AustLit
For many indexers who worked on AustLit in the late 2000s, the database was known as 'Big Red', for its vibrant red logo and red-grey-and-white colour scheme. This section of the digital history of AustLit counts down to the launch of this new-look colour scheme in 2008 and beyond, taking in some significant research projects on the way.
Children's fiction has been part of AustLit since the database's inception, but prior to mid-2005, it had been indexed using the same protocols as 'adult' fiction: that is, as a novel, novella, or short story. From mid-2005, AustLit introduced the category 'children's fiction' instead, on the basis that the pre-existing categories could be ambiguous and unhelpful, given that fiction for children varies so much in length and character.
In mid-2021, AustLit contains tens of thousands of works under the category 'children's fiction', from Alfred Dudley, or the Australian Settlers in 1830 to the forthcoming fourth volume in Jessica Townsend's Morrigan Crow series, due in 2022.
Explore bibliographical records for children's fiction on AustLit.
Or see AustLit's research projects on children's and young-adult fiction.
As a further indication of AustLit's significance as national research infrastructure for the humanities, supporting original research into Australian cultural endeavours, the 2005 LIEF success supported AustLit's development for a further three years.
The funding supported a range of developments in AustLit, including:
- expanded retroactive indexing to explore the history of Australian writing.
- the development of BlackWords.
- the creation of a dataset around Tasmanian writing.
- expanded coverage of multicultural writers, children's fiction, and north Queensland writing.
More detail on these projects is included below.
January 2006: Australian Popular Theatre Dataset Begins
The Australian Popular Theatre dataset began development in 2006. Led by Professor Richard Fotheringham from The University of Queensland and with research by Dr Clay Djubal, the project provides details of the lives and theatrical activities of hundreds of the participants in Australia's thriving theatre industry of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Australian Popular Theatre was not just focused on the large cities and popular theatres, but also explored regional productions and vaudeville / travelling theatre circuits, greatly increasing our awareness of the way in which theatre functioned in Australia in the period.
Featured productions include Frank Dix's Come Over Here, Garnet Walch's Helen's Babies, All Diggers Company's Mademoiselle Mimi, Charles Nagel's Merry Freaks in Troublous Times, Beaumont Smith and A. Riddick's Stop Your Nonsense, Will Evans and Arthur Valentine's Tons of Money, Ella Airlie and Nat Phillip's The Bunyip, and Theodore Kremer's The Fatal Wedding.
Actors such as Amy Rochelle and Bert Bailey and impresarios such as E. J. Carroll have rich AustLit records thanks to the Australian Popular Theatre dataset.
The 500,000 milestone was reached in March 2006, and although AustLit recorded the fact in its April/May newsletter, it did not record which indexer added the fateful record—although we're sure that indexer remembers the occasion.
AustLit was also closing on 100,000 agent records at that time: with 85,000 agents already on the database and an average of 1500 new agents being added every two months, they calculated on reaching the 100,000 mark in December 2007.
Now, in August 2021, AustLit is nearing its one millionth discrete work record, with over 970,000 works on the database.
August 2006: The Literature of Tasmania Dataset Becomes Functional
The Literature of Tasmania dataset was developed from 2006 to 2008, but first became functional and searchable on AustLit in August 2006, established from a core list of authors, works and organisations with Tasmanian connections.
The original dataset drew from John Ferguson's Bibliography of Australia 1784-1900, Elizabeth Webby's Early Australian Poetry, and, of course, E. Morris Miller's Australian Literature from Its Beginnings, as well as holdings in the Tasmaniana Library at the State Library of Tasmania and the Morris Miller Library.
From its original list of 766 authors, the dataset was expanded with a particular focus on nineteenth-century publications, including the Hobart Town Gazette, and on authors such as James Knox, Clive Sansom, and Bessie Marchant.
The project was established by Professor Philip Mead with research by Dr Anthony ('Tony') Stagg and Dr Ralph Spaulding. It was supported by the Australian Research Council and the University of Tasmania.
When AustLit was launched in 2001, one of the foundational 'specialist subsets' was Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Writers. Unlike other subsets, this had not arisen from a pre-existing specialist database, but from AustLit's commitment, shared among all the partner organisations, to represent this important part of Australia's literary culture.
Funding from the ARC enabled the development of this subset into what we now know as BlackWords.
The inaugural national coordinator for BlackWords was Professor (then Dr) Anita Heiss. Under her guidance, and with collaborators in universities and research centres across Australia, BlackWords undertook to review existing records for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers and to expand coverage to 'take proper account of the rich Indigenous storytelling history' (Kilner and Minter, 5).
