Link: Australian Newspapers On-Line

[stonechat]

There does seem to be a different attitude in Oz.
The military records where they have been scanned are online.

In the case of the newspapers in UK, the British Library have partnered up with Gale n similar way to the National Archives allows companies to scan records e.g. findmypast and the shipping records.


Bob

[Siamese Girl]

The Australian attitude to its military records I always find  quite humbling in comparison to the UKs. Like so many others my grandfather's WW1 record has been carefully photographed and is free to view - all 60 pages of it. Here it's £3.50 just to find out what you can have guessed, that someone got their bog standard 2 war medals ...

I do feel that Australia honour their soldiers more than us.

Carole

[q98]

The availability of our soldiers records is probably due to Australia's First World War official war correspondent C W Bean. The Australian War Memorial was his idea and he was, I believe, its first Director.

Q98

[MarieC]

Well, I didn't know that either, Q98!  You're always learning on here!

WWII records haven't been digitised on the site yet - some of these men are still alive.  But you can pay to have your own ancestor's records digitised and put on there.  Not totally cheap, but a good thing to do - keep meaning to do it for my dad.

MarieC

[Siamese Girl]

Well, I didn't know that either, Q98!  You're always learning on here!

WWII records haven't been digitised on the site yet - some of these men are still alive.  But you can pay to have your own ancestor's records digitised and put on there.  Not totally cheap, but a good thing to do - keep meaning to do it for my dad.

MarieC

This isn't quite true - I've looked at my mother's boyfriend's WW2 RAAF record. Perhaps his is available because he died in 1970?

Carole

[MarieC]

Oh yes, it's right, Carole, because I've looked into it.  Your mother's boyfriend's record and any others that are there, are there because someone has paid for them to be digitised and put there.  Unfortunately they don't check all the veterans to see who has died and put their records up - it would be a massive task - if they did, my Dad's records would be there by now and I wouldn't have to be paying to put them there!!!!

MarieC

[q98]

Two excellent books to read are:
Bean's Gallipoli - The Diaries of Australia's Official War Correspondent, Allen and Unwin, ISBN 978-1-74175-088-1
and
Goodbye Cobber, God Bless You, Pan Macmillan Australia, ISBN
1-4050-3624-9

Goodbye Cobber etc. was immortalized in the Peter Weir movie "Gallipoli". At a location named "The Nek", six hundred Australian Lighthorse men charged, in four waves, across a piece of ground no larger than three tennis courts, armed ONLY with bayonets. The order was "rifles unloaded and uncharged" - no magazine and no round in the breach! "The Nek" was reinforced with artrillery, machine-guns and thousands of Turks.  Each wave of Lighthouse men rose and charged despite seeing what happened to the previous wave. There being so many dead and wounded, running was impossible.

Q98

[Siamese Girl]

Oh yes, it's right, Carole, because I've looked into it.  Your mother's boyfriend's record and any others that are there, are there because someone has paid for them to be digitised and put there.  Unfortunately they don't check all the veterans to see who has died and put their records up - it would be a massive task - if they did, my Dad's records would be there by now and I wouldn't have to be paying to put them there!!!!

MarieC

Well that's very interesting - I didn't know that and I'm now very curious as to who paid to have it digitalised as he never married and didn't have that much of a family.
I know it took time (not surprisingly) for the WW1 records to be done, and you could request a few a year to be digitalised withou any cost, as my cousin requested his grandfathers records.
I do know my mother's record won't be there as although she was a WRAAF because she joined up in England her records are not kept in Australia.

Carole

[Kybama]

Take a look at what http://www.nambour-chronicle.com is doing. It's an archive of the Nambour Chronicle & North Coast Advertiser first published in 1903.