Reading has shaped Australian culture. Whether of fiction or non-fiction, literary or mass market, Australian or from overseas, through reading Australians of all ages and walks of life have encountered ways of seeing the world and their place in it. The Australian Common Reader is a database of library loan records from across the country. Through it, you can explore the reading habits of Australians since the nineteenth century. Discover how global literary culture circulated in Australia: what books were being read by women and men, teachers and miners, West Australians and Queenslanders? Find out more about the libraries and their borrowers here.

On this page, you can search the database filtering by library, occupation and gender of borrowers, or use the search bar to look for specific books or borrowers. Filter the results further by clicking on any link within a record. At any stage, you can export the results of your search.

You can also explore the data using visualisations. Clicking on any graph segment (e.g. gender, author name, book title) will filter the records by that field.

For more information about how to use this site, see our user guide .