AustLit

Welcome to the AustLit Literature of Tasmania digital monograph.

AustLit first began the digital monograph project with the goal of combining contemporary practices in scholarly publishing with the disruptive ethos of fast developing fields such as the Digital Humanities. The monograph form provided us with ideal sandbox for marrying the high quality of scholarship produced by sustained thought, investigation, and inquiry, with the extreme readability of contemporary digital platforms. As such, our digital monographs incorporate various aspects of digital literacy that we hope will complement and build upon this research and text by Professor Philip Mead, Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia.

The monograph itself has been divided into relevant subsections under the tabs on your left. We recommend that you begin your introduction to Tasmanian literature with Phillip Mead’s critical introduction. There, Mead provides a historical, thematic and theoretical framework for engaging with the Tasmanian literary imagination, from the island state’s complex Indigenous and Colonial past to the contemporary discussion surrounding the world literature of Islands. Subsequently you may read the monograph linearly, by following a link to the next section at the bottom of each page. This path, from the top tab to bottom, follows the chronology of the monograph's original print format. Alternatively you may wish to read specific subsections related to your interests. The monograph sections can be read in any order; each subsection, though interrelated with its neighbouring sections, can be read independently. If you wish to do so, please navigate via the left-hand stack of section tabs.

We have also sought to embody the connective tissue of the literature of Tasmania through the digital monograph’s formatting. The text of the monograph is hyperlinked, to carry you between connected subsections and beyond, to the broader AustLit database. Click on a hyperlinked title or author’s name to open the associated AustLit entry in a new tab; additionally, there are external links to relevant resources such as the National Film and Sound Archive, the Project Guttenberg Library of Australiana, and the National Library of Australia Trove database.

Where possible we have incorporated digitisations and illustrations of relevant historical figures, texts and images. Recent interest in Tasmanian culture and subcultures, such as Tasmanian Gothic, has also allowed us to embed links and videos to several contemporary representations of Tasmanian literature in film, and open access to the National Film and Sound Archives means you can watch the last paces of the Tasmanian Tiger, or listen to the only known sound recordings of Indigenous Palawa language.

We wish to acknowledge the work of Philip Mead, without whose high-quality scholarship the project would not have been possible. A special thanks is also owed to Anthony Stagg, at the University of Tasmania, who provided AustLit with numerous images from his private collection, and also provided invaluable research for this project on the literary imagination of Tasmania.

Read on to next section: Critical Introduction.