AustLit

'Australians are nervous about AI. Efforts are underway to put their minds at ease: advisory committees, consultations and regulations. But these actions have tended to be reactive instead of proactive. We need to imagine potential scenarios before they happen.' (Introduction)

'The Insight Text Guide on The Yield is a comprehensive guide to Tara June Winch's award-winning novel for secondary school students of English and Literature. It includes notes on background and context, genre, structure and language, and an in-depth chapter-by-chapter analysis. It also discusses characters and themes in detail and presents an overview of different critical responses to and interpretations of the text. A section on essay writing, including topics, a sample analysis of a topic and a complete sample essay, will assist students in their analytical writing on the novel.' (Publication summary)

'With a combination of fantastical and anachronistic technologies and neo-Victorian settings, steampunk emerged from a niche genre to a widespread phenomenon. But this, in turn, raised urgent questions about the "punk"-ness of steampunk and the extent to which it can critique, avoid, and repurpose the Victorian trappings that it adopts. This article examines one such query: whether steampunk can interrogate its ableist underpinnings and, particularly, whether Australian steampunk writers do so in a way that is distinctly Australian. Beginning with a brief overview of Australian steampunk and the genre's conflicted approach to disability aesthetics and roleplaying, the author examines three case studies: the invisibility of disability in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century proto-steampunk stories, prosthetics as a vehicle for imperial trauma, and the recurrent motif of the clockwork heart. As Australian steampunk exists outside the genre's mainstream, so too is it able to speak to the marginal elements, such as underlying ableism, that the mainstream too often ignores.' (Publication abstract)

'The Miles Franklin Literary Award has long been recognized as Australia’s most prestigious literary prize: winners include Patrick White, Thea Astley, Thomas Keneally, Peter Carey, David Malouf, Kim Scott, Shirley Hazzard, Anna Funder, and Michelle de Kretser. But it is given for works that “present Australian life in any of its phases.” So how is this very local prize valued on the global stage? There is little empirical research into the connection between national literary prizes and the licensing of international rights. Yet these licenses are a recognized indicator of literary value. Building on the existing records in the AustLit database, Miles Franklin Rights Project researchers tracked down twenty-one years of international editions of shortlisted and Miles Franklin–winning titles to discover the where, when, and who of their publishing lives. The result is a fully searchable data set that researchers can draw on to explore the relationship between local and global literary value. This article demonstrates the benefit of combining digital bibliographical approaches with sociologically informed publishing studies to produce new data that can be used to discover new insights into Australia’s status on the international literary field.' (Publication abstract)

'Drawing from a recent AustLit project on climate change fiction, this paper discusses the earliest example we have traced of climate-change fiction in post-invasion Australia: James Edmond’s short story ‘The Fool and His Inheritance’. Published in 1911, the story begins in ‘the basement of things among the coals and the debris’ and moves through the Industrial Revolution, water wars, and the Great Slaying to the ultimate destruction of the Last Man by rising oceans. Analysis of this work in the twin contexts of its writing (1911) and our reading (2019) show the seeds of modern climate-change fiction sown over a century ago, as well as revealing the complex roots of such strains of thinking as ecofascism. We bring to this analysis three discrete and distinct approaches: bibliography, environmental science, and feminist cultural studies. From our diverse disciplinary positions, we offer a tripartite analysis to critique Edmond’s story, make sense of its place in the ‘climate change fiction’ genre, trouble the genre’s origins, and explore the value of multi-disciplinary co-reading approaches to literature.'

Source: Abstract.

'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. It 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.

'Writing Disability in Australia promotes the social model of disability, which sees disability as a condition created by barriers in culture and environment. It does not perceive disability as something to be ‘fixed’; rather, it emphasises the removal of these barriers so that people with disability can participate in society on an equal basis.'

Source: Project website.

'This special AustLit project is designed to shine a light on the ways that Australian writers are currently addressing and have, in the past, explored what has been correctly described as the most urgent environmental, social, and technological concern of current generations. Post-apocalyptic speculative fiction has explored this territory for some time and now these themes are emerging in other forms of writing. Through this project, we aim to highlight Australian creative and critical writing that examines the impacts of human-induced climate change and to provide necessary contextualising information on the science and consciousness-raising work at the community level.'

Source: AustLit.

