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Our Memory of a Nation exhibition in Canberra includes a wall of photographs of Australians at work and at play. In the web version of Faces of Australia, you can browse, help us identify the people, places and dates or share a memory.
Or read on for more about the photographs and how they came to be.
Warning – Faces of Australia includes images of Indigenous Australians now deceased.
We're doing what we can to identify the Indigenous people in Faces of Australia. If you can help us on this front, please contact faces@naa.gov.au.
Faces of Australia includes 227 images chosen from the 2711 metres of photographs in the National Archives collection – around three million images.
Most were taken by photographers working for the Australian News and Information Bureau in the 1950s and 60s – they travelled around the country to record life in an increasingly prosperous postwar nation. As such the images show the face the Australian Government wanted to present to the world – people at work and at play, commemorating and celebrating.
 | Photographic negatives and prints – black & white | 1911–71 | A1200 | ||
| Photographic colour transparencies | 1947–71 | A1500 | ||
| Photographic colour transparencies | 1971– | A6135 | ||
| Black and white prints | 1964– | B941 | ||
| Photographs kept by Dame Annabelle Rankin | 1915–74 | M2127 | ||
| Index proofs and negatives used to promote tourism in Australia | 1934–64 | M914 | ||