AustLit

Users are advised that AustLit contains names and images of people who have died.

The trails below focus on resources about specific writers, different peoples and their culture, child characters, indigenous soldiers at war, indigenous sports men and women, and the experiences of the Stolen Generation. While there is an obvious place for these texts in subject English, you will find resources useful for a wide range of curriculum areas, including Health and Physical Education and History.

Conducted by Dr Anita Heiss with contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers, full transcripts of each interview can be accessed on the website here. As well as providing background on a range of authors, these interviews could be used to explore aspects of the writing process, the writing life, and the impact of books in the lives of writers. Interviews are a popular assessment activity in English, and these interviews could be used as exemplars for students. In a more general sense, the interviews provide an interesting insight to the diverse lives of contemporary First Nations people; the interviews are likely puncture a few stereotypes and help students reflect critically on common texts used in school. The set of standard questions used also facilitates comparisons among writers.

The Stolen Generation and Our Truths: Aboriginal Writers and the Stolen Generation. As well as providing background on the Stolen Generation, teachers will find a wide range of resources that would be useful in both the Humanities and English. Resources include: biography and autobiography; children’s literature; poetry and song; fiction (including novels); drama and film; anthology; further readings. The Stolen Generation page also includes a 32-minute video.

This will take you to a curated selection of articles from The Conversation. Of particular interest here are the articles on culture. These could be used for research by teachers and students, as well as exemplars of intellectually-rigorous journalistic writing.

If your interest is in sporting achievements, then this is a valuable source of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. As well as providing resources that might appeal to less-enthusiastic readers, the resources cover a wide range of genres that can be used for close study, research and as exemplars: autobiography, biography, interviews, novels, short stories, poems, theatre and film, children’s books, academic texts, criticism and non-fiction. These texts would be suitable in English, Health and Physical Education and the Humanities (e.g. History).

These resources fill a gap in much of the mainstream writing about Australian experiences in war: the focus is on resources about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander soldiers all the way back to the Boer War. Like many of the other sites, you will find biography, autobiography, poetry, fiction, websites, theatre, film, television, and children’s literature. There are also video clips to be viewed. There are obvious applications for English, Drama, Film and Television, and History. However, the resources listed here would be valuable as stories for use during ANZAC Day ceremonies.

This set of resources has been included in several trails, but has been included here as these shorter texts cover a diverse range of aspects of culture and peoples. The anthologies cover a range of genres such as short story, poetry and oral history.

This is another set of resources that has been included in several of the trails. It is included here as you will find a listing of stories with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander characters who are children. These can be used as stories for reading aloud, and the picture books would be interesting to compare with ones from other cultures (e.g. focussing on the use of visual design conventions).

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