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.