Gwoja Tjungurrayi features on our $2 coin and was the first living Australian to feature on a postage stamp. It turns out he made his stamp debut much earlier.
She was a feted opera singer, and Australia’s first celebrity. But there were many sides to Nellie Melba, a complex, clever businesswoman with a rather contemporary take on fame.
Historical artefacts of every facet of Australian life - from government to migration to popular culture - is held by the National Archives. Without an urgent injection of funds, it could all be lost.
Royal New Zealand Returned and Services' Association Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, NZ (Tiaki reference number 1/4-009458-G)
Anzac soldiers wrote poetry about body lice, shared treatment tips and experimented with new ways of bathing.
Crowds ahead of the dawn service at Canberra’s National War Memorial in 2018. Attendance at the service fell from 120,000 in 2015 to 35,000 in 2019.
Rohan Thomson/AAP
The prime minister calls it “our most sacred day”, but numbers at Anzac Day dawn services fell by 70% from 2015-2019.
Mrs Chan Harr, Marjorie Wong Yee, Annie Kwok, Norma Wong Yee, Ida Kwok, and Patty Wong Yee on their arrival in Sydney from Hong Kong on the SS Changte, 8 March 1938.
ACP Magazines Ltd Photographic Archive, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales (ON 388/Box 043/Item 035)
In 1901, there were almost 30,000 Chinese men in Australia but fewer than 500 women. Despite their small numbers, emerging research reveals surprising stories of Chinese Australian women’s lives.
What happens when the distant frontier takes up residence in the family home? How are we to remember our flawed ancestors? A new book grapples with these questions.
A mug shot of Neville McQuade (aged 18) and Lewis Stanley Keith (aged 19), taken at North Sydney Police Station in June 1942.
Sydney Living Museums
It would be ‘aggressively Australian’, holding a mirror up to contemporary society. The creation of the first Macquarie Dictionary, while not without controversies, was a cultural milestone.
A new book, about the suburban women who poisoned their husbands in post-war Sydney, explores their cold-blooded modus operandi and the hot dinners they prepared.
A Chinese community dinner in Sydney, some time in the 1930s.
City of Sydney Archives
From Cantonese sausage on the goldfields, to mid-century sweet and sour pork, to today’s delicate xiao long bao, Chinese food in Australia has come a long way.
Rosaleen Norton works in crayon in a converted stable in Kings Cross in Sydney, 1946.
News Ltd/Black Jelly Films
An artist and self-proclaimed witch, Rosaleen Norton defied cultural norms in Menzies-era Australia. Reviled by the media, she was a powerfully unconventional woman.
Discrimination against trans women at Sydney’s McIver’s Ladies Baths is, sadly, just the latest in a long history of some Australians being excluded from the water.
The main chamber of Cloggs Cave. Monash University archaeologist Joe Crouch is standing in the 1970s excavation pit, digging a new area in the wall of the old excavation.
Bruno David
Two starkly different research projects at East Gippsland’s Cloggs Cave, 50 years apart, show the importance of Indigenous perspectives in archaeology.
When British colonials came to Australia, they stuck to their winter Christmas traditions of roast meats and plum puddings. But over the centuries, Australians found their own ways to celebrate.