Quick Guide, 2023-24

Anzac Day 2024 – Military history online resources: a quick guide

Defence Culture Arts and Recreation

Author

Nicole Brangwin

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The purpose of this quick guide is to provide parliamentarians and their staff with helpful resources for researching various aspects of Australia’s military history. The 2024 iteration of this quick guide includes updates from previous versions and all hyperlinks are correct as of 18 April 2024.

Online military history resources

Australian War Memorial

The Australian War Memorial (AWM) website is a trusted resource for researching Australia’s military history, including:

Official histories

The digitised official histories of the First World War and the Second World War, which are referred to as the ‘national record of Australia’s involvement’ in these wars.  

Non-digitised official histories have been published on the Korean War, Southeast Asian conflicts and Peacekeeping and Post-Cold War operations. Official histories of Australia’s military involvement in East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan are in development. Volume I of the INTERFET deployment to East Timor (1999–2000) was published in December 2022.

For parliamentarians and their staff, hardcopies of the published official histories are available from the Parliamentary Library’s collection.

Indigenous service

There is a dedicated section of the AWM website for Indigenous service in Australia’s armed forces in peace and war, which includes ongoing research findings from the Boer War, First World War, Second World War, British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF) in Japan, Korean War, the Malayan Emergency and the Vietnam War. The Indigenous service hub features an Indigenous Service List of around 3,532 personnel who served from the Boer War to the Vietnam War.

Commemoration

The Roll of Honour commemorates more than 103,000 Australian military personnel who ‘died during or as a result of war service, or for Post-1945 conflicts, warlike service, non-warlike service and certain peacetime operations’.

The Commemorative Roll honours Australians ‘who died during or as a result of service in wars, conflicts or operations identical with the Roll of Honour, but who are not members of the Australian armed forces’.

In November 2014 the National Anzac Centre at Albany, Western Australia, was officially opened. The centre was developed by the Western Australian Museum and the AWM at Albany to commemorate the original embarkment and deployment point for Australian and New Zealand military personnel during the First World War.

War diaries

Digitised unit and commander’s war diaries are available from the First World War, Second World War, Korean War, Vietnam War and Australia’s contribution to the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC). These diaries contain records of daily activities by Australian Army units.

First World War records

Digitised First World War embarkation roll, nominal roll and Red Cross wounded and missing files enable searches of individual personnel.

Military casualties

Record of Australian military casualties from conflicts in New Zealand in 1860 to the Middle East in 2014.

Research resources

The ‘Researching a person’ function allows searches of the AWM’s collection for information about individual people and at the bottom of this function’s webpage are helpful research guides for researching Australian’s military service.

Classroom resources provide access to material on an extensive range of topics, including women in the military, military animals and military skin tattoos.

Department of Veterans’ Affairs 

Anzac Day resources

The Department of Veterans’ Affairs (DVA) offers a variety of resources to help commemorate Anzac Day, including the Anzac Portal and Anzac Day Kitbag.

Nominal rolls

DVA publishes an online database of 4 nominal rolls of veterans from the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the First Gulf War (preliminary) to acknowledge and commemorate their service.

War graves

The DVA’s Office of Australian War Graves (OAWG) is responsible for maintaining war cemeteries and war graves in Australia and overseas. The OAWG webpage provides guidance on ways to commemorate Australians who died during conflict and provides a list of war cemeteries in Australia and overseas. The OAWG is an agent of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in maintaining ‘war cemeteries, individual war graves and memorials for members of the Commonwealth forces who died during the First and Second world wars’. The DVA website provides guidance material on commemorations, memorials and war graves.

Research resources

The DVA website contains a large number of media backgrounder fact sheets on various aspects of Australia’s military history, including Australian women in the First World War, where Australians served and National Service

DVA also publishes a range of online resources including oral histories, videos, images and books, such as:

National Archives of Australia 

Historical records

The National Archives of Australia (NAA) website contains an array of primary source military history documents and thematic fact sheets. These include service records, administrative records, internment records and national service records. The NAA holds records on conflicts Australia has been involved in from 1899 to 1975. These records relate to:

  • civilian service
  • courts-martial
  • merchant navy
  • munitions workers
  • soldier settlement
  • veterans’ cases
  • war crimes
  • war gratuities
  • war graves
  • defence administration and policy.

The NAA guide to researching war service provides useful information, as well as a link to the ‘Record search’ database.

First and Second World Wars digitisation projects

The service records of more than 376,000 men and women who served in the First World War have been digitised and made publicly available as part of the ‘Gift to the Nation’ digitisation project.

The NAA has digitised more than 1 million records of men and women who served in the Second World War, which are being progressively released online. 

