Your contribution will help protect our memories, keeping them alive, intact and authentic for generations to come.

To connect Australians, young and old, to our nation’s memory, National Archives of Australia secures, preserves and provides access to Australian Government records of enduring significance.

With a collection of over 45 million records, preserving and sharing our precious memories is vitally important to our democracy – to identify who we are, where we come from and where we want to be, as a nation and as individuals.

Your donation is a gift to the nation and to future generations. Help support National Archives to protect and share our national memory and the benefits it brings for future generations – policy makers, historians and individual Australians alike.

Your donation will help...

Digitisation and preservation

Preserve service records, recordings of Indigenous languages and ceremonies, records on the environment, science and technology, national security, ad campaigns and much more.

Public collection access and research

Help people to discover parts of the collection most relevant to them: family histories, migration stories, Stolen Generations, historical moments and clandestine tales.

Exhibitions

Support visitors to National Archives in Canberra and around Australia, in discovering the connections they have to the collection, and its relevance to life today.

Education programs

Encourage new generations of Australians to connect to the past, so that they may learn how to affect a better future.

Donor story: Barbara Mason

In 2021, National Archives received a generous $1 million donation from philanthropist Barbara Mason. Ms Mason's contribution will help preserve the service files of the Royal Australian Air Force, commencing with 50,000 photographic negatives as part of the 'Putting a face to the name' WWII digitisation project.

This digitisation project complements and enhances the current government-funded initiative to digitise the World War II service records of Army and Air Force servicemen and women. When complete, these records will join those of the Royal Australian Navy in being freely accessible to all Australians online.

Ms Mason's donation will ensure that more faces can be put to the names of those who served during World War II, and that these portraits will be accessible by their families and future generations of Australians.