Welcome to Hidden Treasures of the Mitchell Library, one of the specialist research projects within Australian Book History and Print Culture.

Supported by a Nancy Keesing Fellowship at the State Library of New South Wales, this project began as a thorough survey of the Mitchell Library's large and unique collection of magazines published in Sydney between 1895 and 1930. The aim is to make the extent and coherence of those holdings more visible to researchers. In addition, it may help explore how generalist interpretations of the country's past and the possibilities of its people's thoughts and actions have been somewhat distorted through reliance on the views of a limited number of magazines.

This dataset collects together a selection of sixty-two enhanced AustLit records for magazines whose contents expose an extraordinary diversity of opinion and commentary on the many activities of domestic, social, cultural, and political life. The internal formula and mix of each magazine individually provide us with clues about the complex multiplicity of identity, association, and interest of its individual readers. And the set or range of successful magazines at any one time provides us with clues about the whole population of readers.

Read Jill Julius Matthews's peer-reviewed article.

See all of the magazines included in the dataset here.