Melbourne’s “The Argus” Newspaper 1848-1945 Posted Online

The National Library of Australia, using their Trove online database system, has posted the historic newspaper, The Argus, published in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. The digitized newspaper runs from Vol. 1, no. 1 (Sept. 15, 1848) through about 1945. The newspaper itself ceased publication on January 19, 1957. Note that the headings and titling all say the online papers end in 1954, but that looks to be a typo – that got repeated over and over again.

The following description (taken from Wikipedia) is found at the Trove website:
The Argus was a morning daily newspaper in Melbourne established in 1846 and closed in 1957. Widely known as a conservative newspaper for most of its history, it adopted a left leaning approach from 1949 when it was acquired by the London based Daily Mirror newspaper group. The main competitor over the life of the newspaper was David Syme’s more liberal-minded The Age newspaper. See the full Wikipedia entry.

The papers are also available on microfilm. The 1948-1945 issues are also available online via the Australian Newspapers service. See: http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-title13

The newspaper was also know as the Melbourne argus and the Melbourne daily news.

I did some searches on the newspapers and found the interface friendly and easy to use. It’s immediately evident that the indexing is done by using OCRed version of the papers – that have a horrendously high error rate (to be expected). The system allows the user to make corrections to OCRed materials, which over time might make for a more accurate index.

The Argus is just the latest in Australian papers to be posted at the Trove website. In searching on the Canfield surname, I got 268 hits (as noted by number in the list below) in 19 different newspaper titles, with The Argus having the most by far, at 181.

• The Argus (Melbourne,… (181)
• The Advertiser (Adelaide,… (22)
• The Sydney Morning Herald… (15)
• The Mercury (Hobart,… (12)
• The Brisbane Courier… (10)
• The Canberra Times (ACT… (7)
• The Maitland Mercury… (5)
• The West Australian (Perth,… (3)
• The Sydney Gazette and… (2)
• The Sydney Herald (NSW… (2)
• Colonial Times (Hobart,… (1)
• Northern Territory Times… (1)
• The Courier (Brisbane,… (1)
• The Courier (Hobart,… (1)
• The Courier-Mail (Brisbane,… (1)
• The Perth Gazette and… (1)
• The Perth Gazette and… (1)
• The South Australian… (1)
• The Sun-Herald (Sydney,… (1)