AustLit

Welcome to Trauma Texts, a specialist AustLit Research Project investigating trauma in Australian life narratives. It explores literary representations of individual, family or communal trauma in auto/biographical writing from 1990 to 2015. Trauma Texts began in 2013 to collate and examine the range of trauma represented in contemporary life narratives. Through the identification, creation, and compilation of bibliographic records, Trauma Texts has catalogued the types of trauma represented, as well as the geographic and temporal settings of the trauma narratives.

For the purposes of this project, trauma is understood as significant physical and/or psychological harm experienced by a person or persons, on an individual or collective level. Contemporary narratives of trauma traverse a range of experiences, events, geographies and histories. Traumatic events and situations experienced both in Australia and abroad are common in the dataset. For example, significant post-war immigration and community history projects have produced autobiographies by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Trauma experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples throughout the earlier colonial period and twentieth century are abundant in the dataset, particularly illuminated by oral history projects and by the 1990s Royal Commission into the practices and experiences of Aboriginal child removal (the Stolen Generations) culminating in the 1997 Bringing Them Home Report. Life narratives of asylum seekers arriving in Australia since mandatory detention was introduced in 1992 are also notable features of this collection, with trauma increasingly being experienced both in the initial countries of flight and in the Australian-run detention and processing facilities. Autobiographies of childhood, a publishing trend within the memoir “boom” of the 1990s and early 2000s, frequently contain depictions of childhood trauma, particularly child abuse, and this is evident in Trauma Texts. There are many life narratives featuring child abuse and child sexual abuse, with the trauma often occurring in familial and institutional “home” spaces.

The “subject” search function of Trauma Texts is a simple and illuminating entry into this resource. Searches by form, year, and more are also available. Trauma Texts can be used by students and researchers to examine what role trauma has played in Australian literary culture and practices of self-representation.

Kate Douglas

Carolyn Lake

Tully Barnett

Pamela Graham

Emma Maguire

Trauma Texts was launched at Locating Lives: The Inaugural Conference for the IABA Asia-Pacific Chapter (1-3 December 2015, Flinders University), a conference of the International AutoBiography Association.