Cirrus@Austlit

Compiled by Professor Leigh Dale, former editor of Australian Literary Studiesand Linda Hale and edited by Kerry Kilner. The Anthology of Criticism contains 75 full text scholarly articles on authors and their works, including Henry Lawson, Judith Wright, Peter Carey, Jack Davis, and many others. The selection of material is designed to support the teaching of Australian literature at both secondary and tertiary levels.

The Anthology also makes available selective bibliographies on each included author to assist with the discovery of other relevant, authoritative, secondary material for teaching and study.

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The Australian Drama Archive is a developing collection of plays and performance texts. Using plays held in the Eunice Hanger Collection at the library of The University of Queensland and in the Campbell Howard Collection at the University of New England, a group of theatre historians are throwing light on the rich history of early twentieth century Australian theatre.

Led by AustLit Director, Kerry Kilner with colleagues from UQ and UNE, the Archive will contain dozens of plays with full biographical details and performance histories. The plays will be able to be used for research, teaching, and performance.

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More than 200 works of Australian fiction and poetry have been digitised with the support of the University of Sydney's Scholarly Electronic Text and Image Service (SETIS) program program. These works range from the early nineteenth century to the 1930s. Texts were selected on the basis of academic and teaching staff surveys and advice. More works will be added to this collection as they become available.

See the full collection of full text Australian fiction and poetry.

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Researched, compiled, and written by Dr Catriona Mills and Geoffrey Hondroudakis, Beyond Goggles and Corsets : Australian Steampunk is a unique AustLit research project that identifies and describes Australian-written steampunk works, and sets out the history and thematic concerns of Australian steampunk from the earliest proto-steampunk works to the present day. The lengthy essay is richly illustrated and accompanied by curated reading lists.

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The BlackWords Essays, published by AustLit in 2015, are a series of eight essays by Anita Heiss, produced for teachers, students, researchers, and readers in order to highlight AustLit’s BlackWords project, the most comprehensive resource of Indigenous Australian writing available. The essays cover issues of Indigenous literacy, writing for children and young adults, writing about country, the role of anthologies in writing careers, the Stolen Generations, and writing about identity.

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A full-text repository of Australian children's literature from 1830 to 1945, the Children's Literature Digital Resource is a collection of hundreds of early works, from novels to poetry and picture books, from authors including Dorothy Wall, E.W. Cole, Richard Rowe, and Lillian Pyke. The collection also includes a selection of critical works, including works by Clare Bradford, Heather Scutter, Kerry White, Sharyn Pearce, and Marcie Muir. The project establishes an important digital facility for research, teaching, and information provision around Australian children’s literature and provides access to a wide range of high-quality full-text data, both primary and secondary resources.

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AustLit's Climate Change in Australian Narratives includes the digital publication of a revised edition of Dr Deborah Jordan's Climate Change Narratives in Fiction (2014). In addition to being richly illustrated, this new edition expands the critique beyond the original end-date of 2014, positioning the analysis against the recent boom in climate change fiction. This monograph is supported by rich ancillary material about the treatment climate change in a range of Australian stories.

Explore the exhibition.

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The Colonial Newspapers and Magazines Project has been underway since 2009, involving AustLit team members at three universities. In 2013, the project entered a new phase, focusing on in-depth researching and indexing of titles from three points during the colonial period: 1838, 1868, and 1888. This represented a shift from vertical to horizontal analysis: rather than indexing the entire run of a single periodical deemed 'significant', researchers mapped the entirety of available periodicals across a fixed point in time. Thousands of works identified through the project are available in full text, either through AustLit's own digitisation or through external sources such as Trove. The result is a body of content that allows a new insight into colonial reading, writing, and publishing practices.

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A Companion to the Australian Media edited by Professor Bridget Griffen-Foley is a remarkable collection of hundreds of articles written by more than 300 authorities on various aspects of the media in Australia.

The Companion was published in print form by Australian Scholarly Publishing in 2014 and republished by AustLit in 2016.

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Courting Blakness : Recalibrating the Sandstone University was a groundbreaking exhibition curated by University of Queensland Adjunct Professor Fiona Foley.

Located in The University of Queensland’s Great Court between September 5-28 in 2014, the project brought together works in different media by Ryan Presley, Archie Moore, Natalie Harkin, Karla Dickens, Christian Thompson, Megan Cope, r e a, and Michael Cook.

The Courting Blakness website published by AustLit gathers all of the digital footprints of the exhibitions and surrounding events in order to allow this powerful experience to live on, becoming a part of the rich resources in the BlackWords project of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers and storytellers (www.austlit.edu.au/BlackWords).

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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.

A second collection was published in March 2020.

Explore Growing Up Indigenous in Australia.

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'One way we recognise the dead is that they don’t come to dinner. They don’t pick up the phone, don’t come to your parties.  Yet ever since I became aware of John Forbes, I keep bumping into him.

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.

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First released in 2015, the Joseph Furphy Digital Archive, edited by Dr Roger Osborne, is a detailed record of the publication history of a significant Australian writer. Beginning with Furphy's Such Is Life, the archive traces the editorial development of Furphy's work, including transcriptions of manuscript and typescript material, as well as rich critical apparatuses such as a Furphy timeline and a biographical listing of people and organisations involved in Furphy's career. The Joseph Furphy Digital Archive is a unique fusion of critical scholarship and bibliography.

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The Literature of Tasmania by Professor Philip Mead explores the stories that define and map Australia's island state.

This multichapter work is a rare and comprehensive study of Tasmania as a site and source of story. Spanning the period from before European arrival to the present day, The Literature of Tasmania is a fascinating analysis and survey of the various manifestations of the island in writers' minds. The monograph includes discussion of film, theatre, television, and the continuing storytelling of Aboriginal people.

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Sumner Locke, who died one hundred years before this collection was published, on 18 October 1917, is better known today as the mother of Sumner Locke Elliott. But when she died, she was a well-known and popular writer of humorous novels and magazine stories.

This collection marks the centenary of Sumner Locke's death by republishing a collection of twelve of her war stories, the brittle and brutal magazine fiction she wrote after the outbreak of World War I.

Explore the collection.

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Players : Australian Actors on Stage, Television, and Screen

These biographical essays, accompanied by some wonderful photographs, by Professor Anne Pender were published in December, 2016. They are based on extensive research undertaken during the course of an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship.

The lives and careers of actors involved in theatre, television, and film are explored. They include Jackie Weaver, Helmut Bakaitis, Julia Blake, Max Cullen, Maggie Dence, and Alan Hopgood, among many others.

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Designed by Fulbright scholar Dr Travis Franks during his period with AustLit in 2017, the exhibition provides an introduction to settler colonial theory and contemporary settler colonial literature, surveying 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.

Including a 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, this is an invaluable resource for teachers and students alike.

Explore the exhibition.

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AustLit's re-publication of The Writer's Press in 2020 is a recognition that the essays in the collection provide valuable insights into the history of UQP and collectively form an important resource for publishing studies. 

We thank Craig Munro and Jacqueline Blanchard for their assistance in making the project possible.

Original edition edited by Craig Munro and published by UQP in 1998. 

Digital version created by Giorgia Kilpatrick and Georgia Ward, interns for AustLit and The University of Queensland Press, Semester Two, 2020. 

Read The Writer's Press.