UNESCO SIX
- Past Exhibition
Our UNESCO World Heritage collections are displayed together for the very first time in our beautiful new galleries. These items of international significance include our unrivalled collection of First Fleet journals, personal diaries from the First World War and the world’s largest glass-plate negatives of Sydney Harbour taken in 1875.
Exhibition Information
1 Shakespeare Place
Sydney NSW 2000
Australia
+61 2 9273 1414
UNESCO collection stories
The Holtermann Collection: photographic documentation of goldfields life in Australia
In 1951, a hoard of 3,500 glass plate negatives from the nineteenth century was discovered in a garden shed in Chatswood.
Armistice and peace: 'now that the war is over we realise what we’ve been through'
‘The Armistice – agreeing to cease hostilities’ was signed between Germany, France and Britain at 5 am on the morning of 11 November.
Internee collections: diaries of ‘enemy aliens’
During the First World War nearly 7000 ‘enemy aliens’, mainly of German and Austro-Hungarian origin, were interned in camps in Australia. The Library’s collection of papers of ‘enemy aliens’ interned in Australia during WW1 contains around 40 handwritten diaries written by internees.
Displayed here together for the first time are the six State Library collections on the UNESCO Memory of the World registers.
The Australian Memory of the World program is one of 60 worldwide. It recognises and protects heritage documents that are significant for Australia and the world. On the list are our First Fleet journals, World War 1 diaries, the Holtermann photographic collection, Dorothea Mackellar’s poetry notebook, and papers of ‘enemy aliens’ interned in Australia from 1914 to 1919.
In 2017, three giant glass-plate negatives from the Holtermann photographic collection were successfully nominated as the Library’s first listing on the UNESCO Memory of the World international register, joining only five other inscriptions from Australia.