eras
- Convicts, Transportation and what it built. About one hundred and sixty-two thousand convicts arrived between 1788 and 1868, and eleven of the places that held them are inscribed as World Heritage. Barracks, cells, leg irons, work gangs, probation stations and the paperwork of a system that ran for eighty years.
- Frontier, The frontier conflict and its documentary record. Massacre sites and their memorials, native police, the mission and reserve system, and the commemorations that came much later. Casualty figures are contested and are given as ranges with the historians who estimate them named.
- Eels, Budj Bim, where the Gunditjmara cut channels, weirs and dams into a lava flow in western Victoria to trap and farm short-finned eels, kooyang. One trap system at Lake Condah is carbon dated to six thousand six hundred years and the wider complex is suggested at about eight thousand. It was inscribed on the World Heritage List on 6 July 2019, and the Traditional Owners tell it themselves through their own corporation.
- Ochre, Ochre as material and as trade: the pits and quarries, ground pigment, grinding stones, and the routes the colour travelled. Thin here by measurement rather than neglect, because the free photographic record of ochre practice barely exists and no amount of searching produced it.
- Madjedbebe, Deep-time occupation and the archaeology that dates it. The Madjedbebe rockshelter in the Northern Territory, Lake Mungo, ground-edge axes, grindstones and the excavation trenches themselves. The 65,000-year date published in Nature is genuinely contested on grounds of sediment movement, and the archive says so rather than settling it.
- Dictation, The White Australia policy and the machinery that ran it. The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 and its dictation test, which could be administered in any European language and was designed to be failed, along with certificates of exemption, customs paperwork, and the long dismantling. The documents are the subject here as much as the people.
- Marngrook, Football and the argument about where it came from. Marn Grook is well documented as a game, but the claim that it influenced Australian rules is rejected by Hibbins, who wrote the code's own official history, and by Pennings and Ruddell, so the archive presents the dispute rather than the claim. Also the grounds, the crowds, and the Indigenous Round.
- Wool, The industry that paid for the country. Merinos, shearing sheds and the shearers who worked them, wool bales and stores, the great woolsheds and the stations behind them. Also the strikes, which is where a good deal of Australian politics starts.
- Songlines, Country as something carried and transmitted rather than owned. Named tracks across the continent, the Seven Sisters, and the Arnhem Land material that can be shown. Restricted and ceremonial material is excluded, which is a real limit on what this facet can hold, and the limit is the point rather than an omission.
- Papunya, The Western Desert painting movement that began at Papunya in 1971, with the cooperative following in 1972. Boards and canvases, the settlement itself, and the Luritja and Pintupi Country the work sets down. After community criticism between 1973 and 1975 the painters adopted over-dotting to conceal restricted designs, so the style the world knows is partly a way of not showing something.
- Verandah, The Australian building as an object: the verandah itself, corrugated iron, weatherboard, iron lace, the Queenslander on stumps and the homestead with its shade. Domestic and civic architecture treated as a national vernacular rather than as scenery.
- Gallipoli, The landing of 25 April 1915 and everything built on it. Eight thousand seven hundred and nine Australians died in the campaign, and the legend was assembled afterwards, substantially by the war correspondent C.E.W. Bean. The cove, the trenches, the cemeteries, and the commemoration that outgrew the battle.
- Bark, Painting as a transmissible practice in Arnhem Land, moving from rock to bark to board. The smallest facet in the archive on the photographic side, because almost no bark painting exists under a free licence anywhere: Commons holds roughly twenty-five files in total. What is here leans on the rock art at Ubirr and Burrungkuy, and the film side carries the rest.
- Surf, The beach as an institution. Surf lifesaving clubs and their reels, the flags, the boards, the carnivals, and the beaches themselves from Bondi and Manly outward. The largest photographic facet in the archive.
