Primary contact
Estonian House, 141 Campbell Street, Surry HillsSydney, New South Wales 2010
The Estonian Archives in Australia (EAA) was established by the Council of Estonian Societies in Australia on 5 January 1952. The Archives is one of the four Estonian Archives existing outside Estonia and holds an important collection of material relating to the lives and achievements of Estonians living outside Estonia.
The collection comprises a library, an archive and a museum of material collected from all over the world. Much of the collection is yet to be catalogued. The library contains books written in Estonian, by an Estonian or about Estonia in any language. A large part of the library consists of rare books published in Estonian prior to independence in 1918.
The archives comprises mainly published material, personal papers and memoirs, records of the activities of organisations, photographs, sound recordings, films, artefacts, ephemera and textiles. A major part of the collection consists of more than 10 000 reprints of scholarly works by researchers of Estonian origin living all over the world. This represents the largest collection of such material anywhere in the world.
A small but unique part of the archives consists of the records, personal papers, publications, memoirs, artefacts, photographs and sound recordings of the lives, activities and achievements of the Estonians in Australia. These records date back to the "first fleeters" of Estonians who came to Australia in the late 1880s, as well as those of the second wave of migration in the 1920s but the bulk of the material relates to the post World War II immigration. This collection is not only important to Estonia and the Australians of Estonian descent but also to Australia as it chronicles the contribution of the immigrants to the Australia of today.