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History

Explore our history through the Library's unrivalled collections.

History

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18th Century and before

All well & good

by Elise Edmonds

Twenty-first-century notions of wellness have a long lineage.

Medical botany : containing systematic and general descriptions

Mutiny & murder

The horrific tale of the Batavia shipwreck became one of the first true crime bestsellers.

Ongeluckige voyagie

Voyages of discovery

Europeans had been searching for rich new lands in the Southern Hemisphere long before Captain James Cook arrived on the east coast of Australia in 1770. Explore the State Library's incredible maps, journals, drawings and books.
Map of the world

The Art of the Title page

A title page has always told readers what the book is about, but sometimes with an artistic flourish.

Vlyssis Aldrovandi patricii Bononiensis Serpentum, et draconu[m] historiae libri duo, 1640, by Vlyssis Aldrovandi

The world in a book: the first atlases

by Maggie Patton

In the Golden Age of Cartography, the first atlases combined the skills of the mapmaker with the ingenuity of the publisher.

Eight Days in Kamay

On 29 April 1770, the Gweagal people of Kamay (Botany Bay) discovered James Cook and his crew. 250 years later, those eight days and their impact are still being debated, contested, felt.

The real secret river: exploring Dyarubbin

by Grace Karskens

A list of Aboriginal placenames was a trigger for seeking the ‘real secret river’.

A landscape photograph depicting a misty river as viewed through a break in tree cover.

19th Century

The writer & the archivist

by Suzanne Falkiner and Meredith Lawn

Rose de Freycinet, a nineteenth-century French woman, stowaway and diarist, unites a writer and an archivist 200 years later.

Flower patterns

How to colour in a ghost

by Rachel Franks

The challenges of bringing a hangman known as ‘Nosey Bob’ back to life.

Reimagining the Pacific

by Ian Hoskins

While the Pacific has loomed large in Australia’s history, there is a riddle at the heart of our relationship with the region.

Burns Philp Pacific cruise advertisement, The Home magazine, 2 January 1936

Shanty town

by Mark Dapin

A recent online boom in sea shanties is a welcome surprise for longtime converts.

Joe Hillel and Daniel Bornstein, The Grubby Urchins, photo supplied

Finding Charlotte

by Kate Forsyth

Two writers’ search for their mysterious and talented forebear was full of archival riches.

View at Oldbury, c 1826, by Charlotte Atkinson

The spreading fire of fake news

by Margaret Van Heekeren

Detail from The Fin de Siècle Newspaper Proprietor, an illustration featured in an 1894 issue of Puck magazine (source: Library of Congress)

Deeper history

by Rebecca Hamilton

Science and history come together in conserving the swamplands of southern Sydney.

Swamp paperbark trees (Melaleuca quinquenervia), Lachlan Swamp, Centennial Park, Sydney, 2019, photo by Rebecca Hamilton

20th Century onward

Do we still have time for Henry Lawson?

by Susan Hunt

It is 100 years since the famous writer and chronicler of bush life died.

A pastel portrait of Henry Lawson in profile. Lawson wears a suit and tie and has dark brown hair and a reddish brown bushy moustache. His eyes are slightly downcast as he looks to the right hand side of the frame.

The Long March from Wollongong

by Elizabeth Humphrys

A historian finds rich industrial history, and photography, in the archives.

When newspapers took over Australian television

by Sally Young

 The machinations behind the first Australian television licences.

Language that binds

by Ashley Kalagian Blunt

Images and interviews from linguistically diverse communities reflect the Library’s goal of collecting history as it happens.

The Armenian community in Sydney, particularly schools and church ceremonies, 1989–95, photo by Teny Aghamalian

War diaries of George Gittoes

by Louise Denoon

A selection of  visual diaries of Australian artist George Gittoes, covering the period between 2001 and 2014, have been recently digitised by the Library.

Detail from Image 8, Item 24: George Gittoes art diary, ca. April 2009-ca. December 2009

'Demonstrations were our internet'

by Ashleigh Synnott

Fifty years after the first gay rights organisation was founded in NSW, the activism of the 1970s still resonates.

Discover stories about Coming out in the 70s.