Western Cape York remains one of the most remote, inaccessible, and climatically inhospitable places on the Australian continent, yet since the early seventeenth century Europeans have had a profound impact on western Cape York Peninsula, and its Indigenous people.

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First came the mariners. Then the missionaries, sent by the government towards the end of the nineteenth century to ameliorate the impact of the mariners. Then in the nineteen fifties, came the miners excavating and exporting the rich and extensive deposits of bauxite on Aboriginal land to be refined into aluminium, a metal mainstay of advanced twentieth century economies.

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The records relating to the Western coast of Cape York are spread in repositories – libraries, archives, museums and galleries - across Australia, with several in the United Kingdom and Germany. This website is a modest attempt at digital repatriation, in bringing together in one virtual location information about the diverse collections of materials and extracting and presenting key information from those collections in an accessible way.

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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are advised that this website contains images of people who have died.