This paper argues for the inclusion of data from Australian studies of bilingualism and trilingualism in the Australian National Corpus. The paper underlines the importance of comparative corpora of community languages with varying typologies in contact, migration vintages, generations, and differing sociolinguistic histories. It points to theoretical advances that have resulted from such comparisons. As the great diversity of language contacts in Australia has generated research on an increasing range of languages, it would be a waste not to preserve the data for further research. Also, there is some overlap between ethnolectal Australian English and bilingual data. Much of the language contact data will be lost if it cannot be incorporated into the national corpus.