- Snowy, The Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme and the postwar migration that built it. Dams, tunnels, penstocks and power stations, the construction camps, and a workforce drawn from more than thirty countries. The photographic record here is thinner than the engineering deserves.
- Apology, The Stolen Generations and the long reckoning. The Bringing Them Home report of 1997, the National Apology delivered on 13 February 2008, Sorry Day, the memorials, and the Voice referendum of 2023, which failed with 39.94 per cent in favour and only the Australian Capital Territory voting yes.
- Music, The country in sound. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander music first, including the didgeridoo, which comes from Arnhem Land in the north and is under a thousand years old rather than ancient and nationwide. Then the pub rock circuit and the venues that sustained it, country music and the Tamworth festival, the instruments, the broadcasters, and the art music written here.
- Writers, The literary record: the poets and novelists, the bush ballads and the arguments about them, the little magazines, the prizes and the manuscripts. Includes writers who left and kept writing about the place from elsewhere.
- Cinema, Australian film, which produced what is generally held to be the first feature length narrative film anywhere, The Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906. The studios and the location shoots, the new wave of the 1970s, the actors and directors, and the long stretches when the industry barely existed.
- Stage, Theatre, dance and performance. The touring circuits and the picture palaces that doubled as theatres, ballet and contemporary dance, Aboriginal performance companies, cabaret and vaudeville, and the buildings that housed all of it.
- Opera House, One building, treated as its own subject because the record justifies it. Utzon's competition win in 1957, the shells and the tile lids, the political fight that drove him out of the country in 1966, the opening by the Queen in 1973, and its inscription as World Heritage in 2007.
- - The prison hulk Justitia at Woolwich. Convicts labour on the shore at Woolwich Warren with the 260 ton hulk Justitia moored in the Thames behind them. The hulks filled up after the American War of Independence closed off transportation to the former colonies, leaving Britain with sentenced prisoners and nowhere to send them. Botany Bay was the answer to that backlog.
- - List of female convicts on the Lady Penrhyn. A manuscript roll of the women carried aboard the Lady Penrhyn, compiled around 1790 by Arthur Bowes Smyth, the ship's surgeon. The Lady Penrhyn sailed with the First Fleet in May 1787 carrying only women prisoners. Names on lists like this are often the only surviving record of a transported person.
- - A First Fleet convict list. A handwritten list of prisoners from the papers of the surgeon Arthur Bowes Smyth, held by the State Library of New South Wales. About 162,000 convicts were transported to the Australian colonies across the whole period of transportation. Roughly 1,400 people sailed with the First Fleet, of whom about half were convicts.
- - The Friendship transport, 13 May 1787. A list of prisoners aboard the Friendship dated the day the First Fleet sailed from Portsmouth. The voyage to Botany Bay took just over eight months. Compared with later mass transportations, First Fleet mortality was low, which the officers attributed to their own provisioning.
- - Women received from the Charlotte. A receipt list of female convicts transferred from the transport Charlotte. Women were about fifteen per cent of all convicts sent to the Australian colonies. The paperwork treated them as consignments to be signed for.
- - Weather journal of HMS Sirius. A daily noon weather record kept aboard the fleet's flagship. Sirius was the naval escort for the transports and the colony's link to the outside world. She was wrecked off Norfolk Island in March 1790, stranding the settlement's supply line.
- - Arrived in Botany Bay, January 1788. A note written inside a journal cover recording arrival at Botany Bay on 20 January 1788. The fleet found the bay unsuitable and moved north to Port Jackson within days. The colony's founding date is taken from the landing there on 26 January.
- - Lieutenant Ball signs at Sydney Cove. A document signed by Henry Lidgbird Ball aboard HMS Supply at Sydney Cove in April 1788, ten weeks after the landing. Supply was the smallest ship of the fleet and the fastest. Ball took her to Norfolk Island in February 1788 to plant a second settlement there.
- - An account of Port Jackson timber. Notes inserted into a First Fleet journal assessing the local timbers and what each was good for. Building the settlement depended on answering questions like this by trial. Much early construction failed because the assessments were wrong.
