More than 90 Queensland newspapers added to Trove

Queensland’s history is now easier to search online. We’ve digitised 93 newspaper titles and added them to Trove – the digital home of Australia’s culture and history. The collection of rural, regional, and metropolitan newspapers dates as far back as the 1850s and is available online up to 1954.

To bring this material online, we digitised 1056 microfilm reels from the National Library and the State Library of Queensland collections. Through this collaborative project – funded by the National Library – over 855,000 newspaper pages have been added to Trove.

Searching Queensland newspapers

Discover articles of interest within the newspapers on Trove, by searching for a keyword or phrase in Trove’s Newspapers & Gazettes category. Then, use the filters to refine your results to just Queensland.

A newspaper search for “births” in Queensland, for example, brings up over 3 million search results. Try adding one of your Queensland-born ancestors to this search query and see what you might find!

Screenshot of Trove newspaper search results filters to show newspapers from Queensland

Tracing the history of Queensland

Local newspapers offer a ready insight into the day-to-day happenings of a community. They are a rich source of social, political, cultural, and economic history. When Queensland became a distinct colony in 1859, for example, newspapers like the Moreton Bay Free Press documented local feelings about the change.

newspaper article about the separation of Queensland from Morton Bay

'Separation!’, Moreton Bay Free Press, 19 July 1859, nla.gov.au/nla.news-article288072601

Trove makes it easy to look at the newspapers across different decades, tracing historical milestones and how the state developed over time. Making this large collection available online makes it possible for researchers to gain a deeper understanding of different geographically dispersed regions of Australia’s second largest state.