Before Victoria separated from New South Wales in 1851 government notices, regulations, forms and orders relating to the Port Phillip District were published initially in the New South Wales Government Gazette, then the Port Phillip Government Notices, and later in the Port Phillip Government Gazette (from 1843).
The first issue of the Victoria Government Gazette was published on 9 July 1851. Early issues were published once a week until 1854, when two issues a week were produced. By the 20th century the frequency was almost daily, increasing to as many as nine or ten issues in a day.
In 1987 the gazettes were split and published in three series:
The Victoria Government Gazette is the government's method of notifying the general public of its decisions and activities. It includes a wide range of information from land transactions, insolvency notices, impoundments and patent applications, to shipping and emigration notices, licences, contracts, proclamation of acts, government appointments, and more.
Gazette entries may be anything from a brief notification of a road closure or the address of a registered company to a detailed description of wages to be paid in various industries such as breadmaking, or a 200-page list of everyone who is registered to practice medicine in the Victoria.
This website includes images of every page of every relevant gazette and government notice produced since 1836. These include:
Please note: No copies are known to exist for the period 19 July-December 1843. Gazette information for this period may be in The Port Phillip Herald newspaper under the 'Melbourne Government Gazette' column.
This online archive of historic gazettes allows you to:
The search function on the Victoria Government Gazette site only accesses information in the gazette indexes. It does not search for information on individual pages.
More information on this and other aspects of the site is available via the Help link in the top-right-hand corner.
To print an A4-sized copy of a gazette page you need to download the PDF via the link in the top-right-hand corner. More information on how to do this is available on the Help page.
You may find anomalies in the information found in the gazettes. For example, some issues were cancelled and others contain errors that appeared in the original printed publication. You may also find errors in the indexes which have been captured using OCR (Optical Character Recognition).
While we are reviewing the gazettes and fixing errors as we come across them, please let us know if you had any errors via our feedback form.
You can access all Gazettes published after 1997 at the official Victoria Government Gazette website.
This website is the result of collaboration between the State Library of Victoria, Land Victoria and the Office of the Chief Parliamentary Counsel.
We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the State Library of New South Wales, who provided high-quality scans of the early NSW gazettes.
© 2008 - 2009 State Library of Victoria
Copyright | Disclaimer | Privacy
The Victoria Government Gazette is a publication of the Victorian Government Printer.
This website is the result of collaboration between the State Library of Victoria, Land Victoria and the Office of the Chief Parliamentary Counsel.
