AustLit

The Re-mapping the Lost Literary Capital: Darwin/Larrakia Country project, beginning 2025, brings together the scores of novels, plays, short stories, poems, and genre fiction titles that have portrayed Darwin from Federation to the present. Funded by the Australian Research Council (Discovery Project DP250100723, 2025-2028), it aims to pull Darwin from the literary void it has sat in for much of the twentieth century and restore it to the national imaginary. The aims of the project team are to offer a series of public lectures and exhibitions at the Northern Territory Library, guided literary tours of Darwin, and a monograph that organises the literary texts into a series of accessible themed chapters for future educators, students and researchers. The goal is to increase cultural visibility for north Australian writers and increase capacity for cultural tourism to the regions.

Explore the project.

Image by Desertchik via Pixarbay.

Led by Dr Millicent Weber at the Australian National University and funded by the Australian Research Council (DE240100466) the research project Audiobooks and Digital Book Culture: Australian Books and Publishing at a Time of Global Disruption is a systematic investigation of how audiobooks are reshaping Australian book culture, including publishing, circulation and reading practices. This project will draw on findings from interviews and surveys with creators and readers, and alongside AustLit the collaborators and contributors include professionals working with audiobooks at publishers, libraries, and major non-profit Vision Australia.

Explore the project.

This Australian Research Council-funded Discovery Project (DP230101835), led by Ronan McDonald (University of Melbourne), Katherine Bode (Australian National University), and Maggie Nolan (University of Queensland) aims to transform our understanding of Australian literature by combining existing traditional literary methods, bibliographical approaches and digital/computational methods to investigate the complex role of Irishness in its production, circulation and reception.

Explore the project.

Images from Guiseppe Milo via Flickr and Andy Mitchell via Wikimedia Commons.

An outcome of the Festival of the Fantastic in Australian and Japanese Arts, a series of events held in Sydney, Hobart, Yokohama, and Brisbane in 2022, this AustLit project, led by Dr Lucy Fraser and Sonia Broad from The University of Queensland, highlights a part of the history and back-drop to 'fantastic' Japan-Australia encounters: the history of Australian fantasy literature in Japanese translation. 

Explore the project.

AI in the Australian Archive is the start of a dataset on Artificial Intelligence and Robots, using bibliographical records collated by the AustLit database.

If you search 'artificial intelligence' in the AustLit database, you get 469 results, going back to 1951. 'Robots' gives you even more works, with over 1400 results going all the way back to 1891.

With AI currently being a hot topic across the globe, we aim to inform readers about ongoing discussions on the topic through the lens of Australian writers and encourage discussions about Australian AI and robotics literature. We also seek to show Australia's stance on the current global debate on AI.

Explore AI in the Australian Archive.

A 'prepper' can be defined as someone who expects to experience some form of major disruption – from a natural disaster to widespread societal collapse – within their lifetime, and who is taking active steps to prepare for that eventuality.

This project was the result of foundational work focused on identifying, updating and compiling records already within the AustLit database, developing dataset parameters, affiliating works into a searchable and discrete dataset, identifying future sources of data, and creating the Preppers project page.

Explore the project.

This project is a specialised data set on Australian writing about rock music, which is part of a larger project on the connections between texts and music by Chief Investigator Margaret Henderson.  The data set aims to collate bibliographical records of fiction, memoir, critical essays and, resources permitting, journalism.  We aim to produce an innovative, world-leading dataset that highlights the depth and breadth of writing about Australian rock music, and therefore the breadth and depth of Australian rock music itself.

Explore Australian Writing and Rock Music.

Australian Colonial Narrative Journalism is 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.

Explore Australian Colonial Narrative Journalism.

A Companion to the Australian Media, edited by Professor Bridget Griffen-Foley, from Maquarie University, was published by Australian Scholarly Publishing in October 2014.  

From the first Aboriginal newspaper in 1836 to the advent of social media, from Blue Hills to The Chaser, from astrology to women in the media, this is an essential Companion for everyone with a serious interest in those who decide what we read, hear and watch every day. Hundreds of interlinked narratives – from brief entries to essays – explore media organisations, genres and regions along with key players and significant issues.

It was published in digital format by AustLit in late 2016.

Explore A Companion to the Australian Media.

The Media Archives Project Database, created by the Centre for Media History at Macquarie University, is a register of archives pertaining to the Australian media.

Including newspapers, magazines, radio, television, film and advertising, the MAP database focuses on private and lesser-known archives, held by companies, peak bodies, community groups and individuals. Each archive record contains descriptive information of the archive, plus links to related online material.

It was transferred to the AustLit database in late 2016.

Explore the Media Archives Project Database.

An AustLit digital exhibition, The Silent Film Era presents the marketing of silent films in Australian newspapers through pictorial advertisements, portraits of silent-film stars, and publicity stills, harvested from contemporary newspapers via Trove.

Explore The Silent Film Era.

A research outcome of Dr Catriona Mills's 2012 AFI Research Collection (AFIRC) Research Fellowship, The Writer in Australian TV History is a collection of AustLit records based on the Crawford Collection at the AFI Research Collection at RMIT. The collection includes expanded records for 318 episodes of one radio and seven television programs: The Crime Club (1953-1954), Homicide (1964-1977), Hunter (1967-1969), Division 4 (1969-1975), Matlock Police (1970-1975), Ryan (1973-1974), Solo One (1976), and Bluey (1976-1977).

Explore The Writer in Australian TV History.

The Colonial Newspapers and Magazines Project is an intensive indexing project focusing on three years in the nineteenth century: 1838, 1868, and 1888. (These dates represent 50 and 100 years after the arrival of the First Fleet, and a mid-point – 1868 – in the colonial era.) The project postulates a shift from a vertical indexing model (a single significant journal indexed across the length of its run) to a horizontal model (the indexing of all periodicals across a single period).

