Newspapers online
Google newspaper archive
Access a wide range of Australian and overseas newspapers via this site, including The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) (only to 1989). I have found this site to be handy, as I have found it to have some editions of the SMH unavailable via the National Library of Australia (see below), but available on this site.
National Library of Australia’s online resources
To access online Australian newspapers from the National Library of Australia’s (NLA) website, you will need to have an NLA library card. You can apply for one online here. NLA library cards are free and available to anyone who lives in Australia and can supply a residential address.
Once you have an NLA library card, you can access the many online publications on the NLA website here.
You can search for any publication via the ‘search’ bar or by clicking on any of the search tiles.
The most useful tiles for Australian newspapers are the following:
The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald – OPTION 1
Access The Sydney Morning Herald (and its predecessor, The Sydney Herald) by clicking on the ‘Pro Quest – The Sydney Herald, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald‘ tile:
This will lead to the ‘ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Australian Collection‘ page.
Click the ‘Publication’ link – which will lead to the following page:
You can now select to view copies of The Age (1854-2000), The Sydney Herald (1831-1842), or The Sydney Morning Herald (1842-2025).
The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald + other Australian newspapers – OPTION 2
Instead of selecting the ‘ProQuest’ tile, as suggested above, select the ‘NewsBank’ tile:
In addition to The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, you can access recent editions of other Australian newspapers from links on the right side of the screen:
The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald + other Australian newspapers – OPTION 3
Instead of selecting the ‘ProQuest’ tile, as suggested above, select the ‘Press Reader’ tile:
Change the All countries/regions option to ‘Australia‘ to have Australian newspapers (and magazines) display below the featured titles. In general, you can display the previous 3 months’ worth of editions.
Trove
Trove is a website hosted by the National Library of Australia. It contains digitised records of many Australian newspapers (up to 1954), government gazettes, and various other content from libraries, museums, archives and repositories around Australia. And it really is a ‘treasure trove’ of information for Australian history researchers—including those researching their family trees. I can’t say enough good things about this site! I have found it to be particularly useful for family notices, obituaries and even wedding descriptions.
The link above is to the Trove ‘home’ page, and this link is to the main ‘help’ page for the site.
This link will take you directly to the ‘newspapers’ home page.
It is useful (and free!) to create a login and password, to register as a user of the site. As you become more familiar with the site, you might like to engage in correcting some of the digitised text, or adding tags (e.g. people’s names) to newspaper articles. These tasks are easier with your own login details.