AustLit

... and you want to use AustLit.

AustLit aims to be the definitive virtual research environment and information resource for Australian literary, print, and narrative culture.

On AustLit, you will find records for over 830,000 works and more than 150,000 authors and organisations. These records include bibliographical or biographical details; information on genres, subjects, and settings; lists of ‘works about’; links to related works and people; and other rich material.

As a record of a national literature, AustLit is unique. So how can this unique, wide-ranging resource help you in your work?

If you're teaching Australian literature at a high-school level, AustLit is an excellent source of biographical and (particularly) bibliographical information on the Australian texts included in high-school syllabi.

From anyone of our work records, you can find

• accurate bibliographical information.

• lists of secondary resources.

• links to library holdings.

• information on the work's subjects and setting.

Take, for example, the record for Romulus, My Father. From this main work page, you can access:

• bibliographical details for the various publications of the work, including translations.

• more than thirty works about this work.

• library holdings of the work.

• links to adaptations.

• information on which universities teach the work.

And with one click, you can bring up a list of other works on the database about Yugoslav people, mental illness, or fathers and sons.

The advanced search page gives you even more control over your access to the database's contents. Using our advanced search function, you can perform targeted searches, searching for authors by gender, birth date, or cultural heritage, and searching for works by genre, publication date, or language.

AustLit, in short, allows you to map your route through the vast, amorphous landscape of Australian writing.

As well as the main database, AustLit also groups records into specialised datasets, allowing targeted searching of certain categories. Some of the research datasets that are of particular use to high-school teaching include:

• BlackWords, our collection of works by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers.

• World War I in Australian Literary Culture, our collection of works about World War I, from the war years to the present day.

• Asian Australian Children's Literature and Publishing, our collection of works with Asian characters, settings, or themes.

• Australian Multicultural Writers, our collection of works by authors who identify as something other than 'Anglo-Celtic'.

• Asylum Seeker Narratives, our collection of narratives by and about asylum seekers.

Imagine this case study

Jane Harrison's Rainbow's End is on the syllabus this year, but your students don't have much experience with dramatic works by Indigenous film-makers or dramatists. So you come to AustLit to quickly compile a list of film and television programs by Indigenous writers.

Using AustLit's advanced search page, you look for a list of film and television made by people with Aboriginal heritage, and you come up with this list of more than 250 works.

250 works is more than you can use in the classroom, but, fortunately, you can filter them by genre without even leaving the search results page. From here, you can look at the options for young adult fiction (and find Double Trouble), or historical fiction (where you'll find Women of the Sun and My Place), or by crime (where you'll find Heartland.)

You can even see at a glance which works are available to view online, with links to Tracey Moffatt works, to Robert J. Merritt's Short Changed, to Bill Bennett's Backlash, and the short films of From Sand to Celluloid.

One search on AustLit, and your students have a much richer understanding of the history of Indigenous representation and self-representation on Australian screens.

(Header image via the Gosford Times and Wyong District Advocate, 4 August 1950, p.4.)