Cirrus@Austlit

'This paper examines the effects of curatorial processes used to develop children's literature digital research projects in the bibliographic database AustLit. Through AustLit's emphasis on contextualising individual works within cultural, biographical, and critical spaces, Australia's literary history is comprehensively represented in a unique digital humanities space. Within AustLit is BlackWords, a project dedicated to recording Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander storytelling, publishing, and literary cultural history, including children's and young adult texts. Children's literature has received significant attention in AustLit (and BlackWords) over the last decade through three projects that are documented in this paper. The curation of this data highlights the challenges in presenting ‘national’ literatures in countries where minority voices were (and perhaps continue to be) repressed and unseen. This paper employs a ‘resourceful reading’ approach – both close and distant reading methods – to trace the complex and ever-evolving definition of ‘Australian children's literature’.'

Source: EUP.

This collection of autobiographical short stories captures the experience of growing up in Australia as an Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander person. The authors range in age from young adults to older women and men but common to all of their experience is resilience and respect. The stories are published by BlackWords as a result of an overwhelming volume of stories submitted to Black Inc. for consideration in a print collection entitled Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia edited by Professor Anita Heiss.

'The AustLit database (Kilner, 2002) contains bibliographical records for more than 882,000 works of Australian creative and critical writing and over 161,000 author and organization records. As an information resource, it is unsurpassed in comprehensiveness and breadth of coverage and is a central plank in Australia’s research infrastructure for the fields of cultural history and heritage. As a full-text repository, AustLit contains over a thousand items selected and digitized from original documents. These comprise seminal works of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Australian literature, a collection of early speculative fiction, a large corpus of early children’s literature, and selected criticism and scholarly works. Much of the creative writing full text is out of copyright, and we are soon to embark upon a digitization project to make available play-scripts written and performed in the first half of the twentieth century. In addition to this aspect of our activities, AustLit’s comprehensive bibliographical records link outwards to more than 80,000 full-text items that are available online. This selection, curation, and development of full-text collections make AustLit a valuable site for finding contextualized reading material and content that supports historical research and teaching.' (Introduction)

'Dorothy Blewett's story, 'This Girl Came to Our School' broadcast on the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) in 1949 and published here in print for the first time, is a more complex work that it seems on first reading. Into its mere 1,600 words are packed themes of colonisation and its collapse, racism and prejudice, guerrilla warfare, constructed white privilege with its perception of the threat of miscegenation, and the enduring impacts of schoolgirl bullying on both the bullied and the bully. The story, written in the late 1940s, is a psychological study of the narrator's dawning recognition that her racist behaviour has, in part, fed into the creation of a revolutionary engaged in a battle against European culture and its colonial enterprise.

'The story was submitted to an ABC short story competition in 1949. Although it didn't win, the story was one of four commended submissions purchased by the ABC and broadcast around Australia in July and August 1949. The story was broadcast in Sydney, Darwin, Adelaide and Melbourne and is likely to have been broadcast across the entire ABC network in Australia.' (Abstract)

This collection of essays has been 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 aim to assist readers to better understand the impact of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writing and publishing on Australia’s literary landscape.

The essays showcase recent trends in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writing and highlight the diversity of voices, the range of themes, the genres authors are publishing in, and the ongoing importance of storytelling in contemporary Indigenous society. Common themes emerge in the concerns of Indigenous writers: identity; connection to country; urban life; language maintenance and reclamation. While Indigenous authored books to assist with literacy at a community level is a growing aspect of publishing.

Terminology

A range of terminology has been used in these essays in order to define Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers and storytellers who make up the BlackWords dataset. In each case, the chosen term reflects the context of the work being considered. The term ‘First Peoples’ and ‘First Nations’ will mean Aboriginal only, while Indigenous and Black are inclusive of both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples.

Acknowledgements

The author, Dr Anita Heiss, would like to thank Emeritus Professor Gus Worby, Flinders University and Yunggorendi First Nations Centre, for his professional support and good will in undertaking a scholarly edit of these essays; and to Kerry Kilner for textual editing and for recognising the importance of having them as part of the AustLit database.

Dr Heiss would also like to acknowledge the support of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board of the Australia Council who granted her a literature fellowship to research and write these essays, and thereby making them freely available to visitors to BlackWords. AustLit maintains BlackWords through the support of The University of Queensland and the generosity of our subscribers.

