The Victoria Government Gazette

About the Victoria Government Gazette 

Victoria Government Gazette – Online Archive – 1851, p1. (2019). Gazette.slv.vic.gov.au. Retrieved 14 March 2019, from http://gazette.slv.vic.gov.au/view.cgi?year=1851&class=general&page_num=1&state=V&classNum=G1&id=

“The first issue of the Victoria Government Gazette was published on 9 July 1851.

Pre- July 1851 material about Victoria was published in the New South Wales Government Gazette, the Port Phillip Government Notices and the Port Phillip Government Gazette. ....” Pasted from <http://www.gazette.vic.gov.au/>   “ Early issues of the Victoria Government Gazette were published once a week. In the 1850s the frequency increased, and by the turn of the century the gazette was pressed almost daily.”  Pasted from <http://gazette.slv.vic.gov.au/about/>

The Gazette was the main tool of communication from the government to its employees and the general public.   It contains “information on everything from land transactions, bankruptcies, reward notices and new acts of parliament, to tenders, patent applications, unclaimed letters and monies, shipping and emigration notices, and more.”

This resource can be accessed via

1.      “Findmypast.com.au” which is a pay per view service
2.       The Australasian Legal Information Institute (AUSTLII) website at http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/vic_gazette/ where you can search both the entire text and the index of all the Victorian Gazettes, however you cannot increase the size of the image to facilitate reading.  This is a free site.
3.       State Library of Victoria’s (SLV) website at http://gazette.slv.vic.gov.au where you can search the index of the Gazette but not the entire text, the pages can be enlarged and are much clearer than those accessed via AUSTLII. This is a free site.

My technique for investigating this resource

I use both the AUSTLII and the SLV website to ensure that I obtain as much data as is possible and also obtain the clearest images for my personal record holdings.

First I search AUSTLII which website see link above.  This will then give me a long list search results, in the case of my “ebbott” search it gave me a list of 390 documents to look at. 

For each document, there were two listings: -  one listing shows the page of the document where the term was found and the second listing is the first page of the edition in which this particular page is found.  Of the 390 documents listed, there were actually only 195 different results.  The listing with the page number listed at the end of the result shows where in the Gazette the term “ebbott” appears and is the link I always investigate of the two.

Once I have the result I then go to the advanced search page on the SLV website at  http://gazette.slv.vic.gov.au/search/advanced/ and perform a page search based on the information for year and page number given by the AUSTLII results listing so that I can either transcribe the page (and increase the size of the image if needed)  or save and download it to my computer.

Planning

When I did my initial search on the name “ebbott”  I didn’t expect to find so many results.  In order to manage the number of results I printed off the research results and then I looked up each of the documents listed on the SLV website and ticked them off as I went through.  This meant I could work in half-hour time increments far more manageable than trying to get through them all at once.

Happy Hunting!