BlackWords began with what Kilner and Minter call 'a modest beginning of 700 biographical records' (5), and now contains records for 24,500 works.
For a fuller history of BlackWords, including a list of past and present contributors, see About BlackWords.
BlackWords was officially launched on 6 June 2007, after a year of preparation that included not only adding new records to the database, but also the review of existing records by the Indigenous researchers working on the BlackWords project: more than 1000 storytellers had been surveyed by mid-2007.
BlackWords has continued to expand, and now includes work by more than 7000 authors and organisations.
In 2022, BlackWords will celebrate fifteen years since its launch.
Reading in the Victorian Classroom was developed by a research team headed by Professor Clare Bradford. The project provides richly detailed records on the school readers produced between 1927 and 1930 for school children in Victoria, which were used (with revisions) down to the 1950s.
'Given that children represent the future of societies and nations, the texts presented to them always promote the values and social practices which adults deem desirable. [...] Many Australians recall school readers with nostalgia and affection, since they provided children with reading material when few families had access to a wide range of fiction and non-fiction.' (Clare Bradford)
The project was supported by long-time AustLit consortia member, Deakin University.
Explore Reading in the Victorian Classroom.
Meanwhile, the Resourceful Reading projects aimed to re-examine and re-invigorate Australian literary criticism and history by integrating traditional, qualitative approaches to literary studies with empirically-rich methodologies including data-mining and quantitative analysis.
The projects included Professor Katherine Bode's Reading by Numbers, which challenged 'established arguments in Australian literary studies, book history, feminism, and gender studies, while presenting innovative ways of understanding literature, publishing, authorship and reading, and the relationships between them':
By mining, modelling and analysing data in a digital archive — AustLit, a comprehensive, online bibliographical record of Australian literature — I present a new history of the Australian novel: one that concentrates on the nineteenth century and the decades since the end of the Second World War, and aims precisely for the more 'extensive' and 'democratic' historiography. (Introduction)
Other projects under the Resourceful Reading banner included two projects by Professor Gillian Whitlock (Late 20th Century Anthologies and Asylum Seeker Narratives), Professor Robert Dixon's Australian Literature in the 'Translation Zone', and Professor Leigh Dale's Australian Newspaper Reviews of 1930.
Explore all five of the Resourceful Reading projects from their home page.
Professor Katherine Bode put together some thoughts on her wide-ranging use of AustLit in her research for these anniversary celebrations.
Multicultural Writers was one of the core datasets with which AustLit was launched in 2001.
2007 saw a period of upgrading and increased research, with particular focus on:
- Publications by Australian multicultural writers in languages other than English.
- Overseas publications by and about Australian writers, in English and other languages.
- Community-based multicultural writing initiatives (The Book of African Australian Stories, featured right, was one of the latter works: it was written in workshops with children and young people from Liberian, Somalian, Eritrean, Sierra Leonean, Sudanese, Ethiopian and Congolese backgrounds).
'Pick any Australian novel, play or book of poetry from the last 200 years, and chances are The Bibliography of Australian Literature will be recording it' (UQ News).
Professor John Hay, general editor of the bibliography said, 'When complete, the Bibliography will stretch across four volumes and almost 3500 pages – an invaluable resource for the study of Australian literature and a major achievement of UQ and its research partners.'
BAL's fourth and final volume was launched in December 2008, at a spectacular event at Customs House in Brisbane, bringing a significant project to a triumphant end.
2008: The Pulp Fiction Project Begins
Continuing through to 2011, the Pulp Fiction project focused on rendering more visible Australia's tradition of radio serials, comics, romance, crime, western, science, horror, and sports fiction in the popular publishing industry between 1939 and 1959.
The Pulp Fiction project was led by Dr Toni Johnson-Woods, who had previously published Pulp: A Collector's Book of Australian Pulp Fiction Covers.
The project expanded on this work, enhancing the biographical details of more than 100 authors and cover artists, and expanding the bibliographical coverage of over 2000 titles and their translations.
Among the authors whose bibliographies were expanded during the project were Carter Brown and G. C. Bleeck.
For many of us still working on the database, it was the first version of AustLit that we'd worked on and we still remember it fondly—including its very powerful and very complicated editing interface. In fact, the record you've just slid past was the last one that current Content Manager Dr Catriona Mills created on Big Red, back in 2013.
The new look was designed by a Brisbane-based design company, Inkahoots.
A specialty dataset of the broader Western Australian Literature project, Goldfields Bards of Western Australia was managed by the University of Western Australia.