- - The First Fleet at Botany Bay. An engraving by T. Medland after a drawing by R. Cleveley, published in Arthur Phillip's account of the voyage. Aboriginal people watch from canoes in the foreground as the ships come in, with Bare Island and Cape Solander behind. The image is a British publication's version of the arrival, drawn for readers in London.
- - Charles Gore paints Botany Bay. A watercolour of the bay made about 1789, held by the State Library of New South Wales. The wide low shoreline was what the fleet rejected: poor soil, no reliable fresh water, exposed anchorage. The settlement went to Sydney Cove instead.
- - Losses in the wreck of the Sirius. An inventory of what went down when HMS Sirius struck the reef at Norfolk Island in March 1790. The loss came during the colony's worst period of shortage, before the arrival of the Second Fleet. Rations at Sydney Cove had already been cut.
- - Richard Dry, transported after 1798. A portrait of Richard Dry, sentenced to transportation following the Irish rising of 1798 as a supporter of Lord Edward Fitzgerald. Political prisoners from Ireland formed a distinct group among the transported. His son became the first native born premier of Tasmania.
- - Lycett painting of a corroboree. A corroboree at Newcastle as painted by Joseph Lycett around 1818. Lycett was a convict artist and the image is a colonist's record of Aboriginal people made by someone with no standing to interpret what he was watching.
- - Government gaol gang, Sydney. Augustus Earle's view of a chained government gaol gang, published in his Australian scrap book in 1830. Iron gangs were the punishment tier for convicts who reoffended in the colony. Earle travelled widely and drew what he saw, which makes his plates unusual among period images.
- - Convicts in New South Wales. A lithograph after Augustus Earle, printed in London by Charles Joseph Hullmandel and published by J. Cross in 1830. The plate circulated an image of colonial convict labour to a British audience that had sentenced the men in it. The original is held by the State Library of New South Wales.
- - Towtrer, painted by William Buelow Gould. A portrait of Towtrer, described as a leader of the Port Davey people in south west Tasmania, painted in 1833 by William Buelow Gould and held by the State Library of New South Wales. Gould was a convict artist transported for theft who was set to painting natural history specimens and portraits.
- - Benjamin Law's bust of Trucaninny. A plaster bust by Benjamin Law titled Trucaninny, Wife of Woureddy, made in Hobart in the 1830s and held by the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. Law produced these as a commercial pair for sale to colonists, which makes them among the earliest sculptures made in the colony and also an early example of Aboriginal people turned into saleable objects.
- - Plan of the Norfolk Island barracks. A coloured plan dated 31 March 1838, marking out the wards of the prisoner barracks including an invalid ward and a boys' ward. The second Norfolk Island settlement, running from 1825, was deliberately built as the harshest destination in the system. The plan is held by State Records New South Wales.
- - Commandant Charles O'Hara Booth. Thomas James Lempriere painted the Port Arthur commandant around 1840. Booth was appointed in March 1833 with authority over every station on the Tasman Peninsula, and laid out the township, the harbour works and the semaphore line. From 1840 his jurisdiction narrowed to Port Arthur and the boys' establishment at Point Puer.
- - A conduct register entry. A detail from the Van Diemen's Land conduct register for George Jones, held by the Tasmanian Archives. Registers under the assignment system recorded every offence, punishment and reassignment across a sentence. They are now the main genealogical route back to individual convicts.
- - Conrad Martens paints Government House. Conrad Martens made this oil painting in 1842, held by the State Library of New South Wales. Martens had arrived in Sydney in 1835 after sailing as artist aboard the Beagle. His view presents the seat of colonial authority as landscape rather than as administration.
- - John Hall of Dublin, died 1843. A headstone for John Hall, native of the city of Dublin, who died on 9 September 1843 aged 24. Norfolk Island in the 1840s held men sent as a further punishment after reoffending in New South Wales or Van Diemen's Land. Few of the dead have stones at all.
