The Centre aims to facilitate access to published and unpublished information for the period up to the 1850s, which represents an era of intercultural encounters. It seeks to document particularly the lives and experiences of those persons, groups and organisations that have not been the subject of historical investigation by collating an inventory of the diversity and claims on country that made up the early colonial period. This includes Indigenous diplomats and resisters, interpreters and guides, convicts and free-born, shipwrecks and settlers, religious and military – the whole range of contributors to a new era.