Aboriginal Australian

A comprehensive guide to undertaking Indigenous family history research throughout Australia. Includes an online request form as well as links to organisations such as Link-Up, which assists in family tracing and reunion of Indigenous people who were removed.

Australian Museum website looking at indigenous peoples long association with the Habour and looks at the wildlife and natural environment. Includes placenames, clans ,language and foods.

The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies holds computer-based information about Australia's Indigenous languages in the Aboriginal Studies Electronic Data Archive. The Archive is available to language community members and to researchers in the field of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. This page describes material held by ASEDA.

Full text of Board annual reports from 1884 - 1956.

These protocols are intended to guide libraries, archives and information services in appropriate ways to interact with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the communities, and handle material with Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander content.

Published for the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee (NACC) by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in 2004, this CDROM contains the electoral roll for over 27,000 Indigenous people (aged 18 and over) who voted to elect 41 members of the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee ( NACC ) on 24 November 1973.

NACC voters had to be an Aboriginal person or Torres Strait Islander and registered on the Commonwealth Electoral Roll. The total number of Aboriginal adults eligible to enrol for the NACC elections was 53,000 and the total number of Aboriginals in Australia at the time is estimated at 116,000.

The NACC was the first national representative organisation in the Australian body politic for Australian Aborigines. Altogether there were 41 National Aboriginal Consultative Committee Electoral Districts: New South Wales 8; Victoria 3; Queensland 9; South Australia 4; Western Australia 8; Tasmania 1; and Northern Territory 8. Electors residing in the Capital Territory were included in the appropriate Electoral District for the State of New South Wales.

In 1977 the Federal Government dissolved the NACC and replaced it with the National Aboriginal Conference (NAC), which in turn was abolished in 1986. The NAC was subsequently superseded by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), established by the Federal Government under Bob Hawke through the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission Act 1989 (the ATSIC Act), which took effect on 5 March 1990. ATSIC was then formally abolished on 24 March 2005 by the Federal Government under John Howard.

The Australian Electoral Commission has guides ' Electoral Milestones for Indigenous Australians ' and a 'History of the Indigenous Vote' at Australian Electoral History.

This site provides information on the history of the Australian Aboriginal flag.

Part of the WWW Virtual Library Project, this site has links to resources for about 50 of the more than 200 Australian Aboriginal languages. These are grouped by state, language name, and type of resource, such as dictionaries, courses and other categories.

The select list of 150 items provides a readily accessible compilation of some significant microfilmed records (mainly manuscript) concerning the Australian Aboriginal peoples.

A guide to evaluated websites for Aboriginal studies, maintained in conjunction with the Center For World Indigenous Studies' Indigenous Studies WWW Virtual Library.

A collection of texts about Aboriginal spirituality, myths and legends. Because this site only provides texts in the public domain, the texts about Australian Aboriginal religion are mainly historical (nineteenth and early twentieth century) texts by white Australians. Part of the Internet Sacred Text Archive.

The Australian Indigenous Index or INFOKOORI is a State Library of NSW index to the Koori Mail: the fortnightly national indigenous newspaper, published in Lismore, NSW, since May 1991, that focuses on the Indigenous people of Australia.

INFOKOORI is also an index to biographical information from other periodicals held by the NSW State Library besides the Koori Mail including: Our aim : a monthly record of the Aborigines' Inland Mission of Australia. (1907–1961), Dawn : a magazine for the Aboriginal people of N.S.W. (1952–1969), New Dawn (1970–1975) and Identity: Aboriginal Publications Foundation (1971–1982).

You can access Dawn and New Dawn, for full-text online versions of these 2 periodicals. Published by the NSW Aborigines Welfare Board, they contain family history information such as births, deaths, and marriages, as well as hundreds of photographs. They also contain articles about conditions and activities on reserves, stations, homes and schools in NSW.

Historical information about Aboriginal people and communities is also being added from other newspapers published in NSW that are held by the NSW State Library, such as the Armidale Express, the Dubbo Dispatch and Wellington Independent, the Australian Evangel , Today, the Daily Examiner (Grafton) and the North-western Watchman (Coonabarabran).

AIATSIS Library is Australia's major information resource collection on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander topics.

The Indigenous history of Sydney City. Contains a thematic introduction, biographies, useful contacts, and references to books, films, images and websites.

A national Indigenous business and community enterprise directory. As well as providing a comprehensive national listing of Indigenous businesses, community enterprises and services, Black Pages aims to be a central communication portal to promote Australia's Indigenous culture and facilitate community and socio-economic development. Links to Government and other information relating to Indigenous affairs are listed in the 'Smart links section.

This site contains the Report of the national inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families.

The history of the Aboriginal people of inner-western Sydney.

This site provides information on the Council, the People's Movement for Reconciliation, the Australian Reconciliation Convention, a calendar of events and a list of current publications.