The research was carried out by Charles McLaughlin , with an acknowledgement of the foundational work carried out by Beverley Smith in her 1961 Master of Arts thesis, 'Early Western Australian Literature: A Guide to Colonial and Goldfields Life'. Where Smith suggested some sixty goldfields newspapers, AustLit research suggested the numbers were higher:
'In booming towns like Coolgardie (which quickly became the third largest settlement in Western Australia after Perth and Albany), Kalgoorlie, Boulder, Cue, and Meekatharra, as well as many others now virtually forgotten, talented newspaper editors quickly set up printing presses and actively sought contributions from local writers in the belief that topical verse was an integral component of good journalism.' (Charles McLaughlin, 'Adventures in AustLit'.)
You can explore these works through the AustLit record for 'The Goldfields Poet', an AustLit agent created to collect otherwise anonymous work in goldfields newspapers.
2008: The Writing The Tropical North Dataset Begins
The three datasets that made up Writing the Tropical North aimed to discover the many features that in general distinguish the literature of the Australian tropics from works produced in more temperate southern zones.
Led by Dr Cheryl Taylor, the work was completed largely out of James Cook University, between 2008 and 2012. Northern Territory writing was the specific responsibility of Dr Jane Frugtneit, who drew heavily on the Northern Territory Collection (housed in the Northern Territory Library), which was begun by Michael Loos in 1972.
The dataset includes:
- Writers of Tropical Queensland: the original dataset of the three, Writers of Tropical Queensland records information by and about authors who were born in, lived in, visited or wrote about Queensland north of the Tropic of Capricorn.
- North Western Australian Literature: expanding AustLit's coverage of works in the tropical zones across northern Australia, North Western Australian Literature includes information about and works by authors who were born in, lived in, visited or wrote about Western Australia north of the Tropic of Capricorn.
- Northern Territory Literature: produced in assocation with North Western Australian Literature, Northern Territory Literature includes information about and works by authors who were born in, lived in, visited, or wrote about the Northern Territory, and the works and organisations important to the cultural life of the region.
2008: Banned in Australia Dataset is Launched by Associate Professor Ken Stewart
Led by Professor Nicole Moore with research assistance from Dr Marita Bullock , Banned in Australia is a bibliographic list of every literary title banned by Customs censorship through the twentieth century.
The project tracks the restriction or banning of some 500 works between 1901 and 1973, from literary fiction to pornography, including details on why they were banned and when they were released:
'[O]wing to the urgency for a decision, the time available to me to read this book was only one week-end, in which I was able to read 248 pages ... this, however, has been enough to convince me that the novel not only over-emphasises sex matters, but also that in many places is so bawdy as to be classified as indecent in its general tone and character.' (Censor's decision on Forever Amber.)
Banned in Australia is a cumulative reconstruction of Australia's 'banned list' and makes this record of literary censorship available to the Australian public for the first time.
June 2008: AustLit's Teaching Aust Lit (TAL) Project Page Goes Live
Teaching Aust Lit was an attempt to record the ebbs and flows of the teaching of Australian literature, film, and other texts in Australian and international universities.
Although the project only covers 2009 to 2016 (with some courses logged in 2008), it still shows some interesting data. For example, did you know that Follow the Rabbit-proof Fence was taught in 26 courses (including repeat offerings) during that time?
To see teaching data, look for the 'Units Teaching' tab on a work record.
December 2008: Children's Literature Digital Resources Funded Through a LIEF Grant
In addition to supporting the further development of BlackWords and the retrospective indexing of later nineteenth and early twentieth century periodicals, the LIEF grant that supported the third stage of AustLit's development was instrumental in supporting the digitisation of a wide range of out-of-print Australian children's fiction, which became the Children's Literature Digital Resource (CLDR).
2009: The Colonial Newspapers and Magazines Project Begins
Under the guidance of Professors Paul Eggert, Nicole Moore, and Elizabeth McMahon, this project helped enable a more comprehensive evaluation of the literary culture of the colonial period.
The Colonial Newspapers and Magazines Project continued valuable bibliographical projects from the 1990s, focussing on bringing to light the literary content of periodicals published between 1788 and 1900. Compared to bibliographical projects that had focused on individually published works (e.g., novels), this project recovered the careers of writers who had written extensively or even exclusively for newspapers and magazines.
Furthermore, they paved the way for a new approach, trialled in 2013 and implemented in 2014: a horizontal approach to periodical indexing. A vertical indexing approach identifies a relevant literary periodical and indexes all its available issues. But a horizontal approach aimed to index all extant newspapers and literary and general magazines published in relevant years: in this case, 1838, 1868, and 1888. This approach answered research questions of a kind and a reach that we had not been in a position to address before.
