AustLit

'Drawing from a recent AustLit project on climate change fiction, this paper discusses the earliest example we have traced of climate-change fiction in post-invasion Australia: James Edmond’s short story ‘The Fool and His Inheritance’. Published in 1911, the story begins in ‘the basement of things among the coals and the debris’ and moves through the Industrial Revolution, water wars, and the Great Slaying to the ultimate destruction of the Last Man by rising oceans. Analysis of this work in the twin contexts of its writing (1911) and our reading (2019) show the seeds of modern climate-change fiction sown over a century ago, as well as revealing the complex roots of such strains of thinking as ecofascism. We bring to this analysis three discrete and distinct approaches: bibliography, environmental science, and feminist cultural studies. From our diverse disciplinary positions, we offer a tripartite analysis to critique Edmond’s story, make sense of its place in the ‘climate change fiction’ genre, trouble the genre’s origins, and explore the value of multi-disciplinary co-reading approaches to literature.'

Source: Abstract.

'Writing Disability in Australia aggregates writing on disability in AustLit into a searchable index, with the aim of drawing attention to the ways in which Australian writers have represented disability. It highlights the significant and imaginative achievements of writers with disability, the structures and assumptions of ableism, the resourcefulness with which people with disability navigate their everyday lives, and the ways in which disability lends itself to creativity, lateral thinking, and resilience.

'Writing Disability in Australia promotes the social model of disability, which sees disability as a condition created by barriers in culture and environment. It does not perceive disability as something to be ‘fixed’; rather, it emphasises the removal of these barriers so that people with disability can participate in society on an equal basis.'

Source: Project website.

'This special AustLit project is designed to shine a light on the ways that Australian writers are currently addressing and have, in the past, explored what has been correctly described as the most urgent environmental, social, and technological concern of current generations. Post-apocalyptic speculative fiction has explored this territory for some time and now these themes are emerging in other forms of writing. Through this project, we aim to highlight Australian creative and critical writing that examines the impacts of human-induced climate change and to provide necessary contextualising information on the science and consciousness-raising work at the community level.'

Source: AustLit.

'The rise of steampunk – speculative-fiction works set in a Victorian or pseudo-Victorian world marked by steam-powered technology – has led to a range of debates about what the genre is, what it does, and, more significantly for this paper, what it fails to do. Drawing on a range of steampunk works set in Australia, we explore the extent to which steampunk is able to grapple with coloniality, both in the Victorian period from which it draws and in the colonial present in which it is set. Is steampunk condemned to limit itself to a western-technocratic teleology or is it capable of critiquing or even circumventing colonial pasts? After setting out steampunk’s adherence to the problem-spaces of Euro-modernity, we focus closely on works by D.M. Cornish, Meljean Brook, and Dave Freer to highlight three ways in which authors writing Australian steampunk highlight non-hegemonic subjectivities and settings: secondary worlds and their historical distance, the mediated spaces of alternate histories, and the foregrounding of colonial brutalities in a traditional steampunk setting.'

Source: Abstract.

An illustrated introduction to AustLit's records for Australian pulp westerns.

An edited and illustrated collection of twelve short stories published by Sumner Locke in Australian magazines during World War I.

Researched and written for AustLit, Beyond Goggles and Corsets contains two parts: a scholarly bibliography of more than 330 examples of steampunk written by Australian authors or set in Australia and a richly illustrated history of Australian steampunk and its position within the global genre and culture.

The research essay includes the following categories:

• A Brief History of Steampunk
• Thematic Concerns : An Overview
• Romancing the Past : History and Victorianism
• Alienation or Fetishisation : Technology in Steampunk
• Filthies and Bushrangers : Class and Political Struggle
• Gender and Sexuality : Corsets and Beyond
• Steamroller : The Empire of Steampunk

This exhibition is a curated collection of AustLit records for Australian speculative fiction that falls under the broad rubric of 'diversity'.

As readers and writers increasingly foreground the importance of displaying the full breadth of modern cultures in published books, speculative fiction provides the template, from culture-rich fantasy worlds to non-binary alien species to body-conscious horror.

This exhibition collects together those diverse works that Australian authors have already written, and hopes, by making the current state of the literature explicit, to show some paths forward for increasing diversity in the future.

From the time Australians began making films, they began seeking source material in other publications. After all, they had already built a rich theatrical culture in part on adapting and burlesquing overseas material; why would early films not also benefit from this process?

Then came radio, and then television, and still the process of adaptation remained central to the industries.

Furthermore, the process of adaptation was never simply a one-way street, not solely a matter of bringing American and European texts to Australian screens. The American and British industries, too, were adapting Australian works for their own markets, especially the works of prolific playwrights C. Haddon Chambers and Dion Titheradge. Australians also looked to their own literary output, bringing Australian-written novels, plays, and even poems to the screen.

This exhibition, supported by the ARC-funded Discovery Project, DP130101455 ‘Media Transformation in its Australian and International Contexts: Analysis and Theory-building’ by Prof. Tom O'Regan, begins to explore the tradition of adaptation in Australian films, radio, and television.

'This article traces the increasing participation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors and Muslim-Australian authors in the Australian young-adult fiction market. Using bibliographical data drawn from the AustLit database, the article first outlines the general parameters of young-adult publishing in Australia since the 1990s, before specifically examining the works produced by Indigenous Australian and Muslim-Australian authors. These two groups share a significant characteristic: although they are often at the forefront of current Australian public discourse, they are more often the object of such speech than the speaking subject. This article examines the extent to which young-adult fiction provides a platform for these authors.'

Source: Abstract.

This exhibition explores the way in which Australian newspapers marketed the silent-film era. The individual tiles below show pictorial advertisements, portraits of silent-film stars, and publicity stills–all harvested from contemporary newspapers via the National Library of Australia's Trove database.

A series of exhibitions drawing on AustLit's World War One research project: based on enhanced records built by lead researcher Robert Thomson, the exhibitions (compiled by Robert Thomson, Clay Djubal, and Catriona Mills) highlight specific sets of records.

The project is a collection of AustLit records based on the content of the Crawford Collection at the AFI Research Collection (AFIRC) at RMIT. A subset of the AFIRC’s main collection, the Crawford Collection contains scripts and ancillary material relating to Australian radio and television production company Crawford Productions, from the radio serials of the 1940s and 1950s to the demolition of the Box Hill studios in 2006. The Writer in Australian Television History is a collection of records for 318 episodes of Crawfords’ radio dramas and television series, spanning the period from 1953 to 1977.

This essay examines the adaptation of the serial fiction of Eliza Winstanley into sensation melodramas for the stage in suburban (and particularly East End) theatres in London. The process of adaptation was not a straightforward one. Winstanley was an actress turned writer who drew heavily on her own theatrical background in structuring her writing. Her stage background lent her serials a strongly theatrical flavour; however, playwrights adapting her work seem to have found its inherent theatricality problematic. Examining such adaptations reveals two aspects of playwriting and staging in mid-nineteenth-century suburban theatres: the conflicted attitude of playwrights towards the serials’ theatricality and their occasionally contradictory attempts to tie their productions closely to the original texts by basing tableaux and sensation scenes directly on the serials’ illustrations.