BlackWords provides access to both general and specific information about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander literary cultures and traditions, providing a platform for the investigation and articulation of what 'Black writing' and 'Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander literature'. BlackWords also contains records describing published and unpublished books, stories, plays, poems and criticism associated with eligible writers and storytellers and includes works in English and in Indigenous languages.
In Conversation with BlackWords
Anita Heiss
(editor),
St Lucia
:
AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource
,
2014
14117882
2014
anthology
interview
In late 2013 Dr Anita Heiss sent a series of questions to contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers. The responses she received are at times funny, sad, moving, and always deeply insightful. Universally an important piece of advice was to 'Read, read, read' if you want to write. As an ambassador for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, Anita was very happy to see that advice coming from some of Australia's most admired and read authors.
In 2014, BlackWords published a series of interviews conducted by Dr Anita Heiss with prominent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. This series challenges notions of what Indigenous writing is, who is writing it, and what Indigenous writers are writing about.
'Say, you’re a school teacher in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, and you’re looking for a play for your class to perform that is set in Broome. Or maybe you’re a crime writer playing with the idea of writing a novel set in Sydney and want to check out what other crime novels have been set there. Perhaps you just found out that your great aunt once wrote a series of poems, and you want to know more. It could even be that you’re an author wanting to find the reviews of your latest short story collection. All this, and more, can be found in AustLit. Scholars of Australian literature know how valuable AustLit has been for over two decades, but anyone with an interest in Australian literary culture will find something worth exploring in Australia’s national literary database. AustLit will not only answer your questions, it will surely inspire more.' (Introduction)
'Aboriginal people have been inundated with questions about how to be a better ally. It gives us hope but it’s absolutely exhausting.'
'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.
Discusses Anita Heiss' new role as Professor of Communications at the University of Queensland.'
'‘All Australian children deserve to know the country that they share through the stories that Aboriginal people can tell them,’ write Gladys Idjirrimoonra Milroy and Jill Milroy (2008: 42). If country and story, place and voice are intertwined, it is vital that we make space in Australian creative writing classrooms for the reading and writing of Australian Indigenous story. What principles and questions can allow us to begin? We propose six groundings for this work:
This two-part paper will discuss each of these groundings as orienting and motivating principles for work we do as teachers of introductory creative writing units at the University of Canberra.' (Publication abstract)
Only a year or so ago I had been addressing an audience of trees out of frustration at the deafness of Australians to Indigenous issues. Now here I am, collecting and showcasing the powerful words of some of our great Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers and orators. Perhaps the trees put in a good word for me. I like to think so.
'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)
