The purpose of this quick guide is to provide
parliamentarians and their staff with helpful resources for researching various
aspects of Australia’s military history. The 2025 iteration of this quick guide
includes updates from previous versions and all hyperlinks are correct as of
April 2025.
Online military
history resources
Australian War Memorial
The Australian War Memorial (AWM) website is a trusted resource for researching
Australia’s military history.
Official histories
The digitised official histories of the First
World War and the Second
World War, are referred to as
the ‘national record of Australia’s involvement’ in these wars.
Non-digitised official histories have been published on the
Korean War, Southeast Asian conflicts and Peacekeeping and Post-Cold War
operations. Official histories of Australia’s military involvement in East
Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan are in development. Volume I of the INTERFET
deployment to East Timor (1999–2000) was published in December 2022.
For parliamentarians and their staff, hardcopies of the
published official histories are available from the Parliamentary Library’s
collection.
Indigenous service
There is a dedicated section of the AWM website for Indigenous service in Australia’s armed forces in peace and war,
which includes ongoing research from the Boer War, First World War, Second
World War, the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF) in Japan, the Korean
War, the Malayan Emergency and the Vietnam War. The Indigenous
service hub features an Indigenous Service
List that acknowledges the
names of people of Indigenous descent who served in overseas conflicts from the
Boer War to the Vietnam War. In 2024, there were 3,532 names. As research
continues, the list of names has now grown to 3,594.
Commemoration
The Roll of Honour commemorates 103,044
Australian military personnel who ‘died during or as a result of war
service, or for Post-1945 conflicts, warlike service, non-warlike service and
certain peacetime operations’.
The Commemorative Roll honours 3,249
Australians ‘who died during or as a result of service in wars, conflicts
or operations identical with the Roll of Honour, but who are not members of the
Australian armed forces’.
The National
Anzac Centre at Albany, Western Australia, commemorates the original
embarkment and deployment point for Australian and New Zealand military
personnel during the First World War. It was officially
opened in November 2014 as part of the centenary commemorations.
War diaries
Digitised unit and commander’s war diaries are available from the First
World War, Second
World War, Korean
War, Vietnam
War and Australia’s
contribution to the United Nations Transitional Authority
in Cambodia (UNTAC). These
diaries contain records of daily activities by Australian Army units.
First World War records
Digitised First World War embarkation
roll, nominal roll and Red
Cross wounded and missing files enable searches of individual
personnel.
Military casualties
While there are a variety of sources from which military
casualty statistics might be drawn, the AWM’s record of Australian military casualties by
conflict is developed using the Roll of Honour.
Research resources
The AWM’s ‘Researching a person’ function searches
the AWM’s collection for information about individuals. At the bottom of the
webpage are helpful guides for researching an individual’s military service.
Classroom resources also provide access to material on an
extensive range of topics, including women in the military, military animals, Australian
nurses, multicultural
Anzacs and military skin tattoos.
Department of Veterans’ Affairs
Anzac Day resources
The Department of Veterans’ Affairs (DVA) offers a variety of resources to help commemorate
Anzac Day, including the Anzac Portal and Anzac Day Kitbag.
Nominal rolls
DVA publishes an online
database of 4 nominal rolls of veterans’ names
from the Second World War, the Korean
War, the Vietnam
War and the First Gulf War (preliminary) to
acknowledge and commemorate their service.
War graves
The DVA’s Office of Australian War Graves (OAWG) is responsible for maintaining war
cemeteries and war graves in Australia and overseas. The OAWG webpage provides guidance
on ways to commemorate Australians who died
during conflict and provides a list of war
cemeteries in Australia and overseas. The OAWG is an agent of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in maintaining ‘war
cemeteries, individual war graves and memorials for members of the Commonwealth
forces who died during the First and Second world wars’. The DVA website
provides guidance material on commemorations,
memorials and war graves.
Research resources
The DVA website contains a large number of media backgrounder fact sheets on various aspects of
Australia’s military history, including Australian women in the First World War, where
Australians served and National Service.
DVA also publishes a range of online resources, including
oral histories, videos, images and books, such as:
National Archives of Australia
Historical records
The National Archives of Australia (NAA) website contains an array of primary source military history documents and thematic fact sheets. These include
service records, administrative records, internment records and national
service records. The NAA holds records on conflicts Australia has been
involved in from 1899 to 1975. These records relate to:
- civilian
service
- courts-martial
- merchant
navy
- munitions
workers
- soldier
settlement
- veterans’
cases
- war
crimes
- war
gratuities
- war
graves
- defence
administration and policy.
The NAA guide to researching war service provides useful
information, as well as a link to the ‘Record
search’ database.
First and Second World Wars digitisation projects
The service records of more than 376,000 men and women who
served in the First World War have been digitised and made publicly available
as part of the ‘Gift to the Nation’ digitisation project.
The NAA has digitised more than 1 million
records of men and women who served in the Second World War, with 99% available
online.
The NAA’s Discovering Anzacs website on the Boer War
and First World War, which was developed for Centenary of Anzac commemorations,
was decommissioned in February 2023. However, the records
remain accessible via the NAA’s defence and war service records page.