Colonial Newspapers and Magazines was undertaken at the University of NSW Canberra (formerly UNSW@ADFA), under the guidance of lead investigators Paul Eggert, Nicole Moore, and Elizabeth McMahon, with research by Tessa Wooldridge and Jane Rankine (at the University of NSW Canberra) and Elaine Minor (at the Mitchell Library, Sydney).

Explore Colonial Newspapers and Magazines.

Australian Newspaper Reviews of 1930 began from the premise that the academic study of literature – traditionally the focus of studies of individual writers' reputations – is only one part of a broader and more complex 'ecology' of literature, and that the circulation and reception of texts can productively be analysed in the light of this larger context.

The project was undertaken by Professor Leigh Dale and researcher Robert Thomson as part of Resourceful Reading.

Explore Australian Newspaper Reviews of 1930.

Undertaken by Professor David Carter, AustLit director Kerry Kilner, and Dr Roger Osborne, this ARC-funded AustLit research project is a collection of bio-historical entries on approximately 100 Australian magazines and journals, from Angry Penguins to Westerly. The project began in 2003.

Explore Australian Magazines of the Twentieth Century.

The BlackWords project was launched in 2007 by Uncle Sam Watson. The first national coordinator was Dr Anita Heiss who has remained an important champion of the work we do in recording biographical, bibliographical, and general information about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers and storytellers and their continuing practice of Indigenous culture across the country.

BlackWords contains records for published and unpublished books, stories, plays, poems, and secondary works associated with eligible writers and storytellers and includes works in English, in translations, and in Australian languages. Team members contextualise Australia's historical timeline by adding information on ancient stories and songs.

Readers are advised that BlackWords contains images of people who have died.

Explore BlackWords.

See also the specific BlackWords section on this page.

The Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing dataset includes almost 500 books written about one of key periods in Australia’s modern history. The project was led by Professor Anna Johnston and supported by an Australian Research Council Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship (DP0770685). The University of Tasmania and The University of Queensland provided institutional support for Anna and her team of research assistants.

The nineteenth-century British Empire provided the physical infrastructure and ideological rationale for travel and travel writing to flourish in the southern hemisphere. Travel stimulated many visitors to document Australia’s environment and distinctive flora and fauna. Indigenous peoples and cultures, convicts and penal settlements, and settler colonial society were described by colonial officials, professional travellers, and private tourists in non-fiction writing that addressed armchair readers in Britain and beyond. The dataset reveals an important and influential part of Australia’s literary history, and the refinement of ideas about Australia in the northern hemisphere imagination.

Explore the project.

This project, developed by Bianca Millroy, combines historical and fictional narratives set in or around lighthouses, interwoven with a deeper commentary on the human condition. The objective is to discern patterns in publication and popularity; commonalities in theme and character development (or regression); as well as exploring setting as ‘character’, an external manifestation of internal turmoil.

Explore Liminal Spaces, Solitary Places.

Led by Dr Rebecca Olive, Swimming Wild explores Australian writing about the human body in wild water, from oceans to rivers to lakes.

Explore the project.

A research project under development in 2018 and led by Dr Rebecca Olive of the School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences, Waves of Fiction: Surfing in Australian Literature takes as its starting point the contention that despite the fame of Tim Winton and Puberty Blues, there is a much longer history of surf writing that includes diverse genres, forms, characters and authors. Yet we know little of that collective body of work, nor what new things it can tell us about surfing, which, although so prolific in our coastal lives, remains little understood, even by surfers themselves.

Waves of Fiction was initiated in the first half of 2018.

Explore Waves of Fiction.

This exhibition has been designed in partial fulfilment of a 2017 Postgraduate Fulbright Scholarship by Travis Franks, a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Arizona State University in the US. Travis's dissertation work critiques notions of settler belonging in the US and Australia through the concept of settler nativism--that is, how settlers imagine their sense of belonging against Indigenous and immigrant populations. 

Explore Contemporary Settler Literature.

Led by Professor Gillian Whitlock, Asylum Seeker Narratives is a set of research trails designed to, firstly, provide access to first-person asylum seeker stories and, secondly, to acknowledge the importance of analysing how these stories figure in broader literary and cultural contexts.

Explore Asylum Seeker Narratives.

Reverse Diaspora traces Australian expatriate writers in Britain since the 1830s, exploring the lives and creative work of approximately eighty Australian expatriate writers.

This research project was collaboration between Associate Professor Anne Pender, Professor Bruce Bennett, and Dr Ian Henderson, and was funded by the Australian Research Council.

Explore Reverse Diaspora.

Led by the University of Wollongong under the direction of Professor Wenche Ommundsen and Dr Michael Jacklin, this AustLit research project collates biographical and bibliographical information about Australian writers who identify with cultural heritages other than Anglo-Celtic (both non-English-speaking and English-speaking).

Explore Australian Multicultural Writers.

Australian Literary Responses to 'Asia' provides information on Australian creative writing about or referring to Asia, and some Australian critical responses to the literatures of Asian countries, and includes information on works about, set in, or in some cases, containing references to, or images of, countries in Asia, North East Asia, South East Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East and Papua New Guinea.

This AustLit research project led by Associate Professor Lyn Jacobs, Anne Chittleborough, and Professor Gus Worby, drawing on original research by Lyn Jacobs and Rick Hosking.

Explore Australian Literary Responses to 'Asia'.

The BlackWords project was launched in 2007 by Uncle Sam Watson. The first national coordinator was Dr Anita Heiss who has remained an important champion of the work we do in recording biographical, bibliographical, and general information about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers and storytellers and their continuing practice of Indigenous culture across the country.

