The National Library of Australia’s online archive Trove has unveiled a new-look interface and there is no better time to get acquainted with this truly amazing portal to the past.

A love of history kind of runs in my family.

My father is a historian and teacher and from a young age he used to read us short stories of Henry Lawson and other titbits of Australia’s colonial history.

My brothers and I lapped up Greek mythology, stories of Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, and Medieval Europe. We knew inside-and-out my grandfather’s tales of his time in the Royal Navy – fighting the Vichy French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir, air raids at Alexandria, bombing Sabang Harbour, and being on one of the first Allied ships in Tokyo Bay.

Following school, I went on formally study history and what I wouldn’t have given then to have had a resource like Trove.

For those who are unaware, Trove is Australia’s truly amazing online culture and research portal. It brings together content from the National Library of Australia, State and Territory libraries, and hundreds of other libraries, cultural and research institutions around the country.

Trove gives access to an estimated 6.5 billion records — and it’s free!

I first began using Trove about ten years ago, shortly after it was launched by the National Library, and I have been hooked ever since.

It was while working for a local newspaper out west that I started digger into Trove. A grant to the local library allowed them to digitise 70 years of the local paper starting from 1887 all of which was available through Trove. Over the next few years I would use Trove’s newspaper archive to dig up stories of local interest, like the history of local clubs, major events like floods and fires, bushrangers and bandits and some truly wild stories like battles in the street between communists and nationalistic locals.

I have a bit of an interest in the bush poets of the west and have dug into the history of Henry Lawson’s time in Bourke and the back country. Did you know there are several poems he wrote for the local paper under a pseudonym? I even discovered one, most likely written by Lawson, that had not seen the light of day since it was published in 1893.

Given that Orange has more of an affinity for the Banjo, did you know that on Trove you will also find digital copies of the original manuscript of the song Waltzing Matilda?

And for the real bush poetry buffs you can go back and read some classic poems as they were originally printed as Trove includes scanned copied of The Bulletin magazine.

Once you’re done with that, Trove has a further 1,500 digitised newspaper titles to explore — all fully searchable and as easy as typing something into Google. From there you can refine your search further by categories, date, and even whether an article is illustrated or not.

My own niche interests tend towards historical military arts and I was amazed to discover newspaper accounts of swordsmen and swordswomen, fighting it out on horseback on Bondi Beach for the title of Champion of the World!

But for the family historian Trove is truly priceless. While official records like births, death and marriages can give you dates and family connections, the newspaper archive of Trove is where you will find a little colour.

Knowing that my great grandfather worked as a private inquiry agent in Sydney in the interwar period, I decided to see if he appeared in any newspaper accounts. Boy, was I surprised! I found hundreds of stories and photographs! As a professional witness in mostly divorce cases it seems he was rarely out of the news as the tabloids of the day lapped up the salacious (although by our standards, often quite tame) details.

Clues found researching Trove also led me to discover the identity of my late-grandmother’s birth mother. She had only discovered she was adopted in her 60s when any family who knew the story had passed on. And I am now Facebook friends with the grandson of my grandmother’s stepmother, who ran off to Africa in 1930 — a wild story, the details of which you can also find on Trove.

Dive into Trove, there’s no telling what you’ll discover at trove.nla.gov.au