Firstly, throwing a Veruca Salt style tantrum and demanding
"I want it, and I want it NOW!" will not make you any friends, nor will it get you the stuff you seek.
I write online articles and books (
not on railway related subjects) ranging from 2,500 words up to 25,000 words, many of them have over 60 photos and maps. Collectively they have almost half a million views. So I feel qualified to give a quick run down on how to dig up obscure photos, information and stuff.
If there is a video sitting in a properly curated museum or archives in Australia, it WILL be indexed on line, even if is not viewable on line. Only the most amateur and poorly run places won't have some indication of what they hold on their website
Bear in mind the way that most stuff gets on line is from fans of a subject adding a few sentences to wikipedia articles or people like me putting up comprehensive articles.
If you want to dig deeper, original research is not something for slackers, it takes time, patience and motivation.
- Do a quick Google search. What you initially find will give you a basic background with enough information to let you dig deeper.
- Have a quick look at Trove. This is run by the National Library in Canberra and has the full text of hundreds of newspapers and magazines and many thousands of photos.
- Go to somewhere like the state library catalogue and see what they have that is relevant. Many books and magazines are held off site, so order them for a particular day. Go to their building in the city and read the books. Then ask for large sequences of relevant historic magazines and spend a few days flipping through them, taking notes and making photocopies.
- The Public Record Office in North Melbourne is the state government archives. Order a few files through their on line catalogue that look relevant. Go in and spend half a day flipping through those files of letters, reports and photos. It's pot luck; you may find nothing or you may get that crucial information that you desperately need.
- Go back and do more Google 'advanced' searches using everything that you have learned. Vary the search terms, confine your search to specific things like just photos. Then repeat the process on different search engines like Bing, Google Scholar and even Duck Duck Go. Keep your eyes peeled for that weird little article or web page that is poorly indexed, because for every 100 irrelevant pages you look at, a few will be a bit interesting and at least one will be pure gold with just what you were searching for.
Finally, ask me or one of the other authors on this forum for tips in writing everything up in a way that will appeal to readers.