BlackWords contains records for published and unpublished books, stories, plays, poems, and secondary works associated with eligible writers and storytellers and includes works in English, in translations, and in Australian languages. Team members contextualise Australia's historical timeline by adding information on ancient stories and songs.

Readers are advised that BlackWords contains images of people who have died.

Explore BlackWords.

The AustLit and BlackWords team maintains this calendar of significant events in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history since the point of first contact through invasion, settlement, and colonisation.

The Calendar was first compiled by Professor Anita Heiss in 2007 and has been updated periodically since then. It was most recently substantially updated in September 2024.

Aboriginal people have been living on and caring for the land now known as ‘Australia’ for approximately 60,000 years, retaining unbroken connections to Country from then to the present. Torres Strait Islander people have also maintained continuous occupation and use of islands, reefs, and waters, including the maintenance of Torres Strait Islander cultural identity across the islands.

The Calendar records many of the significant historical events, achievements, tragedies, key figures of resistance, important moments in storytelling and publishing, and the various impacts of colonisation across this land's modern history. It also includes teaching notes for using the calendar in classrooms.

Explore the Calendar.

BlackWords information trails and exhibitions provide paths through the vast range of records that make up the BlackWords dataset, from Indigenous sporting heroes to the David Unaipon Awards, to explorations of country from South Australia to the Gulf of Carpentaria.

Explore the BlackWords information trails.

This small collection of biographical stories that capture the experience of growing up in Australia as an Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander person arises from the overwhelming volume of stories submitted to Black Inc. for consideration in Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia. AustLit is pleased to have the opportunity to make these works available.

Explore Growing Up Indigenous in Australia.

AustLit's first professional development day for teachers, Teaching with BlackWords also produced a series of resources for the ongoing use of teachers, including a detailed lesson plan for both Henry Lawson and Leah Purcell's versions of The Drover's Wife and an in-conversation between Dr Anita Heiss and Professor Larissa Behrendt.

Explore Teaching with BlackWords.

A ground-breaking exhibition curated by Fiona Foley and located in the Great Court at The University Of Queensland's St Lucia campus, Courting Blakness was originally available in September 2014. In 2017, the original website and ancillary materials were moved to AustLit for archival purposes.

Explore Courting Blakness.

Carried out in 2013 by Dr Anita Heiss, these interviews represent a snapshot of Australian First Nations writing in the twenty-first century, as twenty authors, from poets to Miles Franklin winners to academics, set out their path to writing.

Explore the BlackWords Interviews: Anita Heiss.

This set of six interviews were undertaken by Dr Estelle Castro-Koshy during the course of her PhD in 2007: they are now being published on AustLit, accompanied by detailed essays by the interviewer.

Note: Readers are warned that this collection contains the names of people who have died.

Explore Literature (H)as Power.

BlackWords contains a number of information trails designed to introduce teachers and young readers to aspects of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history, experiences, and cultures.

Explore some of the following trails:

Works for Children

Aboriginal Children's Literature about Country

Serious Issues for Young Readers

Aboriginal Literature for Children: More Than Just Pretty Pictures

Designed to introduce teachers and readers to Australian adaptations, re-writings, and other modifications of Shakespearean plays, this exhibition explores versions of Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet for young-adult readerships, as well as works where Shakespeare is studied and performed in schools, Shakespeare for younger readers, and Aboriginal versions of Shakespearean texts.

Explore Shakespeare for Australian Young Adults.

The Picture Book Diet is a research project by Dr Laurel Cohn, 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.

Explore The Picture Book Diet.

Children's Literature and the Environment is a bibliographic dataset of works for children and young adults where discussions of environmental waste, climate change, species endangerment, ecocitizenship, and the effects of globalisation on the environment are major concerns. It takes the form of a series of richly detailed online exhibitions and information trails

Compiled and written by Amy Cross, and led by Professor Kerry Mallan, Martin Borchert, and Dr Cherie Allan, Children's Literature and the Environment was funded by the Faculty of Education and the Division of Technology Information and Learning Support at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and published on AustLit.

Explore Children's Literature and the Environment.

Part of AustLit's research project into World War I in Australian Literary Culture, World War I Stories for Children and Young Adults explores the range of ways in which Australian authors have presented the Great War to young readers, from contemporaneous fiction to modern graphic novels.

Explore World War I Stories for Children and Young Adults.

Asian-Australian Children’s Literature and Publishing (AACLAP) investigates and records details of Australian children’s literature either set in Asia, containing Asian-Australian content or characters, or representing Asian-Australian cultures and experiences, as well as hundreds of Australian works that have been translated into at least one Asian language.

Research on AACLAP was conducted at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) under the lead of Professor Kerry Mallan, Associate Professor Deborah Henderson, and Martin Borchert, with Amy Cross, Dr Michelle Dicinoski, and Dr Cherie Allan.

Explore Asian-Australian Children's Literature and Publishing.

An AustLit research project, the Children's Literature Digital Resource digitised a wide selection of both popular and rare early Australian children's literature published between 1830 and 1945, which can now be read in full text via AustLit.

The project was conducted at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) under the guidance of chief investigators Professor Kerry Mallan, Martin Borchert, and Professor Annette Patterson, with research assistance from Amy Cross, Dr Michelle Dicinoski, and Dr Cherie Allan.

Explore the Children's Literature Digital Resource.

Edited by Professor Clare Bradford and inaugurated in 2007, Reading in the Victorian Classroom provides information on the school readers produced for Victorian schoolchildren between 1927 and 1930, and used until the 1950s. These detailed bibliographical records give a rich insight into what kind of works were made available for children in the early twentieth century, and how they were presented.

Explore Reading in the Victorian Classroom.