The NAA’s Discovering Anzacs website on the Boer War and First World War, which was developed for Centenary of Anzac commemorations, was decommissioned in February 2023. However, the records remain accessible via the NAA’s defence and war service records page

National Library of Australia

The National Library of Australia’s (NLA) Trove website contains a historical record of digitised newspapers, government gazettes and archived websites. It is possible to search more than 25 million newspaper pages and over 2 million gazette pages via Trove spanning the early 1800s to the 2020s. These newspapers are keyword-searchable and provide substantial media coverage of conflicts Australia has been involved in, personal stories from local newspaper articles, and the impact on the home front.

The AIF Project

The AIF Project is a public database of First World War personnel that has been developed over more than 20 years by Emeritus Professor Peter Dennis and hosted by the University of NSW. The database contains open-source information drawn from official sources and allows searches by name, service number or location of birth/place of residence upon enlistment.

Australian Dictionary of Biography

The Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) website contains searchable biographical articles of notable personalities, including those involved in the Australian military. The ADB is maintained by the National Centre of Biography at the Australian National University.

ParlInfo

The Parliament of Australia’s ‘ParlInfo’ database enables access to digitised records, using keyword searches, of House of Representatives and Senate Hansard from the first Parliament onwards, most committee reports and proceedings, Bills debated in each chamber, tabled documents and political party documents. This database can be useful for identifying parliamentary debates and political party positions during times of peace and war.

Thematic topics

Honours and awards

The Department of Defence’s ‘Honours and awards’ section of its website contains information regarding different types of Imperial and Australian military awards.

The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet’s It’s an Honour website provides further details on Australian honours, including the ability to search by an individual’s name or a specific award.

Services of the Australian Defence Force

The Royal Australian Navy’s (RAN) Sea Power Centre – Australia (SPC-A) website contains reference material regarding the histories of RAN vessels, aircraft and naval bases, customs and traditions and biographies of prominent personnel. The website also features a timeline containing articles on thematic histories from the 1800s to the present and other publications, as well as information about RAN museum and heritage learning centres across Australia, including an online heritage collection called eHive.

The Australian Army History Unit develops policy and programs to preserve and promote Australian Army history through publications regarding the Australian Army forces’ contribution to conflicts from pre-Federation to Somalia in the 1990s. It also provides information about traditions and honours and awards, and operates 16 Army museums across Australia.

The Royal Australian Air Force’s (RAAF) History and Heritage Branch maintains the RAAF’s historical collection. The RAAF website contains information on the RAAF’s formation and former chiefs of Air Force as well as information on the RAAF museum and heritage centres.

Military intelligence

In February 2023 the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) released the first volume of its official history, titled The Factory: the official history of the Australian Signals Directorate, vol. 1, written by Dr John Fahey. For parliamentarians and their staff, hardcopies are available from the Library’s collection. The ASD ‘History’ webpage contains a timeline and a brief history of the organisation. Dr Fahey also published Australia’s first spies: the remarkable story of Australia’s intelligence operations, 1901–45 in 2018.

The NAA website features historical information about the development of Australia’s intelligence and security capability, including signals and defence intelligence and key events in intelligence history such as royal commissions.

The Australian Army Military Intelligence Museum (established in 1988) highlights the history of military intelligence operations, which originated with the formation of the ‘oldest Commonwealth Intelligence Corps’, the Australian Intelligence Corps on 6 December 1907.

Soldier settlement

The Year book Australia 1925, published on the Australian Bureau of Statistics website, includes a synopsis of the soldier settlement schemes by state from 1914 to 1918, including statistics on the areas of land acquired at 30 June 1924.

The AWM lists a variety of resources about soldier settlement after the First World War.

The Public Record Office Victoria (now archived) website, Battle to Farm, holds the digitised records for soldier settlers in Victoria from 1919 to 1935.

The NSW State Archives’ website, A Land Fit for Heroes? (now archived), is a history of soldier settlement in NSW from 1916 to 1939, developed by the Australian Research Council, Monash University, the University of New England, DVA and State Records NSW.

The Queensland State Archives published a Research guide to soldier settlement records at Queensland State Archives as well as an index of soldier settlement ledgers from 1917 to 1929, and a series of papers from the Land Department relating to soldier settlement.

The South Australian State Archives holds records relating to soldier settlement during the First and Second World Wars. The SA State Archives website also highlights collection items about SA’s contribution to the military and war, including statistics, prior to Federation through to the First World War.

Information about soldier settlement in Tasmania from 1917 to the 1940s can be accessed through the Libraries Tasmania website, including a database of Tasmanian names index.

Archives ACT provides a detailed overview of the First World War soldier settlement scheme in the then Federal Capital Territory (now Australian Capital Territory), including a name search index, maps and a guide. This website also provides other resources, including Canberra Women in the First World War and ACT Memorials.