National Library of Australia
The National Library of Australia’s Trove website contains a historical record of digitised newspapers,
government gazettes and archived websites. It is possible to search
more than 25
million newspaper pages and over 2 million gazette pages via Trove, spanning the early 1800s to the
2020s. These newspapers are keyword-searchable and provide substantial media
coverage of conflicts Australia has been involved in, personal stories from
local newspaper articles, and the impact on the home front.
The AIF Project
The AIF Project is a
public database of First World War
personnel that has been developed over more than 20 years by Emeritus Professor
Peter Dennis and is hosted by the University of NSW. The database contains
open-source information drawn from official sources and allows searches by
name, service number or location of birth/place of residence upon enlistment.
Australian Dictionary of Biography
The Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) website
contains searchable
biographical articles of notable
personalities, including those involved in the Australian military. The ADB is
maintained by the National Centre of Biography at the Australian National
University.
ParlInfo
The Parliament of Australia’s ParlInfo database enables access to
digitised records using keyword searches of House of
Representatives and Senate Hansard since Federation. A variety of digitised
documents are accessible, including most committee reports and proceedings, bills
debated in each chamber, tabled documents and political party documents. This
database can be useful for identifying parliamentary debates and political
party positions during times of peace and war.
Thematic topics
Honours and awards
The Department of Defence’s ‘Honours and awards’ section of its
website contains information regarding different types of Imperial and
Australian military awards.
The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet’s It’s
an Honour website provides further details on Australian
honours, including the ability to search by an individual’s name or a specific
award.
Services of the Australian Defence Force
The Royal Australian Navy’s (RAN) Sea Power
Centre – Australia (SPC-A) website is in
the process of being updated, but a variety of reference material remains
accessible, including the fleet, unit histories, biographies of
prominent personnel, customs and
traditions and publications.
Some of the content from the previous
website SPC-A website has been archived. The RAN online heritage collection
is available from the eHive website.
The Australian Army History Unit develops policy and
programs to preserve and promote Australian Army history through publications about the Army’s contribution to conflicts from
pre-Federation to Somalia in the 1990s. It also provides information about traditions and honours and awards, and operates 16 Army museums across Australia.
The Royal Australian Air Force’s (RAAF) History and Heritage Branch maintains the RAAF’s
historical collection. The RAAF website contains information on the RAAF’s
formation and biographies on former chiefs of Air Force, as well as
information on the RAAF museum at Point Cook and heritage centres at RAAF Bases Amberley (Qld),
Townsville (Qld), Wagga (NSW) and Williamtown (NSW).
Military intelligence
In February 2023, the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) released the first volume of
its official history, titled The Factory: the official history of the
Australian Signals Directorate, vol. 1, written by Dr John Fahey. For
parliamentarians and their staff, hardcopies are available from the Library’s
collection. The ASD ‘History’ webpage contains a timeline and a brief
history of the organisation.
Dr Fahey also published Australia’s first spies: the remarkable story of
Australia’s intelligence operations, 1901–45 in 2018. The ASD stories webpage
includes the organisation’s history, its contribution in Vietnam, and
information about intelligence partnerships and the
WRANS (the Women’s Royal Australian Naval Service).
The NAA website features historical information about the development
of Australia’s intelligence and security capability, including signals and
defence intelligence and key events in intelligence history such as royal
commissions.
The Australian Army Military Intelligence Museum (established in 1988)
highlights the history of military intelligence operations, which originated
with the formation of the ‘oldest Commonwealth Intelligence Corps’, the Australian Intelligence Corps, on 6 December 1907.
Soldier settlement
The Year book Australia 1925, published on the Australian Bureau of Statistics website, includes a synopsis
of the soldier settlement schemes by state from 1914 to 1918, including
statistics on the areas of land acquired as at 30 June 1924.
The AWM lists a variety of resources about soldier
settlement after the First World War.
The Public Record Office Victoria (now archived)
website holds the digitised records for soldier settlers in Victoria from 1919
to 1935.
The NSW State Archives’ website (now archived) has a history of soldier
settlement in NSW from 1916 to
1939, developed by the Australian Research Council, Monash University, the
University of New England, DVA and State Records NSW.
The Queensland State Archives published a Research guide to soldier settlement records at Queensland State Archives, as well as an index of soldier settlement ledgers from 1917 to 1929,
and a series of papers from the Land Department relating to soldier
settlement.
The South Australian State Archives holds records
relating to soldier settlement during the First and Second World Wars. The SA State Archives website also highlights a
collection of items about SA’s contribution to the military and war prior to
Federation through to the First World War.
Information about soldier settlement in Tasmania from 1917
to the 1940s can be accessed through the Libraries Tasmania website, which includes the Tasmanian names index.
Archives ACT provides a detailed overview of the First World War
soldier settlement scheme in the then Federal Capital Territory (now Australian
Capital Territory), including a name
search index, maps and a guide. This website also
provides other resources, including Canberra Women in the
First World War and the ACT Memorial.