Or notes on finding out who distributed a film in Australia.

Normally, IMDB is a great source of movie related information, quickly followed be wikipedia, Although, both these were not effective in easily finding out who the australian distributor of a film was (or it or will be depending on the case). So a bit of a web search lead to a few interesting finds. No instant solution, but a two step solution which was ok for this because it was only a few.
The first part was the AustralianClassification government website, which has a useful searchable online catalogue. Looking at the applicant gives the company that is trying to get it through the Australian <strike>Censors</strike>, *cough* sorry, Classification. If you’re lucky it will be the local distibutor, such as Roadshow Entertainment or Amalgamated Movies. (They’re the two largest BTW).
However, if they gives you no joy, then there is the Australian Film Societies Federation‘s list of film distributors. They focus on allowing locals to show a particular film as a film society, not commercial cinemas. Although this being the Internet, who knows if they can be trusted. So onwards and the contact information they provide about many distributors is worth investigating. Roadshow Entertainment only had a phone number and email. Amalgamated Movies had a link to the website, and joy oh joy, the website had an online catalogue of the movies they distributed for “Non Theatrical Film Distributors”.
So combining AustralianClassification listing and the list of film distributors form ausfilm, and comparing this with Amalgamated Movies online catalogue. Baring things like data entry error, random transmission malfunctions, acts of god(s), and such, I was able to judge the first to be mostly trust-worthy.
In additional to the list of film producers from above, there is also, Film Distributors in Australia A-Z | International Film School in Sydney, Australia | Participate Film Academy

So to summarize what steps did I follow to conduct this web-search and verify that what I found was any use what so ever?

1. Engaged general knowledge to look at IMDB, and wikipedia, but (and this is important) did not use them as a source. I can not trust wikipedia because of it’s general nature and multiple editors, and I’m just not sure about IMDB.
2. Then using google tried a couple of searchers. australian movie distributors, australian film distributors, and the like. Trying to use the keywords to narrow down the pages returned.
3. Skipping past the ads at the top and side. I investigated the most likely sites from the list looking for government sites, organisations, not for profits, because they are more likely to provide unbiased infromation. A business will usually talk about their products or services and ignore their oppositions, so I can rely on what they say.
4. Skimmed the site for relevance, and if it was useful then scanned it for the useful data I wanted. (Yes you could say I had a quick look and a guess, but there is more to it than that)
5. Now the critical step is, I verified the information provided from one website against another. Now my tolerance for looking at this kind of information is fairly high. If it was something like ‘best armies for Warhammer 40K’, or ‘Best place to buy a flux capacitor’, then I would spend more time reading to build up a broader basis of knowledge from which to judge the useful from the cr@p. And the only way this is achieved is through reading many websites to judge the content, its age, relevance, etc.