Collecting and preserving Western Australian history through photos, maps, newspapers, posters, films, music and so much more. View highlights, discover more and learn how to search the enormous heritage collection.
State Library of WA – Update
Exhibitions and Public Programs
Kinjarling Djinnang Ngalak | Country Sees Us is an immersive exhibition centred around newly recorded video oral histories of Menang Elders and a large-scale visual meditation on the Kinjarling/Albany landscape. This exhibition marks 200 years since colonisation of Menang Country and asks visitors to encounter Kinjarling not as a backdrop to history, but as a living landscape with its own voice and memory. The stories within this exhibition have been recorded to add important new layers of meaning to the largely colonial maps, photographs and illustrations in the State Library’s collection. Visitors step into a quiet six-metre-wide dome inspired by a kornt (a traditional shelter) to hear the Elders’ stories. These include reflections by Carol Pettersen, Lester Coyne, Mark Colbung, Vernice Gillies, Doreen Hancox, Sharralyn Maddren and a young Menang ranger, Cleve Humphries
This immersive experience also features a specially commissioned animation that reinterprets the State Library’s collections through a Menang lens, weaving Menang artist and academic Shandell Cumming’s artworks with centuries-old maps, photographs and illustrations to reveal new ways of seeing and understanding these materials. The exhibition gives new voices and stories to evocative landscape photographs taken by government and commercial photographers over many decades. This exhibition is curated by Denien Toomath, a Menang Noongar woman and Senior Partnerships Officer at the State Library. Produced by the State Library of Western Australia in partnership with the Community Arts Network. Kinjarling Djinnang Ngalak | Country Sees Us is the first State Library exhibition to be launched as part of the Dialogues 2029 project. Dialogues 2029 is a four-year program stimulating public dialogue and contemporary perspectives on the commemoration of 200 years since the colonisation of Western Australia
ARC Linkage partnership with UWA Truth Telling in the Goldfields for 2029 -2030
The State Library is partnering with UWA and the Goldfields Aboriginal Language Centre Aboriginal Corporation for a new research partnership funded by the Australian Research Council. As Western Australia rapidly approaches the bicentenary of British colonisation there is a pressing need to develop more inclusive forms of Australian history. Aboriginal voices and perspectives will be central to this historical reflection. This partnership explores how colonisation was experienced by Aboriginal people in the largest region of WA. It will develop research into State Library collections with Aboriginal people, develop a new history of the Goldfields and create public outcomes for partner organisations. This research project is funded for four years through to 2030.
New Acquisitions
Erica Smyth collection
Dr Erica Smyth AC was a highly significant figure in Western Australia’s minerals and petroleum industry, recognised for her pioneering contributions to resource development, industry governance, and gender equity. Beginning her career as an exploration geologist in the Pilbara in the 1970s, she rose to senior leadership roles and contributed to the growth of Western Australia’s iron ore and gas industries at a formative period in their expansion. As a professional company director, she exercised national influence with regulatory, research, and safety organisations central to Australia’s resource sector. Widely acknowledged as a trailblazer, Dr Smyth helped transform professional pathways for women in mining and energy, leaving an enduring legacy reflected in her industry honours and appointment as a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2018. This collection represents the collective efforts of Erica and relatives to explore the narrative of working women in early Western Australian history through to contemporary retellings, primarily through firsthand accounts and primary research documents.
‘March for Australia’ counter protest images
On August 31 2025 nationwide “March for Australia” rallies were held to protest what are claimed by attendees to be excessive levels of immigration to Australia. And while many of the marchers insisted that the rallies were about patriotism, not racism, the documented links between rally organisers and known far right/Nazi groups are indicative of the rising public profile that these formerly fringe movements are developing, not just in Perth or even across Australia but globally. These images, taken by Noongar photographer Cole Baxter, document the smaller counter protest and are accompanied by a written essay of his own perspective on witnessing the ‘descendants of immigrants marching to gatekeep stolen land from future immigrants’.
Ukrainian Holodomor Survivors oral histories
In 2004-2005, Dr Melnyczuk interviewed 42 Ukrainian migrants to Western Australia about their experiences of the Holodomor, a widespread manmade famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The interviews cover biographical information and memories of the Holodomor, date of arrival in Western Australia, and the impact the Holodomor had on their migration experience and life in Western Australia. The interviewees of these six interviews wished to remain anonymous.
Wallace Vernon Fyfe papers
Wallace Vernon Fyfe, born in Victoria in 1894, began his survey career in Western Australia in 1909 and in 1910 was apprenticed to Marmaduke Terry, to whom he was appointed Assistant Surveyor in 1912. In 1921 he was appointed a Junior Valuer in the Taxation Department, from 1926-1938 he was Chief Valuer of the combined Commonwealth and State Taxation Departments in Western Australia and he was SurveyorGeneral of Western Australia from 1938-1945. During the period 1945- 1947 he was Director of the War Service Land Settlement scheme and in January 1948 was appointed a Member of the Land Settlement Board. He resumed the office of Surveyor General in 1948, a position which he held until his retirement in 1959. This collection of personal journals and notebooks and accompanying reports and correspondence fill a gap in current State Library Papers of Wallace Vernon Fyfe, providing insight into Fyfe’s personal life as well as unpublished private reflections on development schemes that directly impacted many communities through Western Australia. 34
The Snake Film
Harry Butler AO CBE (1930-2015) is widely acclaimed as a naturalist and conservationist, being made Australian of the Year in 1979 and Citizen of the Year for Western Australia in 1980. This film, produced in the early 1950s predates all existing State Library audiovisual holdings regarding conservationists Harry Butler and Dominic and Vincent Serventy. It captures a very early stage in their careers and provides unique insight into the early activities and interests of some of West Australian Naturalist Club’s founding members.