- - The Cascades Female Factory in 1844. John Skinner Prout's hand coloured lithograph shows the female factory in Hobart from Proctor's Quarry. Women sentenced to the factory worked in laundry and needlework under a class system that governed food, contact with children and the possibility of release. The site is one of the eleven Australian Convict Sites inscribed as World Heritage.
- - A convict love token. A copper disc filed smooth from a 1797 penny and engraved by hand, in the National Museum of Australia. Thomas Lock was sentenced to ten years transportation in 1845 for highway robbery and stealing, and made or commissioned this before he sailed. Tokens like it were left with families who would almost certainly never see the sender again.
- - Port Arthur in 1845. John Skinner Prout's pencil and watercolour view of the settlement, held by the State Library of New South Wales. By 1845 Port Arthur was a working industrial site with shipyards, a flour mill and a timber trade, all run on convict labour. It operated from 1830 until 1877.
- - Forged notes in an 1845 arrest file. Fraudulent banknotes kept as evidence after the arrest of the labourer Timothy O'Meara on 3 May 1845. He told authorities he needed the money to buy a rifle. Property offences of this kind account for the large majority of transportation sentences.
- - A murdered overseer, 1846. The stone of Stephen Smith, a free overseer at Norfolk Island and a native of Dublin, aged 40, recorded as barbarously murdered by a body of prisoners on 1 July 1846. The killing came during the period of the second settlement's worst violence. The wording is the administration's account, cut in stone.
- - Convicts push the Port Arthur tramway. A painting of about 1852 showing prisoners pushing passenger carts along the tramway, made in 1855 by Godfrey Charles Mundy or his wife Louisa and published in Mundy's book Our Antipodes. There was no locomotive: the men were the engine. John Watt Beattie photographed the painting decades later and added the caption.
- - Tower Hill in 1855. Von Guerard worked on this panorama of the Tower Hill maar and its inset scoria cones between 15 August and 5 October 1855. The painting recorded the native vegetation in enough detail that it was later used as a reference for replanting the degraded reserve. Tower Hill lies west of Warrnambool on the same volcanic plain.
- - Men in possum skin cloaks at Penshurst. A group of Aboriginal men wearing possum skin cloaks and blankets, photographed at Penshurst in western Victoria in 1858 by Antoine Fauchery. Cloaks were sewn from dozens of pelts and incised on the skin side with designs then rubbed with ochre. A further figure at the left of the plate has been blotted out and only a blur remains.
- - Von Guerard paints the Mount Eccles crater. Eugene von Guerard's mid nineteenth century view of the crater lake, painted while the colony was still calling Budj Bim by its settler name. The accompanying text praises the irregularity of the structure and the brilliant green of the water. Nothing in the colonial record of the period registers the aquaculture system across the flow below.
- - A convict artist paints Mary Tame. Charles Henry Theodore Costantini, born in France in 1803, painted this portrait of Mary Tame during his years in the Tasmanian colony. He was himself a transported convict and worked as an artist there from the 1820s until his death in 1860. Convict artists produced a substantial share of the surviving colonial portraits.
- - Colonial depiction of a Murray River corroboree. A corroboree on the Murray River in a colonial depiction from 1865. Images of this kind were made by and for Europeans, and the ceremonies themselves are not the archive's to interpret.
- - Marcus Clarke in riding gear. 1866. He arrived in Victoria from London at seventeen and worked on a station before turning to journalism.
- - Owen's plate of Diprotodon australis. An illustration from Richard Owen's paper on the fossil mammals of Australia, published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1870. Owen worked entirely from specimens shipped to London and never visited Australia. His naming of the megafauna established the framework that later Australian palaeontologists worked within and against.
