AustLit

BlackWords provides access to both general and specific information about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander literary cultures and traditions, providing a platform for the investigation and articulation of what 'Black writing' and 'Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander literature'. BlackWords also contains records describing published and unpublished books, stories, plays, poems and criticism associated with eligible writers and storytellers and includes works in English and in Indigenous languages.

Resourceful Reading re-examines and re-invigorates Australian literary criticism and history by integrating traditional, qualitative approaches to literary studies with empirically-rich methodologies including data-mining and quantitative analysis. This community aims to contribute to AustLit as well as to maximize the potential of this important, data-rich resource.

Data resulting from five separate but linked research projects was the digital end product of Resourceful Reading.

The five linked projects were :

– Professor Gillian Whitlock's Late 20th Century Anthologies

– Professor Gillian Whitlock's Asylum Seeker Narratives

– Professor Robert Dixon's Australian Literature in the 'Translation Zone'

– Professor Leigh Dale's Australian Newspaper Reviews of 1930

– Dr. Katherine Bode's Reading by Numbers

More information on each project can be found in the individual project pages.

Children's Literature Digital Resources, or, CLDR is a full text digital repository of Australian children’s literature from 1830 to 1945. Users can read online the complete texts of a selection of early Australian children’s literature, both popular and rare.

Over 500 texts can be read online, complete with their original illustrations and marginalia. While the CLDR is an invaluable tool for researchers of Australian children's literature, it is also an enjoyable resource for readers.

Australian Popular Fictions is the umbrella term for a number of ongoing, related projects, led by Dr Kim Wilkins, Professor Van Ikin, and Dr Toni Johnson-Woods, that explore popular fiction and fiction genres.

It aimed to collect and expand the available information and scholarship relating to all forms of popular fiction including crime, fantasy, horror, pulp, graphic novels and comics, and lesbian- and gay-themed popular works and their authors. The project supports research into the long, prolific and profitable industry of mass market genre fiction publishing.

'The Joseph Furphy Digital Archive aims to provide greater access for more people to the material archive that lies behind Furphy's fiction and poetry. Working within a flexible, modular framework, the first module to be published is Such is Life Typescript (1898). This module includes a transcription of the typescript, colour-coded to identify deletions and additions, and visualisations of textual variation with the Bulletin Library first edition. Images of typescript pages can be viewed by clicking on the page numbers in the transcription. An essay on the composition, revision, and publication describes the textual transmission and the unique properties of the typescript that resulted from these processes. This module aims to provide unprecedented access to the pre-publication material for scholars, critics, teachers, and students. It is hoped that this access will encourage new and innovative readings of Furphy's work and facilitate a greater appreciation of the impact that book production can have on literary works.

'The second, third, and fourth modules will produce critical editions of Furphy's three main works for distribution in print and digital formats. These editions will include a critically established text and an essay that describes the textual and cultural history of each of Furphy's works down to the present day. The fifth module will deliver a digital edition of the abridged English edition of Such is Life, including an essay on Vance and Nettie Palmer's role in editing the text for the London publisher Jonathan Cape, particularly the ways in which the original work was changed for English readers of the 1930s. Digital editions of the abridged Such is Life and the unabridged Rigby's Romance will be published here for the first time.'

Source: Project website.

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.

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.

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.

This Research Exhibition identifies children's literature across different forms and genres in Australia where discussions of environmental waste, climate change, species endangerment, ecocitizenship, and the effects of globalisation on the environment are major concerns.The Exhibition provides a space for researchers and students to access and engage with bibliographical data on a range of literary and critical texts that provide various environmental perspectives of contemporary Australian children’s literature.

The Australian Drama Archive project is a digitisation project publishing plays and research relating to writers working in the period before the 1960s.

'A Companion to the Australian Media is the first comprehensive, authoritative study of Australia’s press, broadcasting and new media sectors. This multi-authored, edited volume will be an essential reference work for media organisations and practitioners, media and communications academics, tertiary students, and libraries.'

Access the front matter here.

Source: Publication summary.

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

'Here you will find an introduction to settler colonial theory and contemporary settler colonial literature. This exhibition is intended to survey the major and minor authors, works, and ideas involved with settler colonial writing in Australia, and, to a lesser extent, the United States, since the 1990s.

'In addition to the overview statements on this page, you can click on other tabs to see timeline of publication dates in historical context, a glossary of common terms, an annotated bibliography of primary and secondary sources, brief discussions of themes and motifs useful for student researchers and teachers interested in including settler colonialism in their curricula, and information about comparative settler colonial studies between Australia and the US.'

Source: Abstract.

A research project established by Dr Willa McDonald with Dr Bunty Avieson and Dr Kerrie Davies for Macquarie University.

This is the first stage of a larger study that aims to define Australian narrative journalism and trace its history from 1788 to today. The term ‘narrative journalism’ (sometimes called ‘literary journalism) has come to be associated with factual reporting that uses scenes, characterisation, dialogue, point of view, setting and other literary techniques usually connected with imaginative storytelling. While legacy media outlets are shrinking around the world, narrative journalism can be found in book form, in prestige Australian print publications and on websites that provide long-form, in-depth content.

Originally published on a pilot Wordpress site, the project was moved to AustLit and expanded by Dr Willa McDonald in 2017-2018.

'The Picture Book Diet is a research project identifying representations of food and food practices in contemporary Australian picture books. What we eat is a topic of robust discussion across the country, yet little attention has been given to the ideas and values concerning food embedded in texts for young children, despite such texts being created with the specific intention not only of entertaining but also of enculturating their audiences, therefore having the potential to influence readers' relationships with food.

This dataset aggregates shortlisted, award-winning and bestselling picture books for 3–8 year-olds published 2000–2013, noting not only food type, but associated depictions of food practices connected with gender, identity and place – such as growing food, shopping, cooking, serving – as well as food-related language use.'

Source: AustLit.

'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.

'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.

'Surfing is a beautiful, romantic and mostly pointless pursuit: tanned bodies riding walls of water, waves blue and glittering, grey and heaving, green and wild, sunlight diffusing through the feathering peaks, people triumphantly exiting watery tubes or falling laughing into foam. The modern version of standup surfing that emerged from Hawai’i has been popular in Australia since the early 20^th century and has become an ideal of Australian coastal life and culture. Surfers themselves have come to be symbols of contemporary health and vitality for young and old, their tanned, fit bodies defining ideas of freedom, youth, play and leisure. But what does it all mean?' 

This project follows the various threads of surfing that weave through Australian literature that deepen our understanding of how surfing has shaped our relationships to beaches, coastlines and oceans, and how surfing has contributed to a sense of being Australian.