Film, sound and photographic archives

Sounds, music, moving images and photographs are important in identifying people, place and the period of time as well as the power of an image of family and loved ones. Oral histories of individuals are another important part of this range of records held in libraries, museums and archives.

AIATSIS Audiovisual Archive and Perfect Pictures database

The AIATSIS Audiovisual Archives hold material dating from the 1850s to the present day. Material in the archives contains a wealth of images, films and sound recordings about all aspects of Indigenous traditional and contemporary life; including culturally important places and events, ceremonies, rock art, missions and settlements, pastoral work, language, oral histories, stories and songs.

The catalogue of the Audiovisual Archives can be researched on the AIATSIS on-line database Mura®. For access to the material held in the archives, contact the Access Unit.

AIATSIS will not supply materials for publication, including open access materials, without the consent of the appropriate Indigenous individual, family, community, or communities.

Following the digitisation of a photographic collection, low resolution versions of the individual images are loaded into the Perfect Pictures database. Once the accompanying caption information has been entered, detailing the date and place taken and a description of the content, the images are then accessible to clients using computers located in the AIATSIS Library and Audiovisual Archive Access Unit.

Dawn and New Dawn magazines

Dawn and New Dawn were magazines published between 1952-1975 by the New South Wales Aborigines Welfare Board, with the aim of providing interesting information and an exchange of news and views. The Dawn and New Dawn also served as a way for people to keep in contact. Today the magazines are a valuable source of family history information as they include details of births, deaths, marriages and baptisms, as well as hundreds of photographs. A full set of the Dawn / New Dawn magazines are now available online by clicking here.

Other Organisations

Other organisations that hold audiovisual material relating to Indigenous people include:

Many of these organisations are making available indexes of their photographic and sound collections on the Internet, searchable by keyword. Below is a listing of these sites.

Picture Australia - search the image collections of many significant cultural institutions, without having to know where the images are held. This is a combined database of images held by the Australian Archives, Australian War Memorial, National Library and the State Libraries of NSW, Tasmania and Victoria and the Northern Territory Library.

To search:

The Pictorial collection at the State Library of Western Australia, click here

The Pictorial collection at the State Library of South Australia, click here.

Online Australian Image Collections - find out about pictorial collections in libraries, museums etc via the Australian Libraries Gateway (ALG). To find online image collections in Australian libraries, go to the 'Advanced search' option here in the Australian Libraries Gateway, and limit your search to only those libraries with a link to their online image collection or their online exhibitions and click on "Search".

Collections Australia Network (CAN) database - includes databases of digitised pictorial, as well as objects, in museum, archive collections are available.

Australia's Oral History Collections: a National Directory - allows you to search within tens of thousands of hours of oral recordings. These collections document Australian life, customs, politics and traditions and cover a wide range of subjects. Search by name or the term "Aboriginal People and their Communities".