For more information, see the list of colonial newspapers and magazines indexed for this project.
2009: Australian Popular Medievalism Project Is Underway
Led by Professor Kim Wilkins and with research by Oliver Chadwick and Drew Whitehead, the project mapped medivalism in Australian popular fiction.
The project, which looked exclusively at novels marketed at adult readers (excluding children's and young-adult fiction),
began life as a thought that if, over the last 15 years, 250 or so literary novels had been published that featured contemporary New York City as a setting, it would have attracted critical attention (one might argue that even 25 such novels would have done so). What this dataset exposes is that more than 250 popular novels feature Europe in the Middle Ages: either as an actual setting, or as a source for adapting images and ideas.
The records in the dataset make explicit whether the use of the medieval setting is direct or indirect and whether it is of high or low importance in the work.
Australian Popular Medievalism was launched on 23 April 2010 at The University of Queensland.
Explore Australian Popular Medievalism.
Or read Professor Wilkins' peer-reviewed article on the project, 'Bell, Book, and Battleaxe'.
2009: ScreenLit Begins
Established by Professor Tom O'Regan, Professor Jason Jacobs, Associate Professor Frances Bonner, and AustLit Director Kerry Kilner, ScreenLit provides information-rich records about Australian cinema productions and television programs.
ScreenLit was a large-scale expansion of AustLit's coverage to include narrative texts for the large and small screen. It represents a comprehensive scholarly approach to concentrating the details about screenwriters, screenplays, published and unpublished manuscripts, original works, and adaptations of literary works in one resource.
ScreenLit also led to the development of further research projects and information trails around screenwriting and screen drama, including The Writer in Television History (an outcome of the 2012 AFI Research Collection Fellowship, using the Crawford Productions' archive at RMIT), Australians and Adaptations from 1900, Films and the War from 1914 to 2014, Professional and Post-war Digger Entertainment (1900-1935), and Silent Films in Australian Newspapers.
Professor Tom O'Regan, who died unexpectedly in July 2020, was a great champion and driver of AustLit's work to cover screen texts.
Read more about what Professor O'Regan's work meant to AustLit.
Led by Professor Van Ikin, Professor Kim Wilkins, and Dr Toni Johnson-Woods, Speculations drew from a range of pre-existing resources (including work by Russell Blackford, Sean McMullen, and Robert Hood) as well as original research by AustLit staff.
AustLit has continued its commitment to tracing Australian speculative fiction since 2011, and now records over 29,000 works with the genres of either science fiction, fantasy, or horror (and, in some cases, all three).
Speculations also aimed to digitise historical works of speculative fiction, providing access to out-of-print rare and early works, resulting in a collection of over 380 works.
Explore Speculations on AustLit.
Explore AustLit's full-text collection of early speculative fiction (published between 1837 and 1949).
2011: Asian-Australian Children's Literature and Publishing Begins Development
Better known among the team as AACLAP, the Asian-Australian Children's Literature and Publishing project was managed by AustLit consortia member QUT, and led by Professor Kerry Mallan, Martin Borchert, and Associate Professor Deborah Henderson, with research and project support from Dr Cherie Allan, Dr Michelle Dicinoski, and Amy Cross (Schoonens).
Many of the team involved in the project had earlier worked on the Children's Literature Digital Resource (CLDR).
AACLAP had two outcomes: creating bibliographical records for works that were either set in Asia, contained Asian-Australian content or characters, or represented Asian-Australian cultures and experiences; and tracking Australian works that had been translated into at least one Asian language. It surveyed works connected to East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Bay of Bengal.
More than 1700 works with relevant themes, settings, or characters were identified in the 43-year period (1970-2013) covered by AACLAP researchers and over 3000 works have been identified with at least one Asian-language translation.
Explore Asian-Australian Children's Literature and Publishing.
Launched by AustLit Director Kerry Kilner at James Cook University on 6 May 2005, the Writers of Tropical Queensland dataset was compiled by Dr Cheryl Taylor with the assistance of Dr Ben Myers; it drew on research undertaken by Dr Taylor and her colleague, the late Ross Smith. The searchable dataset included creative writing, travel and life writing, criticism, essays, and reviews.
In launching the dataset, Kerry noted:
while the publication of the WTQ bibliography does mark the achievement and release of a remarkable body of knowledge, the format and usefulness of this work is unlike previously published reference works. This publication represents an exciting new way of creating and disseminating specialist and generalist reference works such as bibliographies and dictionaries of biography. It ensures that they will not remain static, but can evolve over time to become even more valuable than at the point of publication.