Welcome

Welcome to Connecting the Nation - Australia’s Aviation Heritage. Aviation has been an integral part of Australia’s national story. For both city dwellers and those who live in remote and regional communities, aviation has shaped and reflected the cultural and technological history of the 20th century. 

Australia has a rich array of aviation related heritage – from surviving aviation infrastructure, working sites, aircraft and technical equipment, to the vast amounts of archival and pictorial material often cared for by volunteers, to the important collections in Australia’s major museums –this portal helps to reveal and make connections between these diverse sources of heritage.

Investigate Our Heritage to learn more about the forces which have shaped Australia’s aviation, and where to find aviation heritage collections and historic sites.

The portal is an initiative of Airservices Australia, in conjunction with a team of researchers from the University of Canberra.

Our Collections

Connecting the Nation hosts a digital repository that connects you to dispersed Aviation heritage collections. These collections will grow and change as more items are added, and as more links and connections are created by participating community members.

Our collections feature unique aviation heritage resources including a large collection of oral histories and photographs, made available online for the first time. The portal automatically integrates these collection items with other online information, suggesting connections between aviation heritage collections, people and places.

Contribute

You can contribute to caring for Australia’s aviation heritage and the Connecting the Nation portal in a number of ways. You can become a registered user if you are interested in tagging collection items with more information; you can help create tags and summaries of the oral history collections so that they can connect to other sources of heritage; or you can add your digitized collections to the on line repository so that others can discover them. Contact us for more information about becoming a registered user.


Header Image: Charles Kingsford Smith beside his WWI Bristol Tourer, Mascot, June 1927. Photograph by Sam Hood. Source: State Library of New South Wales.