06/07/2026
WARNING: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are warned that this post includes images and names of people who have passed away.
This week is NAIDOC Week, which celebrates and recognises the history, culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
We hold significant collections of records relating to Indigenous Australians. As professional archivists, we are committed to working in genuine partnership with Communities to reframe the archives, rebalance power, and restore dignity. This work is grounded in deep respect for Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing, and recognises that cultural authority rests with the Communities whose histories and knowledge systems are held within our collections. Guided by Indigenous ways of knowing and ethical stewardship, we seek to transform archival practice so that it centres cultural authority, strengthens Community agency, and supports reparative and future focused approaches to memory work.
To mark NAIDOC Week, we’re highlighting some of the records we hold relating to Indigenous Australians.
One of the key resources we have for researching Aboriginal history is our extensive collections of pastoral records. Historically, many Aboriginal people have worked on Australia’s pastoral stations for little or no pay. Surviving records relating to Aboriginal people are scarce, however we do hold valuable ration and wages books, correspondence and photographs.
In 2023 we undertook a major digitisation project with the help of the ANU Digital Scholarship Team, digitising a variety of Aboriginal wages and payment records and photographs from pastoral company collections. We continue to discover more records within our collections and digitise these, so they are more accessible to researchers.
Among these records are a selection of wages records; maternity, child endowment and maintenance claim forms; correspondence, and photographs from pastoral stations in the Northern Territory and Queensland including Avon Downs, Brunette Downs, Eva Downs, Victoria River Downs, Ularunda, Legune, Carlton Hill, Walhallow, Cresswell Downs, Headingly, Corona, and Mt Eba. These records date from circa early 1900s to 1970s and are helpful in tracing Aboriginal people who lived and worked on these stations.
In addition to our pastoral records, we hold the records of academics who spent time in Aboriginal communities researching language and customs. In particular, the records of anthropologist Marie Reay, and anthropologists and linguists Helen Groger-Wurm and Stephen Wurm.
Reay spent time with Aboriginal communities in western New South Wales (Walgett, Bourke, Moree, Coonabarabran and others) in the 1940s. She later extended her fieldwork to the Northern Territory, spending time with Aboriginal communities in Borroloola.
The Wurms spent time with different Aboriginal communities between during the 1950s & 1960s, recording many Indigenous Australian languages, particularly in New South Wales and Southern Queensland.
If you are looking for an Indigenous Australian that was a member of a trade union, we hold an extensive collection of trade union membership records dating from the 1800s and 1900s, so we may have a record of their trade union membership and some employment and personal details for them.
We have produced a guide to Indigenous records in our archives, which you can find on our website - https://libguides.anu.edu.au/Indigenous-archives.
You can also visit the ANU Open Research website to search our digitised records - https://hdl.handle.net/1885/2.
If you need any assistance finding records, please get in touch at [email protected].
