Visit main University website

Opening the Multilingual Archive of Australia (OMAA)

Go To Archive

Opening the Multilingual Archive of Australia (OMAA)

Opening the Multilingual Archive of Australia (OMAA)

↑

Home

Log in to create your own collections

Opening the Multilingual Archive of Australia brings together historical materials from national and international collections in languages other than English. We seek to rethink and enlarge narratives about Australia that come solely from English-language sources, by showing modern Australia to be a complex multilingual creation. This project is funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant.

The site consists of collections of text-based articles, newspapers, images and interviews. You can explore these and carry out searches through the ‘go to archive’ button and clicking on the different categories. For more detailed introduction to the project, see the student presentations in the Teachers and Students page.

Explore collections

Key periods

1. Settlement
2. National boundaries
3. World War I
4. World War II
5. Cold War (including Decolonisation)
6. End of the Cold War

Languages

Albanian
Arabic
Armenian
Bengali
Bosnian
Bulgarian
Burmese
Chinese
Creoles and pidgins
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Esperanto
Estonian
Fijian
Finnish
Flemish
French
Gaelic; Scottish Gaelic
German
Greek (Modern)
Greek (Purist)
Gujarati
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Indonesian
Iranian languages
Irish
Italian
Japanese
Javanese
Khmer
Korean
Lao
Latin
Latvian
Lithuanian
Macedonian
Malay
Maltese
Maori
Nauru
Nepali
Norwegian
Panjabi; Punjabi
Papuan languages
Persian
Philippine languages
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian; Moldavian; Moldovan
Russian
Samoan
Serbian
Slovak
Slovenian
Spanish
Swedish
Tagalog
Tahitian
Tamil
Tetum
Thai
Tok Pisin
Turkish
Ukrainian
Urdu
Vietnamese
Welsh
Yiddish

News

Student Projects
At the OMAA Conference that was held in December 2024, students from the University of Sydney presented projects they had undertaken using the OMAA archive. We have now published these presentations so that they may be used as teaching resources. You can see and download them from the Teaching Resources …
The Opening the Multilingual Archive Conference
The Opening the Multilingual Archive (OMAA) Conference was held over two days in the Quad Refectory on 2-3 December 2024. The program opened with a keynote address by Professor Joy Damousi who talked about the importance of digitising migrant archives, and how these provide new perspectives on the migration experience …
The 2024 Opening the Multilingual Archive of Australia Conference
The University of Sydney will host the 2024 Opening the Multilingual Archive of Australia (OMAA, https://omaa-arts.sydney.edu.au/) Conference, which will explore themes of ‘Multilingual archives and histories’ and ‘Multilingualism in translation’. The Conference will be held at the University of Sydney on December 2 and 3, 2024. Australian Anglocentrism raises essential questions …

Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are advised that this site may contain or link to material which could be culturally sensitive, including records of people who have passed away.