If you live near a family history society or family history library or a state library, you will usually find they have many resources for either free or a small annual membership fee that are what you need when getting started. The online sites are attractive because you can do your research from home any time of the day or night (no parking, no travelling, no opening hours to worry about) but you will generally pay more for them and they often don't have basic stuff for Australian research like BDM indexes, but they can be very useful if you know you need 1800s UK census records or similar (where they tend to be better than your local family history society). Kerry