Appendix 1, and the geographical information systems datasets and workspaces associated with the paper A review of historical earthquakes in Queensland utilising the Trove Newspaper Archive as a primary source published in the Australian Journal of Earth Sciences (Rubenach et al., 2020). The data includes the Shapefiles and ArcGIS documents used in the analyses covered in the publication. The data set was compiled and analysed to study historical (pre-1960) earthquakes in Queensland and compare currently published interpretations of these events with the Trove record (https://trove.nla.gov.au/). The methodology for the data compilation and analyses is detailed in the paper. The dataset consists of Appendix 1 a word document which lists impacted locations for each earthquake, and a series of ArcGIS documents and associated database files for each of the maps/analyses presented in the paper. The database tables structures match the primary source of that type of data in the project, e.g. earthquake data is structured as per Geoscience Australia’s database and location data as per the Queensland place name gazetteer. These have been filled using the sources specified in the paper. Locations which were digitised and the source they were digitised from has been indicated in the comments sections of the locations tables.