AustLit
Beginning with the redesign of AustLit in 2012, this section of our digital history of AustLit counts down the last ten years of the database to the twentieth anniversary in 2021.
2012: AustLit Begins a Redesign
This redesign of the database involved substantial changes to the operations, including behind the scenes, where the separate editing interface for maintainers was replaced with the ability to edit in the records themselves.
This version of the database is still in use today.
World War I in Australian Literary Culture was an internal AustLit project: developed by indexers at The University of Queensland, it expanded our coverage of the way the 1914-1918 war has appeared in literature, film, and other forms of storytelling from the conflict's beginning to the present.
Content development was led by Robert Thomson: as well as expanding existing AustLit records, the project included surveying Fryer Library's world-class collection of World War I literature and assessing the content of newspapers and magazines.
Arising out of an existing interest in trauma and life writing (culminating in this project and in project lead Kate Douglas's Trauma Texts [2015], co-edited with Gillian Whitlock), the project was led out of Flinders University by a team including Professor Kate Douglas, Dr Tully Barnett, Carolyn Lake, Pamela Graham, and Emma Maguire.
The project used AustLit's extant subject-indexing, complemented by mirrored searches on Trove at the National Library today. Resulting works were assessed manually and assigned to the dataset on a case-by-case basis, creating a collection of over 700 bibliographical records.
Trauma Texts was launched at the inaugural 2015 International Auto-Biography Association conference in Adelaide: see photographs from the conference here.
In 2013, UNSW@ADFA hosted a physical exhibition to mark 25 years of AUSTLIT / AustLit.
The exhibition included 'AustLit Antecedents' (including pre-AUSTLIT bibliographies) and then followed the history of the databases from 1988 through to the present.
Among the images to the left is one of AustLit indexer Tessa Wooldridge standing over the original AUSTLIT card Project Box, used for offsite indexing from 1988 to 1995.
Among the images shown to the right is AUSTLIT / AustLit indexer Jane Rankine, who curated the exhibition (as well as making a passionate and compelling case for the original AUSTLIT card file to be housed in Special Collections at UNSW@ADFA, where it remains safely to this day).
Jane and Tessa were among the longest-serving indexers, starting with AUSTLIT and continuing to work for AustLit until indexing stopped in Canberra at the end of 2014. Their contributions to the database are incalculable.
This physical exhibition is in many ways the model for this digital history of AustLit, as a means of showing the scope and scale of this unique resource.
Tessa Wooldridge, Jane Rankine, and their AUSTLIT colleague Lesley Banson all sent us their memories of working for AUSTLIT / AustLit.
Led by chief investigator Professor Kerry Mallan, with primary research by Amy Cross (Schoonens) and research assistance from Dr Cherie Allan, the project assessed works where environmental waste, climate change, species endangerment, ecocitizenship, and the effects of globalisation on the environment are major concerns.
As well as enhanced bibliographical records, the exhibition includes expansive coverage of the various common subjects, connections to the Australian curriculum, and case studies of significant creators and works.
2015: The Joseph Furphy Archive Is Launched
The project is the work of Dr Roger Osborne, who has been associated with AustLit since its inception.
Acknowledging Joseph Furphy's central position in Australian literature, the Archive foregrounds the editorial intrusions and errors that have plagued editions of Such Is Life, Rigby's Romance, and The Buln-Buln and the Brolga.
Built in a flexible, modular framework, the Archive aims to provide greater access for more people to the material archive that lies behind Furphy's fiction and poetry.
The project was supported by a Nancy Keesing Fellowship at the State Library of New South Wales in 2011, which enabled the initial study and transcription of the Such Is Life manuscript.
The Australian Drama Archive began as a collaboration between The University of Queensland and the University of New England, with initial funding from the Ian Potter Foundation.
Led by AustLit Director Kerry Kilner, Associate Professor Stephen Carleton, and Dr Bernadette Cochrane at The University of Queensland, the project digitised pre-1960s drama from the Eunice Hanger Collection (Fryer Library, University of Queensland) and the Campbell Howard Collection (University of New England).
Plays from the collection have been performed by students in the UQ Drama Department, including Dorothy Blewett's The First Joanna, Kester Berwick's Judgment Day, and Catherine Shepherd's Delphiniums.
Explore the Australian Drama Archive.
Edited by Professor Bridget Griffen-Foley, A Companion to the Australian Media was published in hard copy by Australian Scholarly Publishing in 2014. In 2016, AustLit published the digital edition, with the full entries embedded on the database, and linked throughout to AustLit's biographical and bibliographical entries.
Later in the year, AustLit expanded its engagement with media research, taking on the Media Archives Project Database, originally created by the Centre for Media History at Macquarie University. View the full list of 118 archives, from private collections to university holdings.
AustLit would continue its association with media research at Macquarie University in 2017, publishing an expanded version of Dr Willa McDonald's pilot study on Australian Colonial Narrative Journalism.
