Children's Literature Digital Resources, or, CLDR is a full text digital repository of Australian children’s literature from 1830 to 1945. Users can read online the complete texts of a selection of early Australian children’s literature, both popular and rare.
Over 500 texts can be read online, complete with their original illustrations and marginalia. While the CLDR is an invaluable tool for researchers of Australian children's literature, it is also an enjoyable resource for readers.
ARC LIEF Chief Investigators: Kerry Mallan, Martin Borchert, Carolyn Young, Annette Patterson.
Project Officer: Amy Cross (2008-2010, 2011)
Research Assistants: Cherie Allan (2008, 2010-2011); Michelle Dickinoski (2010-2011).
The figure of the lost child is a persistent one in Australian literature. In the mid-to-late 19th century, incidents of children lost in the bush received significant press coverage, and they were also the subject of artists' renderings and fictionalised re-tellings in poems and stories. The most famous case of children lost in the bush is that of the Duff children, who went missing in the Wimmera region of Victoria in 1864. Isaac (aged nine), Jane (aged seven), and Frank (aged almost four) spent nine days lost in the bush before being rescued by indigenous trackers. If we examine some of the numerous re-tellings, drawings, and paintings of the incident, we can see how writers and artists gradually made Jane Duff the hero of the story, virtually ignoring the courage of Isaac and Frank Duff, and the skill of the trackers who actually saved the children's lives. This trail leads you through newspaper reports, art work, poems, shorts stories, and full-length works that tell or re-tell the Duffs' story. It also includes critical work that examines these primary texts, or the figure of the lost child more generally in Australian literature. Most of the primary works listed here can be read immediately online, because they have been digitised as part of the Children's Literature Digital Resources project. You can read more about CLDR by going to austlit.edu.au/CLDR.
'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 essay considers a specific digital ‘archive’ of early Australian children’s literature, known as the Children’s Literature Digital Resources (CLDR), which is located in AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource. Our paper discusses how early Australian children’s literature included in the CLDR collection rhetorically constructs nation and place, and in so doing constructs an Australian identity for its implied readers.
Source: Author's abstract.
This essay considers a specific digital ‘archive’ of early Australian children’s literature, known as the Children’s Literature Digital Resources (CLDR), which is located in AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource. Our paper discusses how early Australian children’s literature included in the CLDR collection rhetorically constructs nation and place, and in so doing constructs an Australian identity for its implied readers.
Source: Author's abstract.