Connecting you with Australian culture online
Image courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney. Fiona Hall, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2005. Fiona Hall, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 2005....
Image courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney. Fiona Hall, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2005. Fiona Hall, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 2005....
The Holden name first appeared in Australia in the 1850s with J A Holden's leather and saddlery business in Adelaide, South Australia. In 1924, the company was renamed Holden's Motor Body Builders and became the exclusive supplier of American car manufac...
Image courtesy of the Sydney Morning Herald. Lawrence Hargrave, who achieved the first powered flight in 1894 with four box kites, was said to be symbolic of many Australian inventors and Australian innovation; 'He was interested in the invention, not th...
Some trading ships were going to the East Indies for spices and lost their way in high winds and seas - literally 'bumping' into Australia's west coast. From 1788, English ships brought convicts and settlers to the colonies. Australia's first known ship...
Aviation has been very significant in Australia. As a country with large distances to cross and a sparse population, aviation was an ideal way to provide services such as mail, transport, medical support and goods supply. All around Australia, a large n...
Cable Beach, Broome, north-west Kimberley Coast, Western Australia. Most of Australia's population lives close to the coastline and the beach has long occupied a special place in the Australian identity. Based on this definition, the Coastal Studies Uni...
Chinese New Year is the longest and most important celebration in the Chinese calendar. Memorabilia is displayed in museums like the Chinese Museum, Melbourne, and the Golden Dragon Museum, Bendigo. Bendigo Chinese Association Golden Dragon Museum....
There are a number of professions in Australia that contribute to a diverse design industry, including architects, interior designers, landscape architects, graphic designers, jewellers, industrial designers, fashion designers, furniture makers and textil...
A wide variety of Australian fashion textiles - hand-coloured, printed and painted silks, woven wool, dyed discharge and devore prints, ground velvets, and ochred designs based on traditional Aboriginal body paintings have all contributed to the definitio...
Riversleigh, north-west Queensland, one of the most important fossil sites in the world. The Riversleigh fossil site, near Mount Isa Queensland, is recognised as one of the most important fossil sites in the world. The Riversleigh and Narracoote (SA) fo...
The Great Depression (1929-32) was a time of extreme hardship for people in Australia. Even before the devastating stock market crash on Wall Street (the centre of stock market trading in New York, United States of America), unemployment in Australia was...
Photograph courtesy of the Victoria Racing Club. Melbourne Cup Day is Australia's most famous Tuesday. At 3.00 pm AEST, on the first Tuesday in November, Australians everywhere stop for one of the world's most famous horse races - the Melbourne Cup....
International Museum Day is celebrated on 18 May each year. Australian museums vary from the small, the privately owned, the community museums, to the large, government enterprises. International Museum Day was established in 1977 by the International C...
The Olympic Games: past present and future Olympic- and sports-related sites Sydney: home of the 2000 Olympic Games Australia: culture, heritage, history Sydney Olympic website (now archived) The Official site of the Games of the XXVII Olympiad Sydney, N...
Bardi people, Cape Leveque, Kimberley region, Western Australia Pearl shell, red pigment. Australia's pearling industry began long before European settlement. Northern Australian coastal dwelling Aborigines harvested the abundant pearl shell from the shal...
The first train lines in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide spanned only a few kilometres. These early inland rail lines formed the basis for the systems that would eventually become Australia's transcontinental railways. Diesel trains are still used for cou...
In England, furniture, jewellery, household items, ceramics, hand-decorated wallpapers and textiles, gardens and even entire houses were produced in the Arts and Crafts style. The Arts and Crafts movement spread internationally. Australian designers lea...
UNESCO states that Indigenous populations number some 350 million individuals in more than 70 countries in the world, and that this represents more than 5000 languages and cultures. Today, many Indigenous peoples live on the fringes of society and are de...
This article may contain the names and images of Aboriginal and Islander people now deceased. While tools varied by group and location, Aboriginal people all had implements such as knives, scrapers, axe-heads, spears, various vessels for eating and drink...
If you can see this message, you are probably not seeing this site in the way it was designed. This site uses cascading style sheets (CSS2) to control the way in which elements are displayed on the page.
You will still be able to access everything in this site, but we do recommend you upgrade your browser to a more recent, standards compliant, browser.