Explore the digital edition of A Companion to the Australian Media.
The illustrated essays focused on actors who came to maturity in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Working at a period where television was burgeoning but stage, radio, and screen still offered rich work opportunities, the actors profiled in these essays have made, and continue to make, a major contribution to Australian cultural life, and to artistic culture beyond our shores.
From Elspeth Ballantyne to Henry Szeps, John Clarke to Helmut Bakaitis, Maggie Dence to Jacki Weaver, these essays offer insight into a transformative period in Australian stage and screen.
(Images to the right are reproduced from the Players essays.)
The essays benefit from interviews granted to Professor Pender and to her correspondence with her interview subjects over several years.
Explore Players: Australian Actors on Stage, Television and Film.
Professor Anne Pender writes affectionately of her ongoing relationship with the AustLit database
Read more elsewhere in our anniversary celebrations.
February 2017: AustLit Completes Research on Its Steampunk Project
Led by Dr Catriona Mills with research assistance from Geoffrey Hondroudakis, the project identified over 300 works by Australian authors or set in Australia with steampunk elements.
The project aimed to give a working overview of steampunk as it stands, as a discursive field of practice in fiction, criticism, and culture, encompassing those who consciously write and produce within the steampunk style, and those works which may less deliberately use it, but nevertheless engage steampunk for thematic content, aesthetics or iconography.
Beginning with such 'proto-steampunk' works as a Banjo Paterson short story about a robot magazine canvasser, the project extended to more modern works that begin to grapple with the question of just how 'punk' steampunk is.
In particular, the project teased out some of the central concerns of steampunk: historicity and ahistoricity, technology, class and political struggle, gender and emancipation, and colonialism.
2017: Courting Blakness Is Archived by BlackWords
Courting Blakness was a groundbreaking exhibition curated by UQ Adjunct Professor Fiona Foley and located in the Great Court of The University of Queensland's St Lucia campus from 5 to 28 September 2014.
In addition to the exhibition, the project generated an edited collection of essays (cover image right) and a rich archive of ancillary material, including videos of the symposium and the exhibition launch, site plans, memories of the exhibition by UQ staff and students, and detailed information on the artworks and artists.
Originally held on their own website, this material was archived on BlackWords in 2017, where it remains available to the public.
In 2017, AustLit hosted Fulbright Scholar Travis Franks (now Dr Travis Franks, at Boston University). Dr Franks' work critiques notions of settler belonging in the US and Australia through the concept of settler nativism—that is, how settlers imagine their sense of belonging against Indigenous and immigrant populations.
This resource provides an introduction to settler colonial theory and contemporary settler colonial literature, and is intended to survey the major and minor authors, works, and ideas involved with settler colonial writing in Australia, and, to a lesser extent, the United States, since the 1990s.
2018: Writing Disability in Australia Begins
Led by Dr Jessica White, then based at The University of Queensland, Writing Disability in Australia aggregates writing on disability in AustLit into a searchable index, with the aim of drawing attention to the ways in which Australian writers have represented disability.
Writing Disability in Australia highlights the significant and imaginative achievements of writers with disability, the structures and assumptions of ableism, the resourcefulness with which people with disability navigate their everyday lives, and the ways in which disability lends itself to creativity, lateral thinking, and resilience.
It offers a means to explore the varied and creative contributions people with disability have made to Australian literature by searching the database by form or genre, and begins to expose and critique the ways in which subject-based database searching through taxonomic thesauruses contributes to medicalised approaches to disability.
2018: Waves of Fiction Begins
Waves of Fiction was the brainchild of Dr Rebecca Olive in the School of Health and Human Movement at The University of Queensland.
Moving beyond the better-known literary representations of surfing in Tim Winton's fiction or Puberty Blues, the project aims to expose a much longer history that includes diverse genres, forms, characters and authors, a collective body of work that remains little understood, despite the new things it can tell us about surfing.
Explore Waves of Fiction.
Surveying 170 shortlisted, award-winning, and best-selling picture books, the project examines the ideas and values embedded in the depictions of making, serving, and eating food that are presented to child readers.
The project includes enhanced AustLit records that track food depiction, food types, food practices, setting, food as cultural identity, and other key factors. For example, Diary of a Wombat has a food-focused storyline that features everyday foods, presented in family meals as a means of social cohesion.
Explore The Picture Book Diet.
2019: Climate Change in Australian Narratives Is Launched
Led by Dr Deborah Jordan, this urgently important project tracks climate fiction by Australian writers.
AustLit contains over 500 works with the subject 'human-induced climate change'. This project, which also includes the digital republication of Dr Jordan's monograph on climate fiction, puts those works into the context of climate activism and climate science, as an important intervention into the most urgent environmental, social, and technological concern of current generations.
Watch project lead Dr Deborah Jordan, AustLit's Dr Catriona Mills, and project researcher Nina Clark discuss this project with the Climate Change Communication and Narratives Network at Deakin University.
