Details of almost 6000 books from the Australian Prime Ministers Centre (APMC) collection are now available online. Catalogue entries for these publications have been uploaded to Trove, the National Library’s discovery service that enables you to search online across hundreds of Australian collections.

A search on Trove will identify a wealth of information on Australia’s key political figures and parliamentary democracy held by the Australian Prime Ministers Centre. The collection includes biographies of Australia’s prime ministers, publications on political and social history and an almost complete run of Parliamentary Debates (Hansard) and Parliamentary Papers from 1901-1988. An intriguing addition to the collection is the complete working library of Sir James Killen, a former long-serving federal Liberal Parliamentarian.

Highlights of the collection include a 1st English edition of Nicholas Machiavelli’s ‘Prince’ published in 1640, a 1790 edition of Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‘A vindication of the rights of woman’ and the ‘Official record of the debates of the Australasian federal convention’ (1897). More recent items in the collection include Jacqueline Kent’s biography ‘The Making of Julia Gillard’, John Keane’s ‘The Life and Death of Democracy’ and Kevin Rudd’s children’s book ‘Jasper & Abby and the great Australia Day kerfuffle’.

Trove lists details of more than 90 million items from the National Library of Australia, the state and territory libraries and over 1000 other libraries around Australia, including the Australian Prime Ministers Centre. The content covers full-text books, journal and newspaper articles, images, music, sound, video, maps, websites, diaries, letters and archives. The APMC is currently only contributing details of published books to Trove but aims to include serials, pamphlets and other political ephemera by early 2011.

To search for items in the Australian Prime Ministers Centre collection via Trove, click on the link below, login and set up the Australian Prime Ministers Centre as one of ‘my libraries’. If you find a publication you wish to view, contact us to discuss access.