In 1998, eight Australian universities and the National Library of Australia began planning an Australian Literature Subject Gateway, to replace the long-running AUSTLIT database and to house a range of bibliographical and data-gathering projects.

AustLit went live in 2001 and was formally launched in 2002. Incorporating significant pre-existing datasets (including Australian Multicultural Writers and South Australian Women Writers), the database has expanded to support research into an increasing range of ways to tell stories, from novels and drama to radio plays and film.

Explore our digital history of AustLit's first twenty years and other resources to mark the anniversary.

The work of Dr Roger Osborne, the Joseph Furphy Digital Archive is designed to provide greater access for more people to the material archive that lies behind Furphy's fiction and poetry. The archive includes ancillary material such as text analysis tools, maps, and an interactive timeline.

Explore the Joseph Furphy Digital Archive.

Professor Gillian Whitlock's Late 20th Century Anthologies, a component of Resourceful Reading, focuses on processes of selection, connection and interpretation of texts in critical anthologies in Australian literature. AustLit was used to explore an identified increase in the publication of anthologies late last century and the role of the anthology in the debates about Australian literature, culture and society.

Explore Late 20th Century Anthologies.

Part of Resourceful Reading, Professor Robert Dixon's Australian Literature in the 'Translation Zone' took as its starting point Emily Apter's metaphor of the 'translation zone' and sought to answer some of the research questions it raised by populating the zone with real data. The work was assisted by Robert Thomson.

Explore Australian Literature in the 'Translation Zone'.

Part of Resourceful Reading, Dr Katherine Bode's Reading by Numbers draws on AustLit's bibliographical data to demonstrate a new digital approach to literary history and provide a revised history of the Australian novel, combining book history's approach to literary data with the digital humanities' practice of computer modelling.

Explore Reading by Numbers.

Within the Climate Change in Australian Narratives research project, this exhibition explores the intersection of extinction and ecological themes in Australian literature through the figure of the thylacine, more commonly known as the Tasmanian tiger. Transformation—of landscapes, beings, and stories—is a central theme of this project.

This project was developed by Samantha Schraag as part of the Masters of Writing, Editing and Publishing, and includes an illustrated essay and bibliographic dataset.

Explore Thylacines and the Anthropocene.

Researched and compiled by Lacey Walker (an ENGL3020 intern with AustLit and Dr Rebecca Olive's Waves of Fiction: Surfing in Australian Literature project), Mortal Tides examines works where surfing and crime overlap, from organised crime to sexual assault.

Explore Mortal Tides.

Researched and written by ENGL3020 intern Susan Moran, in consultation with the performing arts companies, this beautifully illustrated essay connects the works of First Nations performing arts companies to the current Australian curriculum.

Explore First Nations Performing Arts in Education.

Created by ENGL3020 student Sophi Hohn, this exhibition surveys the lives and key works of some of the key Australian women radio dramatists of the mid twentieth century.

Explore Women in Radio.

Written by ENGL3020 intern Emma Cunnington, this richly illustrated essay explores the life and career of playwright Betty Roland.

Explore 'Thoroughly Australian': Representations of Australian Identity in the Plays of Betty Roland.

Written by ENGL3020 intern Joy Chalaby, this exploration of suffragette writer Leontine Cooper places her back in the context in which she was working and writing.

Explore Leontine Cooper and the Queensland Woman.

As part of her work on Cooper, Joy also transcribed two of Cooper's stories into richly illustrated online versions.

Read 'A Bad Night's Camp'.

Read 'The Taming of the Shrew: Australian Fashion'.

The work of ENGL3020 student Katerina Lawler, this Hecate exhibition is concerned with the history, influence and experience of the interdisciplinary journal Hecate. Founded in 1975 with Emeritus Professor Carole Ferrier as editor, it had support from The University of Queensland (UQ), Hecate was one of the first international second-wave feminist journals. Hecate is published by Hecate Press and produced from within the School of Communication and Arts at UQ.

Explore Hecate: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Women's Liberation.

The work of AustLit intern Taylor Johnson, this exhibition explores the background context, writing, and reception of It Has Happened Before, a play by Dorothy Blewett. Like The Manuscripts of Dorothy Blewett and The Dramatic Spaces of Oriel Gray, it forms part of the Australian Drama Archive.

Explore the Background and Context to It Has Happened Before.

The work of 2017 winter scholar Georgia Harawira, Young Adult Fiction of Oceania introduces readers to the young-adult fiction of First Nations peoples of Oceania: works by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, Māori, and Pasifika authors. Each section is divided into accessible subcategories such as fantasy, romance, historical fiction, or identity.

Explore Young Adult Fiction of Oceania.

The work of AustLit intern Jemimah Thompson, The Dramatic Spaces of Oriel Gray explores the social spaces Oriel Gray herself inhabited, the production spaces available to her plays, and the dramatic spaces of which her works made use. Like The Manuscripts of Dorothy Blewett and Background and Context to It Has Happened Before, it forms part of the Australian Drama Archive.

Explore The Dramatic Spaces of Oriel Gray.

Funded by The University of Queensland through Technology Enhanced Learning and Teaching Innovation Grants and developed by AustLit between 2016 and 2019, Cirrus is a teaching-and-learning platform that makes use of the specific functionalities of AustLit to allow students to develop enhanced, multimedia assessment outcomes.

Superlative student work is published on AustLit, after a formal review and editing process, as part of the Best of Cirrus.

Click here to explore the Best of Cirrus.

Or go directly to the Best of Cirrus: PHIL2013 Special Collection (2017-2019).

The work of AustLit intern Saskia Stegman, this exhibition is a comparative textual analysis, tracking the substantial changes to Dorothy Blewett's play The First Joanna across four different versions. Like The Dramatic Spaces of Oriel Grey and Background and Context to It Has Happened Before, it forms part of the Australian Drama Archive.