(Video recorded as an online discussion with the Climate Change Communication and Narratives Network, 28 April 2021.)
As a companion piece to the reading, AustLit explored the history of the Great Famine and the Irish diaspora in Australia, looking at newspaper accounts of the famine, lists of arrivals by ship, and both contemporary and modern literary responses.
Among the ephemera unearthed during the project is the inquest notice for Alice Ball, one of the two famine orphans to whom Smyth dedicated her poems.
2020: The Writer's Press Digital Edition Is Published
Edited by Craig Munro and originally published by The University of Queensland Press in 1998, The Writer's Press is a significant insight into the establishment and running of a university press.
AustLit's re-publication of The Writer's Press in 2020 is a recognition that the essays in the collection provide valuable insights into the history of UQP and collectively form an important resource for publishing studies.
From Frank Thompson on the establishment of the press to Barbara Ker Wilson on children's fiction and (now Associate Professor) Sandra Phillips on publishing Indigenous writers, this is a unique resource.
The digital edition was the work of Giorgia Kilpatrick and Georgia Ward, who completed internships with AustLit in semester two, 2020.
Explore The Writer's Press.
Where bibliography is usually a retrospective activity, the immediacy of the pandemic prompted AustLit to begin tracking its impact while the crisis was still ongoing.
As well as works that explicitly feature the pandemic as a theme and works whose conditions of production are directly created by the pandemic, the project also tracks cancellations of performances and literary / arts festivals.
A project such as this—bibliography on the fly—is made possible by AustLit's unique nature.
As of September 2021, with much of Australia still in lockdown, the dataset includes over 780 works and tracks the cancellation of more than 130 individual stage productions.
Explore COVID-19: The 2020-2021 Global Pandemic in the Australian Arts.
Early 2020: Swimming Wild Is Published
A companion project to Waves of Fiction and also led by Dr Rebecca Olive, Swimming Wild explores Australian writing about the human body in wild water, from oceans to rivers to lakes.
Intersecting with the increasing interest in swimming outdoors (especially in the United States and Europe), Swimming Wild examines works about the human body in water that is not tamed, not chlorinated, not contained—not, in short, a swimming pool.
A relatively small dataset (but one with the potential for great growth, like the hobby itself) Swimming Wild ranges from Jean Curlewis's adventure fiction and travel writing of the 1920s to Miles Franklin Award-winner Melissa Lucashenko's Too Much Lip.
Explore Swimming Wild.
Continuing the theme of liminality in human experiences, Liminal Spaces, Solitary Places, an exploration of lighthouses in fiction, was also published at this time.
A richly illustrated exhibition, it explores the intersection between historical fiction, eco-fiction and magic realism embedded in Australian literary fiction, specifically on the topic of lighthouses.
From the historical drama of South Solitary (South Solitary lighthouse pictured left) to Claire McKenna's kraken-tossed seas in Monstrous Heart, this is a geographic isolation at its most intense.
Explore Liminal Spaces, Solitary Places
2020: 101 Black Voices Is Published on BlackWords
Compiled by Professor Sandy O'Sullivan and originally shared across social media, this list was produced with a specific purpose: 'Instead of whitesplaining articles being avidly retweeted with #BLM, cite these Black words.'
At a time when protests against brutality, murder, and systemic racism were occuring across the globe, Professor O'Sullivan noted:
As I write this on 23 June 2020, the two scholars most cited and promoted on social media in the field of racism and privilege, are White. They are the most heard and the most visible and both have had #BlackLivesMatter applied to posts at a far higher rate over the last few weeks, than the many thousands of Black writers who have been doing this work for decades, and across centuries.
With the kind permission of Professor O'Sullivan, this list was published on BlackWords as a permanent and public resource '[to] counter this and to respond to the call that Black voices are listened to first, rather than last'.
Explore 101 Black Voices.
July 2021: The Miles Franklin Rights Project Is Launched
Led by Dr Airlie Lawson, this project builds on AustLit's existing bibliographical records to provide a basis from which to interrogate the global impact of the Miles Franklin Award.
Expanding on AustLit's existing records for Miles Franklin Award-winning or shortlisted works between 2000 and 2020, the project consulted library catalogues (WorldCat), crowd-sourced sites (Goodreads), and publishers, agents, and authors to expand the information available on international republications and translations of the work.
This project represents the first-ever attempt to create a comprehensive set of international editions of winners of Australia's most prestigious literary award.
As we hope this digital history of AustLit has made clear, AustLit is the outcome of the sustained passion for Australian stories from a vast number of researchers, indexers, bibliographers, and developers.
You can see our former team members, current team members, and past funding and partners from our About pages.
No history of AustLit would be complete without a special and deeply sincere thank you to inaugural director Kerry Kilner, who was involved with AustLit from inception and stepped away from the role at the end of 2020, but whose guidance of AustLit is utterly integral to our celebrating this milestone.