The Chinese-Australian Historical Images in Australia (CHIA) website brings together historical photographs of Chinese in Australia. It contains photographs from the collection of the Chinese Museum, private family collections as well as the online collections of many libraries and museums.

Unlike other online photographic databases, CHIA allows visitors to compare information associated with different versions of the same photograph (see for example this Cobb & Co coach photograph). It also includes photographs reproduced in publications. For copyright reasons not all photograph entries in the website have digitised images. Here’s an unpublished article I wrote about our thinking behind the website/database back in 2004.

I wrote and entered much of the content in CHIA and assisted with the development of the site. It was created by the Australian Science and Technology Centre as part of a La Trobe University and  Chinese Museum Australian Research Council grant. My doctoral thesis was also part of this project.

While working on this website and the Chinese History of Australian Federation website I learnt a lot about preparing and presenting online content. The project also raised a lot of questions around how to catalogue and document photographs and the diverse ways in which photographs are used.

Project role: Author
Launched: November 2005

Website: Chinese-Australian Historical Images in Australia