Explore The Manuscripts of Dorothy Blewett.

This exhibition was produced by Annalijse Keech as part of ENGL3020. It explores the AustLit collection of digitised speculative fiction. The collection of 135 works focuses on Australian speculative fiction from the 1830s to 1940s. The works focus on various topics, ranging from lost civilisations/races to apocalyptic fiction and everything in between.

Explore the exhibition.

Led by Dr Airlie Lawson, The Miles Franklin Rights Project gives an international dimension to what is often described as Australian’s most prestigious literary prize: the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Building on AustLit’s existing bibliographic records to create a comprehensive data set of international editions of award-winning and shortlisted novels from 2000-2020, the project provides a basis from which the impact and value of this very local award can be interrogated from a global perspective.

The Miles Franklin Rights Project commenced at the beginning of 2021 and is still in progress.

Explore the project.

An outcome of Dr Duncan Hose's Fryer Fellowship, John Forbes in the Archive interrogates the experience of encountering the archival remnant of an author.

Explore John Forbes in the Archive.

The work of Dr Roger Osborne, the Joseph Furphy Digital Archive is designed to provide greater access for more people to the material archive that lies behind Furphy's fiction and poetry. The archive includes ancillary material such as text analysis tools, maps, and an interactive timeline.

Explore the Joseph Furphy Digital Archive.

In 2013, Copyright Agency developed Reading Australia to make significant Australian literary works more readily available for teaching in schools and universities. In consultation with Reading Australia, AustLit produced a series of rich information trails that provide context and supporting information for nineteen of the included texts.

Explore AustLit's Reading Australia trails.

The work of Jill Julius Matthews, supported by a Nancy Keesing Fellowship from the State Library of NSW in 2005, Hidden Treasures of the Mitchell Library: Sydney Periodicals, 1895-1930 selected magazines from the Mitchell Library's collection, and built enhanced AustLit records to showcase their diversity and complexity.

Explore Hidden Treasures of the Mitchell Library.

Read Jill Julius Matthew's peer-reviewed article on the project.

The Colonial Newspapers and Magazines Project is an intensive indexing project focusing on three years in the nineteenth century: 1838, 1868, and 1888. (These dates represent 50 and 100 years after the arrival of the First Fleet, and a mid-point – 1868 – in the colonial era.) The project postulates a shift from a vertical indexing model (a single significant journal indexed across the length of its run) to a horizontal model (the indexing of all periodicals across a single period).

Colonial Newspapers and Magazines was undertaken at the University of NSW Canberra (formerly UNSW@ADFA), under the guidance of lead investigators Paul Eggert, Nicole Moore, and Elizabeth McMahon, with research by Tessa Wooldridge and Jane Rankine (at the University of NSW Canberra) and Elaine Minor (at the Mitchell Library, Sydney).

Explore Colonial Newspapers and Magazines.

Australian Newspaper Reviews of 1930 began from the premise that the academic study of literature – traditionally the focus of studies of individual writers' reputations – is only one part of a broader and more complex 'ecology' of literature, and that the circulation and reception of texts can productively be analysed in the light of this larger context.

The project was undertaken by Professor Leigh Dale and researcher Robert Thomson as part of Resourceful Reading.

Explore Australian Newspaper Reviews of 1930.

Banned in Australia gathers information on all literary and scholarly titles whose import into Australia was banned by Australian Customs or which were only allowed restricted circulation between 1901 and 1973. It includes enhanced bibliographical records for some 500 works.

Led by Associate Professor Nicole Moore with research by Marita Bullock, Banned in Australia was funded by the Australian Research Council and supported by the Macquarie University Deputy Vice Chancellor's Grant.

Explore Banned in Australia.

Undertaken by Professor David Carter, AustLit director Kerry Kilner, and Dr Roger Osborne, this ARC-funded AustLit research project is a collection of bio-historical entries on approximately 100 Australian magazines and journals.

Explore Australian Magazines of the Twentieth Century.

Climate Change Fiction in Australian Narratives is a large-scale research project into ways in which Australians have addressed climate change in fiction, from the earliest days to current works.

Climate Change Fiction includes the publication of an expanded edition of Dr Deborah Jordan's monograph on climate change in Australian narratives, as well as accompanying material on short fiction, climate narratives of coastal regions, activism, and climate science.

Explore Climate Change Fiction in Australian Narratives.

Speculations is a substantial study of Australian popular fiction. Established in 2011, the project focused on mapping horror, fantasy, and science-fiction publications and digitising historical works of speculative fiction.

Speculations was led by Professor Van Ikin, Dr Toni Johnson-Woods, and Associate Professor Kim Wilkins, with researchers in Western Australia and Queensland involved in developing the records. AustLit continues to create records in these genres.

Explore Speculations.

Explore the full-text collection of early speculative fiction.

An outcome of the Festival of the Fantastic in Australian and Japanese Arts, a series of events held in Sydney, Hobart, Yokohama, and Brisbane in 2022, this AustLit project, led by Dr Lucy Fraser and Sonia Broad from The University of Queensland, highlights a part of the history and back-drop to 'fantastic' Japan-Australia encounters: the history of Australian fantasy literature in Japanese translation. 

Explore the project.

This research project offers the first systematic examination of 21st-century Australian popular fiction, the most significant growth area in Australian trade publishing since the turn of the century. Its three areas of investigation are: the publishing of Australian popular fiction; the interrelationships between Australian popular fiction and Australian genre communities; and the textual distinctiveness of Australian popular novels in relation to genre.

AustLit is pleased to publish ancillary material related to the Genre Worlds project. Genre Worlds is an ARC-funded research project undertaken by Professor Kim Wilkins, Professor David Carter, Associate Professor Beth Driscoll, and Professor Lisa Fletcher.

