About Old Local Papers
Old Local Papers is a friendly way into Australia's old newspapers. Pick your district, choose a topic (shipwrecks, sport, shows, floods, the wars and more) and see how often the local papers wrote about it, year by year, from the first issues to the 1950s. Every story links to the original page on Trove, where you can read it free. The front page is a new edition every day, from the papers printed that week a hundred years ago.
Where the stories come from
Every headline, preview and date comes from Trove, the National Library of Australia's free collection of digitised newspapers, through the Trove API. We show only the headline, the first lines, the paper, the date and the page, and always link to the story on Trove. We don't copy whole articles or page images, and we keep nothing from Trove for more than 30 days. Old Local Papers is an independent, non-commercial site; it isn't run by or endorsed by the National Library.
How districts and topics work
Districts are groups of the Australian Bureau of Statistics' statistical areas, each with the papers published there. Topics are found by words in each story's headline (a story headed "Wreck of the Ketch" is a shipwreck), using rules written by hand: no artificial intelligence is used on the papers. Old headlines are short and the text was read by machine, so some stories will be missed and a few will be filed under the wrong topic.
Old words, old views
These are historical newspapers. Some stories use language and express views that are offensive today. We show the papers as they were printed. The front page leaves out stories with some of the worst language of the day, but the topic lists don't filter anything.
Spotted a mistake?
Errors in a story's words come from the machine reading of the old page. Anyone with a free Trove account can correct the text on Trove itself, and the fix reaches this site within a few weeks. For anything about this site, email info@snookmz.click.
Privacy
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