Our stories, People & professions, Victorian history:
For many decades, Victorian legislation discriminated against women who wanted to work at the library. Isabella Fraser was State Library Victoria’s first female staff member in 1908, and paved the way for the many women who have followed in her footsteps.
Family matters, Research tips & tricks:
Welcome to National Family History month, a month dedicated to family history research!
Alongside your family history explorations, local and social history research can help us to understand something of the motivations, places, lives and times of our Victorian ancestors. In this week’s blog we include few snapshots from our collections and beyond, to help you build a picture of the journeys undertaken and of the Victoria your ancestors may have inhabited in the nineteenth century.
International Nurses Day is celebrated on Friday 12 May – the anniversary of Florence Nightingale’s birth. In today’s blog we explore the history of nursing in Victoria and take a glimpse at the nurses featured in our collection.
Ask a librarian, Collection spotlights, Our stories, Victorian history:
The Historical Maps and Plans Collection is a boon for researchers, containing everything from descriptions of what the landscape was like when Europeans arrived, to the locations of early buildings and houses, pastoral runs, and even shipwrecks.
Ask a librarian, Music, Our stories, Popular music, rock, Victorian history:
Music, protests and sticky carpet; as the Tote Hotel celebrates 40 years of live music, we look back on the long history of this iconic Melbourne pub.
Ask a librarian, Victorian history:
You can’t visit Melbourne and not at least have a selfie with the iconic entrance of Luna Park, a favourite spot for fun-seekers of any age.
Ask a librarian, Collection spotlights:
A brief look at the preparation and early days of television broadcasting in Victoria, how ‘the box’ was made and became a part of everyday life.
In the 1880s, Victoria experienced an unprecedented property bubble. When it eventually burst, it left the economy in tatters.
Ask a librarian, Our stories, Victorian history:
It was November, 1852, when almost overnight, a strange sight sprang up, near Princes Bridge, in Melbourne. Canvas Town, as it came to be known, was a large tent city, set up to accommodate people on their way to the goldfields…
Upon her death in 1978, Victorian woman Anna Fellowes Vroland (1902-1978) was described by a colleague as being ‘one of the ordinary great women of our time’. Anna was a school teacher, writer, radio commentator, and political activist in the areas of Aboriginal rights, women’s rights and the peace movement. She held many views that seem entirely contemporary, but were not at all commonplace at the time she aired them.
