  In the Gaia era, the majority of stars in the Solar neighbourhood have
parallaxes and proper motions precisely determined while spectroscopic age
indicators are still missing for a large fraction of low-mass young stars. In
this work we select 756 overluminous late K and early M young star candidates
in the southern sky and observe them over 64 nights with the ANU 2.3m Telescope
at Siding Spring Observatory using the Echelle (R=24,000) and Wide Field
spectrographs (WiFeS, R=3000-7000). Our selection is kinematically unbiased to
minimize the preference against low-mass members of stellar associations that
dissipate first, and to include potential members of diffuse components. We
provide measurements of H$\alpha$ and calcium H&K emission, as well as lithium
absorption line, that enable identification of stars as young as $\sim$10-30
Myr which is a typical age of a stellar association. We report on 346 stars
showing a detectable lithium line, 318 of which are not found in the known
catalogs of young stars. We also report 126 additional stars in our sample
which have no detectable lithium but signs of stellar activity indicating
youth. Radial velocities are determined for WiFeS spectra with a precision of
3.2 $\mathrm{km\;s^{-1}}$ and 1.5 $\mathrm{km\;s^{-1}}$ for the Echelle sample.