'The rise of steampunk – speculative-fiction works set in a Victorian or pseudo-Victorian world marked by steam-powered technology – has led to a range of debates about what the genre is, what it does, and, more significantly for this paper, what it fails to do. Drawing on a range of steampunk works set in Australia, we explore the extent to which steampunk is able to grapple with coloniality, both in the Victorian period from which it draws and in the colonial present in which it is set. Is steampunk condemned to limit itself to a western-technocratic teleology or is it capable of critiquing or even circumventing colonial pasts? After setting out steampunk’s adherence to the problem-spaces of Euro-modernity, we focus closely on works by D.M. Cornish, Meljean Brook, and Dave Freer to highlight three ways in which authors writing Australian steampunk highlight non-hegemonic subjectivities and settings: secondary worlds and their historical distance, the mediated spaces of alternate histories, and the foregrounding of colonial brutalities in a traditional steampunk setting.'

Source: Abstract.

An illustrated introduction to AustLit's records for Australian pulp westerns.

An edited and illustrated collection of twelve short stories published by Sumner Locke in Australian magazines during World War I.

Researched and written for AustLit, Beyond Goggles and Corsets contains two parts: a scholarly bibliography of more than 330 examples of steampunk written by Australian authors or set in Australia and a richly illustrated history of Australian steampunk and its position within the global genre and culture.

The research essay includes the following categories:

• A Brief History of Steampunk
• Thematic Concerns : An Overview
• Romancing the Past : History and Victorianism
• Alienation or Fetishisation : Technology in Steampunk
• Filthies and Bushrangers : Class and Political Struggle
• Gender and Sexuality : Corsets and Beyond
• Steamroller : The Empire of Steampunk

This exhibition is a curated collection of AustLit records for Australian speculative fiction that falls under the broad rubric of 'diversity'.

As readers and writers increasingly foreground the importance of displaying the full breadth of modern cultures in published books, speculative fiction provides the template, from culture-rich fantasy worlds to non-binary alien species to body-conscious horror.

This exhibition collects together those diverse works that Australian authors have already written, and hopes, by making the current state of the literature explicit, to show some paths forward for increasing diversity in the future.

From the time Australians began making films, they began seeking source material in other publications. After all, they had already built a rich theatrical culture in part on adapting and burlesquing overseas material; why would early films not also benefit from this process?

Then came radio, and then television, and still the process of adaptation remained central to the industries.

Furthermore, the process of adaptation was never simply a one-way street, not solely a matter of bringing American and European texts to Australian screens. The American and British industries, too, were adapting Australian works for their own markets, especially the works of prolific playwrights C. Haddon Chambers and Dion Titheradge. Australians also looked to their own literary output, bringing Australian-written novels, plays, and even poems to the screen.

This exhibition, supported by the ARC-funded Discovery Project, DP130101455 ‘Media Transformation in its Australian and International Contexts: Analysis and Theory-building’ by Prof. Tom O'Regan, begins to explore the tradition of adaptation in Australian films, radio, and television.

'This article traces the increasing participation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors and Muslim-Australian authors in the Australian young-adult fiction market. Using bibliographical data drawn from the AustLit database, the article first outlines the general parameters of young-adult publishing in Australia since the 1990s, before specifically examining the works produced by Indigenous Australian and Muslim-Australian authors. These two groups share a significant characteristic: although they are often at the forefront of current Australian public discourse, they are more often the object of such speech than the speaking subject. This article examines the extent to which young-adult fiction provides a platform for these authors.'

Source: Abstract.

This exhibition explores the way in which Australian newspapers marketed the silent-film era. The individual tiles below show pictorial advertisements, portraits of silent-film stars, and publicity stills–all harvested from contemporary newspapers via the National Library of Australia's Trove database.

A series of exhibitions drawing on AustLit's World War One research project: based on enhanced records built by lead researcher Robert Thomson, the exhibitions (compiled by Robert Thomson, Clay Djubal, and Catriona Mills) highlight specific sets of records.

The project is a collection of AustLit records based on the content of the Crawford Collection at the AFI Research Collection (AFIRC) at RMIT. A subset of the AFIRC’s main collection, the Crawford Collection contains scripts and ancillary material relating to Australian radio and television production company Crawford Productions, from the radio serials of the 1940s and 1950s to the demolition of the Box Hill studios in 2006. The Writer in Australian Television History is a collection of records for 318 episodes of Crawfords’ radio dramas and television series, spanning the period from 1953 to 1977.