Deniliquin’s missing history

I will explain Trove, then I will explain how a committee is trying to solve our problem and how you, dear reader, might help.

Yes, you guessed it, I am going to invite you to donate to the cause.

Trove is a collaboration between the National Library of Australia and hundreds of collecting organisations across Australia.

The Trove website is free and available online all day, every day.

It holds digital copies of numerous categories of documents, including back copies of literally hundreds of Australian capital city and regional newspapers.

The magic of Trove is that you search online by inserting a key word or phrase, rather than search through page after page looking for information about the person or event of interest, the equivalent of looking for a needle in a haystack.

Try it – insert the names of your parents or grandparents, or a wedding, flood, fire, sporting club, grand final or business at https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/?q=.

If you insert ‘John Henderson’, there will be almost 30,000 Australian newspaper articles identified, which you might say is no better than searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack.

However, you can narrow the search by state, decade, year, or month, or by newspaper.

My great-grandfather, John Henderson operated boot shops on the Victorian goldfields from the late 1850s to the early 1870s, and also selected land east of Echuca in 1865.

Later, he was elected to the Echuca Shire Council.

I could trace my great-grandfather’s career on Trove, finding advertisements for his boot shops in various towns, or reports of the fire that destroyed his shop in Talbot, or his campaigns in local government elections, sometimes gathering in hotels where the crowd could become restless.

Some articles made me cringe, like those reporting his disputes with neighbours or accusations of him closing adjoining public roads to suit his convenience.

Many of the articles referring to my great-grandfather were in the Echuca Riverine Herald.

Copies of the Riverine Herald for 91 years – from 1869-1954 and 1998-2002 – are accessible on Trove.

To our north, historians in Hay have access to The Riverine Grazier on Trove for 82 years – 1873 to 1954.

There have been at least seven newspapers published in Deniliquin.

The Pastoral Times occupies a unique status.

It was the first to be published on May 26, 1859 and continues to this day.

Most of the others, in due course, were acquired by the Pastoral Times.

Two of the other newspapers were titled The Independent. Copies of the first Independent are accessible on Trove, covering 35 years of a 46-year period from 1901 to 1946.

The good news is that a complete set of the Pastoral Times remains in existence and, more importantly, the Edward River Library, the State Library of NSW and the National Library of Australia hold microform copies.

Microform (or microfilm) are reels of old-style negatives that can be loaded and projected on a desktop screen. They are more convenient than leafing through fragile original copies of a paper, but they do not offer the convenience of keyword searching.

However, subject to their quality microform copies can be used for digitisation and use on Trove.

The quality of the Pastoral Times reels varies but generally they are good, and it would be a great leap forward for people interested in the history of Deniliquin and its residents if the Pastoral Times was accessible on Trove.

The Deniliquin & District Pastoral Times Digitisation Project – convened by Deniliquin Genealogy Society president Val Hardman – is progressing the digitisation of the Pastoral Times for Trove.

To start the process, the committee has been pledged $25 000, which is sufficient to digitise the Pastoral Times from July 1863 to about 1925.

The reels for the initial few years of publication are not of sufficient quality to digitise.

The committee has accepted a quote from the National Library of Australia and the initial stage of digitisation is scheduled to commence later this year.

The Deniliquin & District Pastoral Times Digitisation Project campaign has been launched to raise funds to digitise copies beyond 1925.

Initially, with an average of five pages including supplements and published weekly, digitisation will cost about $400 per year.

But with the introduction of a bi-weekly publication in 1926, and an increase in the number of pages from four to eight in 1945, the cost will increase to more than $1,000 per year.

If you want to make history, I encourage you to contribute.

All donations of at least $100 will be acknowledged in the Pastoral Times.

Donations to the Deniliquin & District Pastoral Times Digitisation Project can be: