AustLit

AustLit has a new homepage coming soon!

You can still login and search from the top menu. Click on the "hamburger" at the top left to sign in, and you will find the search box at the right of the menu.

We hope you like the new look.

This semester, we have been fortunate to have a rich surfeit of interns working with our database. Over the next few weeks, we'll be letting them explain in their own words what their work with AustLit has been like. First, we have Dean Agnew, who was working on AustLit's teaching pages.

Dean Agnew

My internship project at AustLit gave me the opportunity to explore and gain understanding of the depth and scope of the organisation’s holdings of reference material and the powerful databases that enable focused user access.

The project involved researching, assembling and presenting material that would be useful, relevant and interesting for primary and secondary school teachers and students. Before starting my project, I was fortunate to have tuition on the extended capabilities of the search engine and how to use the pre-set design features of the AustLit webpages to present and manage the material. Further, I researched the Australian curriculum requirements and matched those to the AustLit holdings as the basis for my project to maximise relevance and appeal for current and potential subscribers. I enjoyed exploring AustLit’s listing for children’s and young adult literature and was amazed at the variety of narratives that went beyond the adventures of Dick and Dora and the Famous Five I encountered in my youth.

I leave the work placement with a greater understanding of AustLit and its importance as a research and educational resource for all Australians with an interest in the nation’s literary heritage.

(Image via Wikimedia Commons.)

From Irene Howe, BlackWords indexer and researcher:

Finding out about the history of your family can be a daunting experience. For some Aboriginal families, their histories are hidden and barely spoken about. I know, finding out the smallest snippet of information about my Grandmother’s family has been a struggle and a long process, but at the same time gives you a tremendous sense of belonging and identity. However, just when you think you cannot find any more information, someone or something comes up out of the blue. This happened to me: a cousin, William Santo, who I had never met or spoken with before, contacted me just recently. It was an incredible experience; not only had he had a wealth of information, including photographs, but he has now written an account of our family’s history.

Gudjal writer and self- publisher William Santo's new book is called Charley (Cupid) Santo Family History. The book is about our family and descendants of South Sea Islander man, Charley Santo and Maggie, and includes the history of the Gudjal people of Charters Towers. William Santo has been for the last few years working on reviving the Aboriginal Gudjal language and has published several children’s books in the Aboriginal Gudjal language.

His latest book, Charley (Cupid) Santo Family History, is available by mail order from William Santo, PO Box 175, Normanton, Qld 4890.

... and you want to use AustLit.

AustLit aims to be the definitive virtual research environment and information resource for Australian literary, print, and narrative culture.

On AustLit, you will find records for over 830,000 works and more than 150,000 authors and organisations. These records include bibliographical or biographical details; information on genres, subjects, and settings; lists of ‘works about’; links to related works and people; and other rich material.

These records are all available on the main database, but sub-sections of the data can also be explored through the various AustLit datasets, which collect together various forms or genres of writing: these include BlackWords, World War I in Australian Literary Culture, Asian Australian Children’s Literature and Publishing, Australian Popular Medievalism, or Pulp Fiction.

As a record of a national literature, AustLit is unique. So how can this unique, wide-ranging resource help you in your work?

AustLit does not solely index novels and works of fiction. Among its records are:

• records for over 1200 individual newspapers, beginning in 1803.

• records for over 59,000 individual newspaper issues, also beginning in 1803.

AustLit regularly indexes the contents of Australian and international newspapers, when they relate to Australian narrative and story-telling. We also regularly retroactively index the contents of older newspapers, as more and more become available through digitisation projects.

All this makes AustLit a valuable resource for the history of the Australian press's engagement with Australian story-telling.

But AustLit is more than that. Where else would you go to find the answers to these questions?

• How many Australian novels were published by women in 2014? (480.)

• How many Australian films have been nominated for writing or directing Oscars? (18.)

• What was the earliest Australian-written film to attract an Oscar nomination? (The Captain Paradise.)

• How many Australian science-fiction novels have been published since 1960? (804.)

Our advanced search page gives you extraordinary control over your access to the database's contents. Using our advanced search function, you can perform targeted searches, searching for authors by gender, birth date, or cultural heritage, and searching for works by genre, publication date, or language.

If you're writing on an aspect of Australia's rich narrative tradition and complex literary landscape, then AustLit is a vital resource for your work.

Consider this case study

An Australian author wins an international award, and you want a quick sentence on how many other international awards have come Australia's way. Where else would you find that information quickly but on AustLit? From the advanced search page, you set up a search for all winners of international awards, and you get this list.

The first thing you notice is that it's a list of over 600 works.

The next thing you notice is that Australian writers began winning international awards as far back as 1823, when there was a particularly Australian-heavy Cambridge Chancellor's Gold Medal Competition for poetry.