Explore GenreWorlds.

An illustrated introduction to some of the most prolific authors of Australian pulp westerns from the 1950s to the 1970s. AustLit's records for pulp westerns form part of Dr Toni Johnson-Woods' research into pulp fiction generally.

Read Australian Pulp Westerns.

Beyond Googles and Corsets: Australian Steampunk is a bio-bibliographical survey of steampunk in Australia, from proto-steampunk works such as Banjo Paterson's 1891 robot story to the most recent bustlepunk novels. The bibliographical records are accompanied by a richly illustrated essay that explores steampunk from its earliest days through issues of class, gender, and coloniality.

Beyond Googles and Steampunk was developed in late 2016 and early 2017 by AustLit researcher Dr Catriona Mills and University of Queensland summer scholar Geoffrey Hondroudakis.

Explore Beyond Goggles and Steampunk.

First developed in 2015 by AustLit researcher Dr Catriona Mills, Diversity in Australian Speculative Fiction is a curated collection of reading lists that aim to expose the diversity of Australian speculative fiction in four categories: racial or ethnic diversity; physical, neurological, and sensate diversity; sexual or gender diversity; and religious diversity. Each category includes divisions into novels, short works, picture books and graphic novels, and multi-work series. The exhibition is further supported by an list of further reading and resources, which is not limited to Australian resources and continues to be updated.

Explore Diversity in Australian Speculative Fiction.

Australian Popular Medievalism was established in 2009 to gauge the extent and importance of medieval images and ideas in Australian popular fiction, focusing on novels published between 1995 and 2010. The project demonstrates that recent Australian popular fiction offers perhaps the most sustained engagement with the Middle Ages in Australian literature, and certainly in Australian popular culture.

Australian Popular Medievalism was led by (now) Associate Professor Kim Wilkins, with research assistance from Drew Whitehead and Oliver Chadwick.

Explore Australian Popular Medievalism.

Read Kim Wilkins' peer-reviewed essay on the project.

Pulp Fiction focuses on making more visible Australia's tradition of romance, crime, western, science, horror, sports fiction, comics, and radio serials, especially the work of some of the most successful and prolific authors, between 1939 and 1959.

Led by Dr Toni Johnson-Woods with research assistance from Joanne Sawyers and Dr Michelle Dicinoski, the project includes biographical details on more than 100 authors and cover artists and bibliographical details on more than 2000 titles and their translations.

Explore Pulp Fiction.

View Carter Brown covers collected as part of this research.

This research project offers the first systematic examination of 21st-century Australian popular fiction, the most significant growth area in Australian trade publishing since the turn of the century. Its three areas of investigation are: the publishing of Australian popular fiction; the interrelationships between Australian popular fiction and Australian genre communities; and the textual distinctiveness of Australian popular novels in relation to genre.

AustLit is pleased to publish ancillary material related to the Genre Worlds project. Genre Worlds is an ARC-funded research project undertaken by Professor Kim Wilkins, Professor David Carter, Associate Professor Beth Driscoll, and Professor Lisa Fletcher.

Explore GenreWorlds.

Led by Dr Airlie Lawson, The Miles Franklin Rights Project gives an international dimension to what is often described as Australian’s most prestigious literary prize: the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Building on AustLit’s existing bibliographic records to create a comprehensive data set of international editions of award-winning and shortlisted novels from 2000-2020, the project provides a basis from which the impact and value of this very local award can be interrogated from a global perspective.

The Miles Franklin Rights Project commenced at the beginning of 2021.

Explore the project.

In 2013, Copyright Agency developed Reading Australia to make significant Australian literary works more readily available for teaching in schools and universities. In consultation with Reading Australia, AustLit produced a series of rich information trails that provide context and supporting information for nineteen of the included texts.

Explore AustLit's Reading Australia trails.

The Colonial Newspapers and Magazines Project is an intensive indexing project focusing on three years in the nineteenth century: 1838, 1868, and 1888. (These dates represent 50 and 100 years after the arrival of the First Fleet, and a mid-point – 1868 – in the colonial era.) The project postulates a shift from a vertical indexing model (a single significant journal indexed across the length of its run) to a horizontal model (the indexing of all periodicals across a single period).

Colonial Newspapers and Magazines was undertaken at the University of NSW Canberra (formerly UNSW@ADFA), under the guidance of lead investigators Paul Eggert, Nicole Moore, and Elizabeth McMahon, with research by Tessa Wooldridge and Jane Rankine (at the University of NSW Canberra) and Elaine Minor (at the Mitchell Library, Sydney).

Explore Colonial Newspapers and Magazines.

Australian Newspaper Reviews of 1930 began from the premise that the academic study of literature – traditionally the focus of studies of individual writers' reputations – is only one part of a broader and more complex 'ecology' of literature, and that the circulation and reception of texts can productively be analysed in the light of this larger context.

The project was undertaken by Professor Leigh Dale and researcher Robert Thomson as part of Resourceful Reading.

Explore Australian Newspaper Reviews of 1930.

Undertaken by Professor David Carter, AustLit director Kerry Kilner, and Dr Roger Osborne, this ARC-funded AustLit research project is a collection of bio-historical entries on approximately 100 Australian magazines and journals.

Explore Australian Magazines of the Twentieth Century.

The Re-mapping the Lost Literary Capital: Darwin/Larrakia Country project, beginning 2025, brings together the scores of novels, plays, short stories, poems, and genre fiction titles that have portrayed Darwin from Federation to the present. Funded by the Australian Research Council (Discovery Project DP250100723, 2025-2028), it aims to pull Darwin from the literary void it has sat in for much of the twentieth century and restore it to the national imaginary. The aims of the project team are to offer a series of public lectures and exhibitions at the Northern Territory Library, guided literary tours of Darwin, and a monograph that organises the literary texts into a series of accessible themed chapters for future educators, students and researchers. The goal is to increase cultural visibility for north Australian writers and increase capacity for cultural tourism to the regions.