'Anita Heiss's latest novel, Tiddas (Simon and Schuster, 2014), is a demonstration of the way Black Australian stories are surging through a wide variety of genres in Australian literature. The story explores friendship, family, books and the challenges and pleasures that women meet along life's pathways as culture, history, love and babies collide with the realities of modern Australia. Heiss, who has been described as inventing Aboriginal Chick Lit (or 'Chock Lit'), is a dynamic, committed writer with a social conscience. So many of the writers whose careers, lives and writing is showcased in BlackWords (the most popular project in the AustLit web resource) deal with the realities 'of living Black in Australia.' (Publication abstract)

'AustLit is an important destination for those researching in the field of Australian literary studies. As a vehicle for periodical studies, AustLit provides invaluable resources in the form of indexes to the literary content of many magazines, newspapers and scholarly journals; the history, editorship and purpose of many small and large periodicals; and collections of records that demonstrate a particular aspect of the history of Australian periodical publishing and readership. As a virtual research environment, AustLit provides researchers with tools for creating, aggregating and annotating collections of relevant data and for publishing these datasets as scholarly outcomes of research projects. Amongst other AustLit supported research projects, Jill Julius Matthews, for example, used AustLit as a publication vehicle for her historical survey, 1895–1930, on the collection of magazines in the State Library of New South Wales’s Mitchell Library.

'This paper will present some of the ways that AustLit has engaged with historical research into Australian magazine and newspaper culture, presenting the outcomes of projects that have, collectively, built our understanding of the important role periodicals have played. It will show how AustLit is embedded in the wider research environment and discuss how scholars and others can use AustLit as a site for their own research outcomes, foreshadowing some of the options becoming available as a result of a major restructure of the database and interface. ' (Publication abstract)

'Australian literary studies have, in the past decade, been greatly assisted by AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource (www.austlit.edu.au), a multi-institutional collaboration between researchers, librarians and software designers from ten universities and the National Library of Australia. Under the leadership of The University of Queensland, this collaboration has produced a web-based research environment that supports a wide range of projects and publications across a diverse array of fields in Australian literary and narrative cultures while also becoming a key resource for teaching and general information. AustLit has consistently worked to integrate the research output of associated projects and is currently planning to expand its position in the community with a new open access and open contribution model. A major innovation in data management and maintenance, the AustLit Research Community structure supports the study of Australian literary and story-making cultures by providing a web-based environment where segments of these cultures can be explored and presented as distinct topics within a larger knowledge framework. Scholars are able to build datasets, annotate, analyse and present that data in a range of ways, and publish scholarly interpretations of their findings in the form of peer reviewed articles. The incorporation of these research-rich datasets into AustLit contributes to an overarching goal of building a comprehensive database of information about Australian writers, writing and print culture more broadly. With a recent decision to move from the current access model as a subscription service, available to relatively few users, to an open access and open contributions model incorporating content produced by a network of volunteers, AustLit is now facing a significant new challenge. The Aus-e-Lit Project has delivered innovative tools and services that will enable AustLit users to engage more directly with AustLit data and to contribute to a Research Commons with collaborative annotations and richly described collections of internet resources. This paper will report on the implications that these innovations bring to current and future research practices. It will consider the successes and challenges that AustLit faces with its aim to be the definitive virtual research environment and information resource for Australian literary, print, and narrative culture, not only for scholars in the field but for students of all levels and the general public.' (Publication abstract)

'The context of the Teaching Australian Literature (TAL) Survey project is the ongoing national debate about education in contemporary Australia, including the teaching of language and literature in our schools and universities, and the development of a national curriculum that includes the study of Australian literature. (Introduction to Executive Summary (1)'

'The Bibliography of Australian Literature P-Z is the fourth and final volume of a major collaborative national bibliographical project recording details of all separately published creative literature by Australian writers from European arrival in Australia to the end of the 20th century.

'Genres covered are poetry, drama, fiction and children's writing. One of the strengths of this unique multi-volume work is that it has no canon, aiming to include all works by all Australian authors regardless of perceived literary merit. For each work details of the first edition are listed, as well as significant new or revised editions and translations. Biographical details, awards and other additional information relevant to an individual author or title is also included.' (Publisher's blurb)