Death of Ben Hall by Patrick William Morony. The infamous bushranger is one of the personalities featured in Obituaries Australia. Image courtesy of the National Library of Australia / nla.pic.an2263709-v
The lives of prominent and ordinary Australians who have come and gone will be resurrected in the digital afterlife through a new website being launched at The Australian National University today. Obituaries Australia, the first resource of its kind in Australia, has taken the paper trail left by the likes of first fleet convicts, bushrangers and their victims, ANZAC diggers and cricketing heroes, and transformed them into a freely accessible online database. The website is linked to digital material held in Australian cultural institutions as well as items in the National Library of Australia's digitised newspapers. Professor Melanie Nolan, Director of the ANU National Centre of Biography which hosts the website, said Obituaries Australia seeks to capture every published obituary of an Australian. 'We are interested in mapping all sorts of relationships and revealing the web that people's lives spin around others,? she said. 'For example the obituary of bushranger Ben Hall contains links to people he robbed, as well as to gang members, police officers who pursued him, the man his gang fatally shot and the son of that man, who witnessed the shooting and went on to join the police force. 'It's a mammoth task and we are seeking the public's assistance in helping us to find obituaries and to index them.' Based on over 300,000 individual citations on index cards housed in 180 catalogue-card drawers, Obituaries Australia will help identify subjects for the University's Australian Dictionary of Biography and lead to exciting research projects on the study of historical groups and Australian lives over time. 'Some of its potential can already be seen,' she said. 'Click on the link to 'World War I?
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