Cirrus@Austlit

'During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, non-Indigenous authors retold Indigenous stories, presenting them as myths or fairy tales. In 1964 the first Indigenous author and artist to do so produced a collection of traditional stories reflective of Indigenous knowledge, teaching, and learning practices. Political advances achieved by Indigenous people during the twentieth century continue to address the imbalance heavily weighted to depictions of Indigenous cultures in children’s books by non-Indigenous producers. I contrast the colonial retelling of Australian Legendary Tales by Kate Langloh Parker with The Legends of Moonie Jarl by Butchulla author and artist Wilf Reeves and Olga Miller to show how transformative an active Indigenous voice is for the Australian literary landscape.' (Publication abstract)

'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.