Now in it's ninth version, the 'Shipping Arrivals and Departures' CD contains details of over 100,000 arrivals and departures relating to Australia and New Zealand, with references to over 140,000 unique references to passengers, crew and convicts. Although this is only a small fraction of the total number of vessel movements and passengers over the timeframe, the CD contains information such as passengers departing Australian ports, which is not generally available from the Archive authorities until the late 1800's.
The CD also contains a wealth of background material relating to shipping for Australia, neighbouring countries and islands. Included on this CD are transcripts of reports and newspaper articles, images of newspaper cuttings and details of shipping movements and passengers mentioned in the papers of the time, as well as transcribed information from archive material and other sources. The articles range from reports of crew members brought before the courts for misbehaviour to personal accounts of encounters with storms, shipwrecks and murderous attacks occurring in the Pacific.
To locate information on the CD, there is an extensive collection of indexes. These include arrivals and departures of vessels by date and port, by vessel name, indexes of shipwrecks by date and name of vessel, ships captains, crew, passengers and convicts. The CD also includes an index to articles by date and vessel.
The information has been sourced predominantly from contemporary material. No single source provides a complete record for a port and each source has errors that need to be considered. Where several sources are used for an individual event, the local source material is given precedence.