- - Paired portraits sold as the last Tasmanians. A printed sheet pairing portraits of Truganini and William Lanne, captioned as the last Tasmanian woman and the last Tasmanian man, held by the Rijksmuseum. Images like this circulated internationally as ethnographic curiosities. After Lanne died in 1869 his body was mutilated and parts taken by competing collectors, and Truganini asked before her death in 1876 that her remains not be treated the same way.
- - Head shots from a colonial collection. Two head shots of Truganini and William Lanne from about 1870, associated with the papers of James Barnard, Government Printer of Tasmania, who read a paper to the Royal Society of Tasmania in 1889 titled Notes on the last living Aboriginal in Tasmania. The framing tells you what the colony wanted to believe about itself.
- - Darlington probation station. The station on Maria Island photographed around 1870, from a collection assembled by E. R. Pretyman. Under the probation system introduced in the 1840s, convicts served a fixed term of gang labour before becoming eligible for a pass. Darlington later became a cement works and then a national park.
- - The Carandini family. 1875, among the first opera performing families in Australia. Marie Carandini toured colonial theatres for decades before Melba's generation.
- - Alfred Deakin as a young man. A studio portrait of the Victorian politician made by Johnstone, O'Shannessy and Company in 1876, when he was about twenty. As Attorney General he drafted and introduced the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, the founding statute of the White Australia policy, and he served three terms as prime minister. He argued the exclusion in the language of racial unity rather than of labour competition.
- - Breastplate given to Billy Hippie. An engraved brass breastplate presented to Billy Hippie, an Aboriginal stockworker at Minnon Station, showing him riding down runaway cattle. Colonists issued these crescent plates, often called king plates, to individuals they chose to designate as leaders, which cut across the authority structures actually in place. This one is held by the National Museum of Australia.
- - Deakin photographed by Stewart and Company. A second early studio portrait of Alfred Deakin, taken in 1877. He entered the Victorian parliament at twenty two and was a leading federationist through the conventions of the 1890s. The Act he shepherded through in 1901 avoided naming any race, substituting a dictation test that officers could set in any European language.
- - Football under electric light at the MCG, 1879. James Waltham Curtis drew this Australian football match played under electric lamps at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on 30 August 1879, one of the earliest attempts anywhere to light a field game artificially. The code had been codified in Melbourne in 1859 and by 1879 was already the winter game of Victoria. Whether the Aboriginal ball game marn grook influenced its invention is disputed, and historians including Gillian Hibbins, who wrote the AFL's own official history, reject the claim.
- - Feeding a pet lamb at Trundle. A hand-fed lamb takes milk from a bottle on a property at Trundle in central western New South Wales. The photograph belongs to the State Library of New South Wales series At Work and Play, which covers rural life across the state between 1880 and 1940. Orphan lambs raised at the house were a normal part of station work and often the children's job.
- - Marcus Clarke. 1880. His novel For the Term of His Natural Life, serialised from 1870, fixed the convict system in Australian fiction.
- - Clare brass band. The Clare brass band in South Australia in the 1880s, with members of one family. Brass banding was the mass participatory music of Australian country towns before radio.
- - Barak paints dancers in possum skin cloaks. A work by William Barak of the Wurundjeri people made at Coranderrk in Victoria, showing dancers and women wearing possum skin cloaks. Barak was born about 1824 and died in 1903, and he led the Coranderrk residents' long campaign against the closure of their station. Only about seven original possum skin cloaks survive in collections.
- - The separate chapel at Port Arthur. An albumen print by the Anson Brothers, made between 1875 and 1885, showing the chapel of the separate prison with its individual partitioned stalls. Prisoners under the separate system could attend a service without seeing one another. Silence and isolation replaced flogging as the primary instrument.
- - Penitentiary corridors, Port Arthur. The Anson Brothers photographed the cell corridors of the penitentiary in the decade the settlement closed. The building had begun as a flour mill and granary before conversion. Their series Views in Tasmania is held by the State Library of New South Wales.
…and 2,075 more moments.
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