Dawn and New dawn magazines were published between 1952 and 1975 by the NSW Aborigines Welfare Board. They include family history information such as births, deaths, and marriages, as well as hundreds of photographs. They also contain articles about conditions and activities on reserves, stations, homes and schools in NSW. The full text of Dawn and New dawn are available at this site. Biographical information on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Dawn, New dawn and other magazines is also indexed by the INFOKOORI Database.

ENIAR aims to promote awareness on Indigenous issues and to provide information for Indigenous Australians about Europe and international organisations.

Informit is the leading provider of online access to indexes and full text databases of Australasian scholarly research. A product of RMIT Publishing, databases can be divided into the following major subject areas: Agriculture, Arts, Asian, Business, Education, Engineering, Health, History, Indigenous, Law, Media, Reference, Sciences, Social Sciences and Technology.

Connecting Kin is a 383-page NSW Department of Community Services guide to NSW records from 1900 onwards aimed at helping people separated from their birth families (through adoption, fostering etc) to locate records about their separation and their families. The Guide was published in September 1998.

Since 1924, over 100,000 children, both Aboriginal and non - Aboriginal, have been made wards of the State of NSW. Thousands more have been placed with other families under adoption or other arrangements.

The guide includes : a brief history of child welfare in NSW; a chronology of key events in NSW child welfare; listing of records at NSW Government welfare agencies, non government agencies, public hospitals and NSW Government non-welfare agencies; Appendix 1 : Services and other sources of information; Appendix 2 : chronological summary of child welfare agencies in NSW; Appendix 3 : brief history of missions in NSW; Appendix 4 : brief history of Aboriginal reserves in NSW; Appendix 5 : definitions and abbreviations used in this Guide; and index.

The index is a key element of the guide as it indexes all the records in the guide by place name (eg: town or suburb name), name of agency (ie Department of Community Services) and name of home or program (ie Parramatta Training School for Girls) with extensive cross referencing. It also indexes the appendices which appear in the Guide.

Records referred to in the guide's 4 main sections ( NSW Government welfare agencies, non government agencies, public hospitals and NSW Government non-welfare agencies ) are grouped under the name, institution or program they relate to, and then are listed in 'series'. A series is a collection of records which usually have the same format ( eg:files, photographs, registers) and which were created for a particular function.

Before starting a search for your birth family, it would be useful to know your date and place of birth, where you were brought up (ie; the name of the children's home and/or the school you attended) and the name/s of your foster or adoptive parents. It is also important to know that for confidentiality reasons, there are a variety of conditions and procedures governing access to records.

A number of agencies which hold records offer support and counselling services. These include:

(1) Family Support Services, NSW Department of Community Services, (02) 9865 5961 or toll free 1800 049 956; (2) Anglican Adoption Agency (Careforce) (02) 9890 6855; (3) Barnardo's Adoption Agency (02) 9281 5510; (4) Centacare Adoption Service (02) 9744 7055; (5) Mercy Family Centre (02) 9487 3022; and (6) Salvation Army (02) 9266 9829.

In addition, there are a number of groups which offer advice, information, mediation and counselling. These include : (1) Adoption Triangle NSW Inc which has a number of country and interstate groups. Phone (02) 4965 5888 for the number of the nearest group to you; (2) Origins Inc (02) 9560 8808; (3) the Post Adoption Resource Centre (02) 9365 3444 or toll free 1800 024 256; and (4) Link-Up (NSW) Aboriginal Corporation (02) 4759 1911.

The online 'Connecting Kin' guide may be slow in downloading because it is a large pdf file. You could also go to related links on the righthand column of the NSW Department of Community Services webpage Are you a former ward?

This site provides information on what native title is and what the Tribunal does, media releases, information on how to apply, official guidelines and a time line of native title applications for all regions of Australia.

Information on how to access the records of the Aborigines Protection Board, later renamed the Aborigines Welfare Board. The time period covered is 1833-1969. The Board's records include details of children removed as well as detailed information on all aspects of life on stations and reserves, such as financial statements, salary and employment details, tenancy agreements and applications to leave the reserve. The site also includes contact details for help with Indigenous family research.

This site provides information on how to gain access to the Aborigines Welfare Board, Aboriginal Lands Trust and Department of Community Services and Aboriginal Services branch records. The guide also lists holdings of records of the Aborigines Welfare Board 1883–1969 and state archives from other government agencies relating to Aboriginal peoples.

The papers of Edward Koiki Mabo are held in the National Library of Australia. This site provides a biographical note, series list, series descriptions, box list and selected Mabo images of the papers held.

The library includes significant documents concerning reconciliation and social justice, most of which are not otherwise available via the Internet. This site provides a searchable full-text database of the library's holdings.

This site provides stories from the cultures of Indigenous Australians and have been collected from all over Australia. The stories are available in video, audio and text-only formats.

This site provides information on the history of the Torres Strait Islander flag.

This site provides information on Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander music, sport, entertainment and lifestyle. It contains profiles of Indigenous music and sport stars and community identities. The site has a strong health focus as well as providing up to date Indigenous job vacancy listings, further education course guides, a national events guide, radio station directory and school based story writing competitions.