The Harry Gentle Resource Centre honours the generous legacy gift of Mr Robert (Harry) Gentle, an alumnus of Griffith University.

The Harry Gentle Resource Centre (HGRC) is dedicated to the study of the peoples and lands of Australia, with an initial focus on the area that became Queensland in 1859. It offers a portal of interactive resources, research publications, commentaries and research aids.

The Centre aims to facilitate access to published and unpublished information for the period up to the 1850s, which represents an era of intercultural encounters.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.

As the Centre develops it will host visiting researchers and research higher degree students to contribute to the broader history of this period.

The Centre seeks collaborations with institutional repositories and local history organisations to facilitate access to relevant materials. It will become a rich resource for family history researchers and genealogists, and anyone interested in intercultural encounters and the earliest period of colonial settlement in Queensland.

It will seek community engagement through volunteer contributions and foster a nexus between research and teaching by engaging undergraduate students in the production of digital history.