Explore the project.

Image by Desertchik via Pixarbay.

Northern Territory Literature explores the literature of the Australian tropics (the Northern Territory) and its distinction from writing produced in more temperate southern zones. It is a companion project to Northern Western Australian Literature and Writers of Tropical Queensland.

This dataset was inaugurated in 2008 and produced by a team of researchers at James Cook University, under the guidance of Associate Professor Cheryl M. Taylor.

Explore Northern Territory Literature.

Northern Western Australian Literature explores the work of authors who were born in, lived in, visited or wrote about Western Australia north of the Tropic of Capricorn to discover features that distinguish the literature of the Australian Tropics from works produced in more temperate southern zones. It is a companion project to Northern Territory Writers and Writers of Tropical Queensland.

This dataset was inaugurated in 2008 and produced by a team of researchers at James Cook University, under the guidance of Associate Professor Cheryl M. Taylor.

Explore Northern Western Australian Literature.

Literature of Tasmania was developed from 2006 to 2008, to collect biographical and bibliographical information on authors who were born in Tasmania or who either visited or wrote about the area. It includes information on early colonial newspapers and magazines, continuing Aboriginal writing, and popular fiction in Tasmania, among other aspects of literary production.

This project was established by Dr Philip Mead, with research, data collection, and record creation by Dr Tony Stagg and Dr Ralph Spaulding. It was supported by the Australian Research Council and the University of Tasmania.

Explore Literature of Tasmania.

Read Philip Mead's illustrated monograph, Tasmania in the Literary Imagination.

Writers of Tropical Queensland records biographical and bibliographical information about authors who were born in, lived in, visited or wrote about Queensland north of the Tropic of Capricorn.

This dataset was initiated in 2004, when James Cook University joined the AustLit partnership. It was overseen by Associate Professor Cheryl Taylor, with a team of dedicated researchers. It is a companion project to Northern Territory Writers and North Western Australian Literature.

Explore Writers of Tropical Queensland.

Western Australian Literature provides biographical and bibliographical information about writers associated with Western Australia by birth, residence, or visits, and their works. It also includes the specialist dataset, The Goldfields Bards of Western Australia.

Western Australian Literature was undertaken by the University of Western Australia, under the direction of Professor Dennis Haskell, Associate Professsor Delys Bird, and Dr Toby Burrows. Primary research was undertaken by Dan Midalia and Charles McLaughlin.

Explore Western Australian Literature.

Explore The Goldfields Bards of Western Australia.

This dataset collates biographical and bibliographical information on women writers associated with South Australia by birth, residence, or visits to the state.

The foundation of this collection is the Bibliography of South Australian Women Writers, compiled by Anne Chittleborough, Rick Hosking, and Graham Tulloch between 1995 and 1999, and incorporated into AustLit in 2000.

Explore South Australian Women Writers.

Originally funded by a research infrastructure grant from The University of Queensland, ScreenLit was established by Professors Tom O'Regan and Frances Bonner, Associate Professor Jason Jacobs, and Kerry Kilner. ScreenLit represents a comprehensive scholarly approach to concentrating the detail about screenwriters, screenplays, published and unpublished manuscripts, original works, and adaptations of literary works in one resource.

Explore ScreenLit.

Established in 2016 with funding from the Ian Potter Foundation, the Australian Drama Archive aims to digitise and research a collection of Australian plays from the twentieth century up to the 1960s and bring them to life again through publication, production, and new research.

The Australian Drama Archive is led from The University of Queensland, with researchers Kerry Kilner, Dr Stephen Carleton, and Dr Bernadette Cochrane, and the University of New England, with Professor Anne Pender and Emeritus Professor Julian Croft.

Explore the Australian Drama Archive.

Supported by the ARC-funded Discovery Project 'Media Transformation in its Australian and International Contexts: Analysis and Theory-building' by Professor Tom O'Regan, Australians and Adaptations since 1900 traces some aspects of the role of adaptation in Australian film and television, from the silent era through the departure of Australian writers to the BBC in the 1950s and 1960s, to the great mini-series of the 1980s.

Originally constructed in 2014, this project has been revised and updated in 2020.

Explore Australians and Adaptations (1900-2014).

The work of Professor Anne Pender under an an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship, Players: Australian Actors on Stage, Television and Film is a series of lushly illustrated essays on selected Australian actors who came to maturity in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and who have shaped our ideas and our identity.

Explore Players.

A Companion to the Australian Media, edited by Professor Bridget Griffen-Foley, from Maquarie University, was published by Australian Scholarly Publishing in October 2014.  

From the first Aboriginal newspaper in 1836 to the advent of social media, from Blue Hills to The Chaser, from astrology to women in the media, this is an essential Companion for everyone with a serious interest in those who decide what we read, hear and watch every day. Hundreds of interlinked narratives – from brief entries to essays – explore media organisations, genres and regions along with key players and significant issues.

It was published in digital format by AustLit in late 2016.

Explore A Companion to the Australian Media.

The Media Archives Project Database, created by the Centre for Media History at Macquarie University, is a register of archives pertaining to the Australian media.

Including newspapers, magazines, radio, television, film and advertising, the MAP database focuses on private and lesser-known archives, held by companies, peak bodies, community groups and individuals. Each archive record contains descriptive information of the archive, plus links to related online material.

It was transferred to the AustLit database in late 2016.

Explore the Media Archives Project Database.

These two connected exhibitions form part of AustLit's World War I in Australian Literary Culture dataset.

