Lives that shaped Australia's history

The lives of prominent and ordinary Australians who have come and gone have been resurrected in the digital afterlife through a new website hosted by the National Centre of Biography.

Obituaries Australia, the first resource of its kind in Australia, has taken the paper trail left by the likes of first fleet convicts, bushrangers and their victims, ANZAC diggers and cricketing heroes, and transformed them into a freely accessible online database.

The website is linked to digital material held in Australian cultural institutions as well as items in the National Library of Australia’s digitised newspapers.

Professor Melanie Nolan, Director of the ANU National Centre of Biography said Obituaries Australia seeks to capture every published obituary of an Australian.

“We are interested in mapping all sorts of relationships and revealing the web that people’s lives spin around others,” she said. “For example the obituary of bushranger Ben Hall contains links to people he robbed, as well as to gang members, police officers who pursued him, the man his gang fatally shot and the son of that man, who witnessed the shooting and went on to join the police force.

“It’s a mammoth task and we are seeking the public’s assistance in helping us to find obituaries and to index them.”

Based on over 300,000 individual citations on index cards housed in 180 catalogue-card drawers, Obituaries Australia will help identify subjects for the University’s Australian Dictionary of Biography and lead to exciting research projects on the study of historical groups and Australian lives over time.

“Some of its potential can already be seen,” she said. “Click on the link to ‘World War I’ and you will find the names of all those, in the database, who played some part in the war – as soldiers, Red Cross administrators, in the conscription debate, as well as those who gave up their stately homes for military hospitals.

“You will also find a list of those who were engaged in the major military battles and the roles they played, those who were killed in action or who died later of war wounds. Go to an individual soldier’s entry and you can read the soldier’s war service record, digitised by the National Archives, as well as investigate the links to the obituaries of other family members, friends, and work and school mates.”

The website was officially launched on Thursday 14 April.