Key Websites and Archives

The national institute, and the single best starting point for almost any question. AIATSIS holds the largest collection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander material in the world, publishes research through Aboriginal Studies Press, and maintains guides that explain how to use its collection rather than merely listing what sits in it. Begin here when a question has no obvious home.

The most patient guide available to anyone tracing family history through records that governments created for their own purposes. It explains where to start, how records were made, and which organisation to approach in each state. The Queensland page names the local services and their contact details.

The national index of orphanages, children's Homes, missions, and other institutions that held children in out-of-home care between 1920 and 1990, built by historians, archivists, and social workers at the University of Melbourne and Australian Catholic University. Search by name, place, period, or type, and each entry records who ran the institution, which laws governed it, and where its records sit now. Find & Connect covers every child removed into institutional care rather than First Nations children alone, so use it beside Link-Up (Qld) and the Queensland Government records service rather than instead of them. Its Stolen Generations Survivors Style Guide sets out how the site describes First Nations records and experiences, and free support services answer on the number above.

Millions of digitised newspaper pages, free and searchable by name, place, and date. Much frontier history sits here in plain sight, printed openly at the time by people who saw nothing to hide. Search a district and a decade and the record answers for itself. Historical papers reproduce the racism of the people who wrote them, so approach the results ready for that.

The mapped and sourced record of frontier killings, built over years by Lyndall Ryan's research team. Each site lists its evidence and its references. Zoom to south-east Queensland and the map answers the myth of peaceful settlement more quickly than any argument does.

The report that named the Stolen Generations and gave the country its evidence. The Commission keeps the full text online alongside its community guide and follow-up reports, so the findings, the testimony, and the recommendations all remain a click apart. Also listed among the reading list's primary sources.

State Library has run kuril dhagun as its centre for Queensland Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures since 2006, and the online portal gathers the collections, language work, family history guidance, and public programs that come with it. The closest thing Brisbane has to a front door for this material, and it stands twenty minutes from Mitchelton by train.

Brief histories of the missions, reserves, and settlements that the 1897 Act brought under government control, gathered in one place with Kathy Frankland's account of how that administration worked. Read it alongside the Act itself, which heads the reading list, and the machinery behind Cherbourg, Yarrabah, and Barambah becomes legible.

The Queensland Government holds the records its predecessors created under the 1897 Act and the Protection Acts that followed, and the Community and Personal Histories team helps Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people find their own. The service costs nothing. Many of the records contain culturally sensitive and personal material, and the page says so plainly.

Correspondence, removal orders, reserve files, census returns, and land records, indexed and increasingly digitised. The 1859 to 1903 inwards correspondence index alone opens the colonial period to anyone with a name and a district. The sessions keep pointing toward this paper trail.

Public libraries and knowledge hubs owned and run by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander councils, in partnership with State Library since 2002. Each reflects the community that runs it. A useful corrective for anyone who pictures Queensland's First Nations institutions as concentrated in Brisbane.

Since 1984, Link-Up (Qld) has reunited Stolen Generations survivors and their descendants with family, community, and Country, through research, counselling, and support before, during, and after a reunion. Listed here because a truth-telling audience should know where the practical help lives, not only where the history sits.

The familiar map of language, tribal, and nation groups across the continent, drawn from published research and best read as an attempt rather than a survey, which AIATSIS itself makes clear. Still the fastest way to show anyone that Australia held hundreds of nations rather than one.

The first Australian map that lets communities control how their own languages appear publicly, built with regional language centres. The name means together in Butchulla, the language of the Hervey Bay region. Each entry links to its AUSTLANG code and to further material, and many include recordings of speakers.

The organisation behind Gambay, and the place to follow language revival as national policy rather than as scattered local effort. Teachers will find notes aligned to the curriculum from foundation to Year 10.

State Library works with communities on languages living and sleeping across Queensland, and publishes word lists, greetings, and an interactive languages map. Anyone who wants to say Yuggera and Turrbal correctly, or to learn a greeting before a session, should start here.

Luke Pearson's platform gives First Nations writers a place to publish without a mainstream editor between them and the reader. Read it to hear arguments among First Nations people rather than only the version that reaches the national papers.

The national Indigenous newspaper, owned by five Bundjalung community organisations and independent of government funding. Its back issues from 1991 onward now sit in the AIATSIS collection, which makes it both current reading and a historical record of the past three decades.

Daily reporting on Indigenous affairs across news, justice, business, arts, and sport, with a state filter that pulls the Queensland stories out of the national feed. Reach for it when a story breaks and the mainstream coverage feels thin, or when someone at a session asks what is happening now rather than what happened then. A free newsletter delivers the headlines to an inbox.

Short, clear explainers on Country, culture, history, and truth-telling, written for people who want to learn without asking the nearest Aboriginal person to teach them. The Weaving Truths series was built with First Nations storytellers as a truth-telling resource for secondary schools, and works equally well for adults at the beginning.

The founding document of truth-telling in this country, kept by its custodians alongside the recording of Professor Megan Davis reading it aloud at Mutitjulu on 26 May 2017, the Referendum Council's final report, and the records of every Regional Dialogue behind it. Four minutes to read, and it asks for a Makarrata Commission to supervise truth-telling about history.

Four years of hearings, submissions, and compelled State records, closing with reports tabled on 1 July 2025 that establish an official public record and attach 100 recommendations to it. The transcripts and witness evidence stay online, which makes Yoorrook a working library rather than a finished monument.

Queensland's own inquiry began hearing evidence in 2024 and closed before it could finish, yet its document library and its learning pages survive. Three speakers from these sessions gave evidence to it. Read it beside Yoorrook and the difference between an inquiry completed and an inquiry stopped becomes concrete.

The national body working with Stolen Generations survivors and their descendants on intergenerational trauma and healing. Its resources explain what the Bringing Them Home recommendations sought, what governments did afterward, and what survivors still need. The practical companion to the report.

ANTAR campaigns for treaty, truth-telling, voice, cultural heritage protection, justice reinvestment, and an end to over-incarceration, working alongside First Nations leaders and organisations. A majority First Nations board has governed it since 2023, and it names itself an ally organisation rather than a First Nations one. Its truth-telling pages explain what truth-telling means, trace its history in Australia, and set out how communities run it themselves, which describes what happens at Mitchelton every month.

Practical material for communities running their own truth-telling, from the national body for reconciliation, including research on the barriers that stop local efforts and the conditions that let them succeed. Reconciliation Australia also publishes clear guidance on Acknowledgement of Country and Welcome to Country, and its Reconciliation Barometer measures what Australians actually think rather than what commentators assume. First Nations thinkers, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang among them, question whether reconciliation as a frame lets settler Australians off too lightly, and reading the criticism beside the resources sharpens both.

Lesson plans, professional learning, and Reconciliation Action Plan tools for schools and early learning services, all free and mapped to the Australian curriculum. Teachers and grandparents who leave a session asking what children should learn will find the answer built and ready here.