Professional Digger and Post-war Entertainment explores the movements and output of individual soldier entertainers and variety troupes comprising ex-servicemen during the war years and afterwards.

Explore Professional Digger and Post-war Entertainment.

Film and the War from 1914 to 2014 traces a century of films about World War I and Australia's role in the conflict, from 1914's A Long, Long Way to Tipperary to 2014's The Water Diviner.

Explore Film and the War.

An AustLit digital exhibition, The Silent Film Era explores the way in which Australian newspapers marketed the silent-film era through pictorial advertisements, portraits of silent-film stars, and publicity stills harvested from contemporary newspapers via Trove.

Explore The Silent Film Era.

A research outcome of Dr Catriona Mills's 2012 AFI Research Collection (AFIRC) Research Fellowship, The Writer in Australian TV History is a collection of AustLit records based on the Crawford Collection at the AFI Research Collection at RMIT. The collection includes expanded records for 318 episodes of eight radio and television projects:  The Crime Club (1953-1954), Homicide (1964-1977), Hunter (1967-1969), Division 4 (1969-1975), Matlock Police (1970-1975), Ryan (1973-1974), Solo One (1976), and Bluey (1976-1977).

Explore The Writer in Australian TV History.

Established in 2006, Australian Popular Theatre focuses on variety theatre of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In addition to information on Australian-based writers and works, it covers designers, entrepreneurs, and stage artists.

Drawn originally from the research of Dr Clay Djubal, the project was later expanded by Professor Richard Fotheringham's ARC research infrastructure grant on stage comedians and Professor Veronica Kelly's Australian Drama Studies project.

Explore Australian Popular Theatre.

In the midst of a global pandemic, AustLit seeks, as always, to record for posterity.

How do you frame this, when the events are ongoing, in a way that makes sense to both an endless present and an unknown future?

AustLit's role is to collect, to record, to organise information—we do this for both the present and for posterity. How people will use this information in a decade, or two, or three, we cannot know when we record it. But we can know that here and now is a time that needs to be recorded.

Originally created in July 2020, it will change as the conditions and consequences of the pandemic change.

Explore COVID-19: The 2020 Pandemic in the Australian Arts.

This is not a critical engagement with the Black Summer bushfires and other bushfire writing in Australia: it is, rather, a set of pathways into bushfire writing, a way of gathering together the disparate ways in which Australians have written about fire.

The main focus is Black Summer: because Black Summer is part of a continuum of bushfires on this continent, we have also collated material under 'Other Bushfire Writing': here, you will find writing about bushfires generally, but also pathways into works about other catastrophic fire events: Black Thursday (1851), Ash Wednesday (1983), and Black Saturday (2009).

Explore Black Summer (2019-2020).

To mark Cherry Smyth's tenure as the S.W. Brooks Visiting Fellow at the School of Communication and Arts at The University of Queensland (October 2019), this exhibition positions Smyth's staggering poem cycle, Famished, against the context of Australian writings on the Great Famine (1845-1852) and the consequent Irish diaspora.

Explore the exhibition.

Led by Dr Jessica White, 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 illuminates the structures and assumptions of ableism, highlights the significant and imaginative achievements of writers with disability, and draws attention to the resourceful ways in which people with disability navigate their everyday lives.

Writing Disability in Australia was inaugurated in 2018 and launched in 2019.

Explore Writing Disability in Australia.

Published on the centenary of her death in October 1917, Parasols and Prosthetics Limbs republishes a selection of short fiction from Sumner Locke, a prolific and popular writer of magazine fiction, novels, and plays, now long forgotten except in her son and namesake, Sumner Locke Elliott.

Sometimes humorous but more often sharp, Locke’s war stories spring from the romantic magazine fiction of the Edwardian period, but are twisted by the constant pressure of the war, of the streams of men to the front, of the three chances to one (as one of the stories is titled) that a sweetheart would come back wounded.

Explore Parasols and Prosthetic Limbs.

Beginning with an introduction to the Stolen Generations, this trail, part of the broader collection of BlackWords trails, presents works depicting the emotional, psychological and physical traumas of their experiences, and the disruption of their oral and cultural knowledge.

Please be warned that some of these works and agent records may contain images, artwork, perspectives, and stories from people who are now deceased. It also contains words, terms, or descriptions that may be culturally sensitive and are considered inappropriate today, but that reflect the period in which the work was written.

Explore the BlackWords: Stolen Generations trail.

A specialist AustLit research project, Trauma Texts investigates trauma in Australian life narratives from 1990 to 2015. the enriched bibliographical records catalogue the types of trauma represented and the geographical and temporal settings of trauma narratives.

Trauma Texts was developed in 2013 by a team from Flinders University, including Kate Douglas, Carolyn Lake, Tully Barnett, Pamela Graham, and Emma Maguire. It was launched at Flinders in December 2015.

Explore Trauma Texts.

World War I in Australian Literary Culture is an AustLit research project expanding our coverage of the way the 1914-1918 war has appeared in literature, film, and other forms of storytelling from the conflict's beginning to the present. Inaugurated in 2012 and led by AustLit researcher Robert Thomson, it presents a collection of over 5000 records and a range of associated research trails.

Explore World War I in Australian Literary Culture.

Led by Professor Gillian Whitlock, Asylum Seeker Narratives is a set of research trails designed to, firstly, provide access to first-person asylum seeker stories and, secondly, to acknowledge the importance of analysing how these stories figure in broader literary and cultural contexts.

Explore Asylum Seeker Narratives.

Convict Narratives: The Australian Penal Colonies in Print, 1786-1900 aims to showcase the rich and diverse array of writing about convicts published in Australia during the long nineteenth century.

Convict Narratives was led by Dr Nathan Garvey and supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (2013-2015).

Coming soon.