The Australian National Corpus has been established in an effort to make currently scattered and relatively inaccessible data available to researchers through an online portal. In contrast to other national corpora, it is conceptualised as a linked collection of many existing and future language resources representing language use in Australia, unified through common technical standards. This approach allows us to bootstrap a significant collection and add value to existing resources by providing a unified, online tool-set to support research in a number of disciplines. This paper provides an outline of the technical platform being developed to support the corpus and a brief overview of some of the collections that form part of the initial version of the Australian National Corpus.