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Legislative Council - Fifty-Third Parliament, Second Session (53-2)
2016-03-09 Daily Xml
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Passengers in History

The Hon. J.M. GAZZOLA (15:37): Along with the Hon. John Darley, the member for Hammond, Adrian Pederick, and the member for Adelaide, Rachel Sanderson, I recently attended the launch of Passengers in History, a new website and state-of-the-art app presented by the South Australian Maritime Museum. It is founded on the principles of unlocking the museum's data and making it easily accessible online. The website provides details of ships, ports and fellow passengers. In launching the website and the app, His Excellency the Governor, Mr Hieu Van Le, spoke of his experiences arriving in Australia.

Over a period of 25 years, volunteers at the Maritime Museum have been building a database populated with names of passengers landing in South Australia between 1836 and 1964, more than 328,000 of them, in fact. This database links to other online resources including Trove in the National Library of Australia, ship logs and passenger diaries and allows people to trawl deep into their family history. The database has been a popular exhibit at the museum for some time and has given many people a sense of their place in our shared history.

As of this year, history enthusiasts can now access this information from their personal computers and, by registering on the Passengers in History website, are able to share information both ways. People are now being invited to leave their own historical footprint by uploading stories and photographs of their ancestors and commenting on the museum's data to help edit the site, in essence becoming citizen historians.

To really understand the significance of this undertaking, one must acknowledge the phenomenal number of volunteer hours that went into the gathering and input of this data. This information took 25 years to collate. I understand former museum guide Mr Rob Lincoln built much of the database in his own time and has contributed an extraordinary number of hours in bringing this idea to fruition.

Thanks must also go to former museum curator Ms Kristy Kokegi, who is now their online programs manager. Her contribution has enabled the museum to post this data online at a very reasonable cost. I understand Mr Ian Nicholson compiled a complementary dataset taken from the Log of Logs which, two years and 600 pages later, was completely entered into the database by Ms Lesley Dunstan.

I am led to believe that the launch of this website has been met with great enthusiasm and that within three days it had over 3,000 online visitors and 118 registered users, 53 of whom contributed information or photographs to the site. I would like to send my sincere thanks to acting chief executive officer of History SA, Mr Kevin Jones, for having me at the event, and I wish him and his team all the very best with future endeavours in the Port.

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