Then you notice that these wins cover all manner of things: novels, poems, short stories, films, plays, fantasy and science fiction, crime, children's books, romance, horror.

It's about then that you wonder whether maybe this isn't actually a whole series of articles ...

(Header image via an article in the Evening News, 28 November 1925, p.1.)

... and you want to use AustLit.

AustLit aims to be the definitive virtual research environment and information resource for Australian literary, print, and narrative culture.

On AustLit, you will find records for over 830,000 works and more than 150,000 authors and organisations. These records include bibliographical or biographical details; information on genres, subjects, and settings; lists of ‘works about’; links to related works and people; and other rich material.

As a record of a national literature, AustLit is unique. So how can this unique, wide-ranging resource help you in your work?

An enormous body of research is undertaken each year by independent researchers, tracing family history, local history, popular genres, and more. Chances are, if you can think of a topic, someone is passionately researching it.

But how does AustLit fit into this?

AustLit has a specific focus on Australian literary history and narrative culture. But you might be surprised at how wide a range of resources that actually includes.

Admittedly, we might not be your first choice if you're a lepidopterist (though we have quite a few works about moths and butterflies), but if you're undertaking genealogical research (into your own family or another), tracing the history of a town, or undertaking independent research into an Australian author, AustLit is an excellent starting point for your research.

For example:

• Are there family rumours about an ancestor being involved in the theatre? AustLit has an extraordinarily rich collection of records in our Australian Popular Theatre dataset.

• Did your ancestor leave behind a scrapbook of poems, and you think they might have published in local newspapers? AustLit traces relatively obscure writing that isn't recorded in other sources, such as those periodicals covered in the Colonial Newspaper and Magazines Project.

• Did your ancestor dabble in the early Australian film industry? AustLit's records on Australian silent films include detailed cast and production information.

• Did your ancestor serve in World War I? Why not see what our World War I dataset says about the battles in which he served or the areas where she worked?

Those datasets are some of our most popular with independent researchers, but with more than 800,000 individual works recorded on the database, and more being added on a daily basis, you're likely to turn up something fascinating just by strolling freely though the database.

Imagine this case study

You want to research Rockhampton. You have excellent resources through your state library, and the National Library of Australia's Trove database provides access to newspaper articles. But you think there are other sources of material out there that you haven't checked.

So you go to AustLit, and you search for works set in Rockhampton or about Rockhampton.

And the database delivers this list of results.

This simple targeted search soon turns up The Winning of Betty: the first film ever made in Rockhampton.

Filmed in 1927 (towards the end of the silent-film era in Australia), The Winning of Betty was filmed in recognisable Rockhampton locations (the election scenes, for example, were filmed on the Post Office corner) and used stars of the local theatre as Betty and her two swains.

Moreover, it tells us that the Australian film industry wasn't entirely limited to the major urban centres.

That's got to be worth a few paragraphs in your history of Rockhampton.

(Header image from an article in the Queenslander, 8 March 1928, p.44.)

... and you want to use AustLit.

AustLit aims to be the definitive virtual research environment and information resource for Australian literary, print, and narrative culture.

On AustLit, you will find records for over 830,000 works and more than 150,000 authors and organisations. These records include bibliographical or biographical details; information on genres, subjects, and settings; lists of ‘works about’; links to related works and people; and other rich material.

These records are all available on the main database, but sub-sections of the data can also be explored through the various AustLit datasets, which collect together various forms or genres of writing: these include BlackWords, World War I in Australian Literary Culture, Asian Australian Children’s Literature and Publishing, Australian Popular Medievalism, or Pulp Fiction.

As a record of a national literature, AustLit is unique. So how can this unique, wide-ranging resource help you in your work?

Academics are one of the core groups that a resource such as AustLit is designed to help. As a database and bibliography, AustLit is an invaluable primary resource for works examining aspects of Australian print culture, literary history, or story-telling.

Consider this case study

(Header image via an article in the Advertiser, 8 December 1936, p.27.)

... and you want to use AustLit.

AustLit aims to be the definitive virtual research environment and information resource for Australian literary, print, and narrative culture.

On AustLit, you will find records for over 830,000 works and more than 150,000 authors and organisations. These records include bibliographical or biographical details; information on genres, subjects, and settings; lists of ‘works about’; links to related works and people; and other rich material.

These records are all available on the main database, but sub-sections of the data can also be explored through the various AustLit datasets, which collect together various forms or genres of writing: these include BlackWords, World War I in Australian Literary Culture, Asian Australian Children’s Literature and Publishing, Australian Popular Medievalism, or Pulp Fiction.

As a record of a national literature, AustLit is unique. So how can this unique, wide-ranging resource help you in your work?

Imagine this case study

(Header image from an article in the Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners' Advocate, 26 June 1954, p.5.)