From Western Australia with love

The State Library of Western Australia's huge collection of digitised newspapers
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When searching Trove newspapers and gazettes, it can be hard to imagine just how much effort and inter-state collaboration can go into getting these priceless historical newspapers online and findable.

This is something the State Library of Western Australia (SLWA) is deeply aware of. As a Principal Partner of Trove, they have contributed, funded and facilitated the digitisation of a whopping 2,238,880 pages (and counting!) of Western Australian newspapers – available to everyone, for free, in Trove.

A new era of digitisation for Western Australia

The SLWA were a very early contributor to the Australian Newspapers Digitisation program at the National Library of Australia in 2008 and have tirelessly worked to have their newspapers on microform digitised ever since. In 2020, the SLWA embarked upon the first of a series of projects to digitise physical newspapers – a more complicated job as physical newspapers are much more fragile than microform. With border closures and risks sending these very significant and fragile newspapers in the post, the SLWA brought scanners in-house to complete these projects, with support from the National Library of Australia.

Coming soon from the SLWA

Now they are scanning a second round of hard-copy newspapers, and we can’t wait to see these new pages come into Trove over the coming year.

Where can I find Western Australian newspapers?

Browse newspapers and gazettes by state to see the long list of Western Australian digitised newspaper titles.

Keep your eyes peeled for new titles from the SLWA on Trove’s Newspapers and Gazettes coming soon page.

And explore more from the State Library of Western Australia.