Cirrus@Austlit

'The Australian Poetry Library (APL) aims to promote a greater appreciation and understanding of Australian poetry by providing access to a wide range of poetic texts as well as to critical and contextual material relating to them, including interviews, photographs and audio/visual recordings.

This website currently contains over 42,000 poems, representing the work of more than 170 Australian poets. All the poems are fully searchable, and may be accessed and read freely on the World Wide Web. Readers wishing to download and print poems may do so for a small fee, part of which is returned to the poets via CAL, the Copyright Agency Limited. Teachers, students and readers of Australian poetry can also create personalised anthologies, which can be purchased and downloaded. Print on demand versions will be availabe from Sydney University Press in the near future.

It is hoped that the APL will encourage teachers to use more Australian material in their English classes, as well as making Australian poetry much more available to readers in remote and regional areas and overseas. It will also help Australian poets, not only by developing new audiences for their work but by allowing them to receive payment for material still in copyright, thus solving the major problem associated with making this material accessible on the Internet.

The Australian Poetry Library is a joint initiative of the University of Sydney and the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL). Begun in 2004 with a prototype site developed by leading Australian poet John Tranter, the project has been funded by a major Linkage Grant from the Australian Research Council (ARC), CAL and the University of Sydney Library. A team of researchers from the University of Sydney, led by Professor Elizabeth Webby and John Tranter, in association with CAL, have developed the Australian Poetry Library as a permanent and wide-ranging Internet archive of Australian poetry resources.' Source: www.poetrylibrary.edu.au (Sighted 30/05/2011).

'Little Book of Weather reflects Australians' fascination with the weather of their arid continent: those on the land watch for stormy skies promising to relieve the parched ground, or grieve the loss of the top soil to the wind; those in towns and cities wait for rain to fill up the water tanks and reservoirs. People appreciate the beauty of the snow, of mist in the morning or of light streaming through the clouds. The years come and go, often marked by events that become part of Australian folklore—the 1895 Federation drought, the 1983 Ash Wednesday bushfires in Victoria and South Australia, the 1990 floods in New South Wales and Queensland, the February 7 2009 Victorian bushfires.

'The latest addition to the National Library of Australia's 'Little Books' series, Little Book of Weather features the work of some of Australia's much-loved poets, including Judith Wright, Les Murray, David Campbell, Mudrooroo, James McAuley, Banjo Paterson and Dorothea Mackellar, along with beautiful images from the Library's collection by Joseph Lycett, Edward Close, Ellis Rowan, Harold Cazneaux, Peter Dombrovskis, Olegas Truchanas, Katherine Nix and others.' (From the publisher's website.)