What was Australian life like over the past 100 years? What did people such as our grandparents and great grandparents do for work? for recreation? for holidays? What kind of houses did they live in? What music did they listen to? What entertainment did they have? Who was prime minister at that time? It is obvious from ancestry-type TV programs that these are questions that intrigue modern day Australians. However, a person researching background information for their family history is likely to find the vast wealth of material a veritable minefield to traverse.
We need an application that combines information from various datasets covering the past 100 years in Australia. Photo collections from the Hood and Hall collections (NSW State Library), Argus Collection (Vic ) and similar photo collections from other State libraries and the National Library, can be linked with oral histories (State Library NSW, National Library & Trove), articles from Australian newspapers, relevant books & diary extracts (Trove database) and recordings from the Music Australia website plus the Sheet Music Collection related to various time periods, information about Australia’s Prime Ministers and important decisions that affected lives of ordinary Australians as well as audio recordings of significant political speeches (National Archives)
When the user selects a specific event such as the Great Depression or a decade such as 1950s, the application would display photos of that era, a list of relevant oral histories, including online recordings where available, Prime Ministers of that period, audio recordings of their speeches and a list of their important decisions, recordings of music & songs, a list of sheet music from that period, artistic performances that took place, diary extracts & either a list of or extracts from Australian newspaper articles, thereby creating a wonderful overview of life at any given time during the past 100 years.
