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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
Children's Literature Digital Resources, or, CLDR is a full text digital repository of Australian children’s literature from 1830 to 1945. Users can read online the complete texts of a selection of early Australian children’s literature, both popular and rare.
Over 500 texts can be read online, complete with their original illustrations and marginalia. While the CLDR is an invaluable tool for researchers of Australian children's literature, it is also an enjoyable resource for readers.
Notes
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ARC LIEF Chief Investigators: Kerry Mallan, Martin Borchert, Carolyn Young, Annette Patterson.
Project Officer: Amy Cross (2008-2010, 2011)
Research Assistants: Cherie Allan (2008, 2010-2011); Michelle Dickinoski (2010-2011).
Contents
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Representations of Aboriginal Australians in a Selection of CLDR Texts,
Cherie Allan
,
website
bibliography
Many of the texts in the CLDR full text collection represent Aboriginal Australians from a colonist or imperial point of view. These representations typically rely on a number of stereotypes including depicting Aboriginal characters as childlike, comic relief or the fool, uncivilised savages or sly, cunning manipulators. Other texts exclude any reference to Aboriginal peoples and thus create a silence around the original inhabitants of Australia thereby reinforcing the notion of terra nullius. This Trail endeavours to raise awareness of these representations and promote resistance to them. It is centred on a number of journal articles which interrogate these representations (Bradford) and/or provide alternative readings of the texts (Collins-Gearing).
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Raising Awareness of the Environment in Early Australian (CLDR) Children's Texts : A Focus on the Works of Louisa Anne Meredith,
Cherie Allan
,
website
bibliography
Louisa Anne Meredith's Tasmanian texts for children combine prose, poetry, and drawings (both botanical and decorative) to sing the praises of Nature. Her message is one of wonderment at the beauty and diversity of nature as well as respect for the environment. These sentiments are influenced by her belief that nature has a strong spiritual connection to a 'higher power'. Kordula Dunscombe (1998) argues in her article on the works of Meredith that "It is heartening to look back on C19th colonial literature for children and see, amongst the messages of domination, exploitation and general disrespect for the environment, that other paradigms of the land were also offered to child readers." It is the intention of this Learning Trail to present a number of resources that will provide material for those with an interest in ecocriticism in children's and young adult literature to explore the extent to which these other paradigms were offered. These early texts can then be examined in the light of contemporary environmental texts available to young readers today. The Trail focuses on the work of Louisa Anne Meredith but includes a number of other CLDR texts which display a range of early attitudes to the environment.
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Children Lost in the Bush,
website
bibliography
The figure of the lost child is a persistent one in Australian literature. In the mid-to-late 19th century, incidents of children lost in the bush received significant press coverage, and they were also the subject of artists' renderings and fictionalised re-tellings in poems and stories. The most famous case of children lost in the bush is that of the Duff children, who went missing in the Wimmera region of Victoria in 1864. Isaac (aged nine), Jane (aged seven), and Frank (aged almost four) spent nine days lost in the bush before being rescued by indigenous trackers. If we examine some of the numerous re-tellings, drawings, and paintings of the incident, we can see how writers and artists gradually made Jane Duff the hero of the story, virtually ignoring the courage of Isaac and Frank Duff, and the skill of the trackers who actually saved the children's lives. This trail leads you through newspaper reports, art work, poems, shorts stories, and full-length works that tell or re-tell the Duffs' story. It also includes critical work that examines these primary texts, or the figure of the lost child more generally in Australian literature. Most of the primary works listed here can be read immediately online, because they have been digitised as part of the Children's Literature Digital Resources project. You can read more about CLDR by going to austlit.edu.au/CLDR.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Digital Curation, AustLit, and Australian Children's Literature
2019
single work
criticism
— Appears in: International Research in Children's Literature , July vol. 12 no. 1 2019; (p. 1-17)'This paper examines the effects of curatorial processes used to develop children's literature digital research projects in the bibliographic database AustLit. Through AustLit's emphasis on contextualising individual works within cultural, biographical, and critical spaces, Australia's literary history is comprehensively represented in a unique digital humanities space. Within AustLit is BlackWords, a project dedicated to recording Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander storytelling, publishing, and literary cultural history, including children's and young adult texts. Children's literature has received significant attention in AustLit (and BlackWords) over the last decade through three projects that are documented in this paper. The curation of this data highlights the challenges in presenting ‘national’ literatures in countries where minority voices were (and perhaps continue to be) repressed and unseen. This paper employs a ‘resourceful reading’ approach – both close and distant reading methods – to trace the complex and ever-evolving definition of ‘Australian children's literature’.'
Source: EUP.
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Networked Reading: Using AustLit to Assist Reading and Understanding of Texts from the Past
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: English in Australia , vol. 47 no. 2 2012; (p. 18-26) In response to a focus on reading, this paper examines the notion of reading online; as such it uses the term 'networked reading' to describe any act of reading in an online or digital environment. In accordance with this notion of 'networked' reading, the paper provides a broad introduction to AustLit: the Australian Literature Resource. This is followed by an examination of a suite of services and digital tools (LORE) developed by the Aus-e-Lit project that extends the scope of AustLit records and facilitates links to external resources. The focus of the final section of the paper is on a collection of full-text resources located within the AustLit subset Children's Literature Digital Resources (CLDR). It proposes a number of ways in which these texts, and an accompanying anthology of critical articles, can be utilised in classrooms across the primary, middle and senior school spectrum (Author abstract). -
Digital Archives and Cultural Memory : Discovering Lost Histories in Digitised Australian Children’s Literature 1851–1945
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Papers : Explorations into Children's Literature , vol. 22 no. 1 2012; (p. 109-119) A recent Australian literature digitisation project uncovered some surprising discoveries in the children’s books that it digitised. The Children’s Literature Digital Resources (CLDR) Project digitised children’s books that were first published between 1851 to 1945 and made them available online through AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource. The digitisation process also preserved, within the pages of those books, a range of bookplates, book labels, inscriptions, and loose ephemera. This material allows us to trace the provenance of some of the digitised works, some of which came from the personal libraries of now-famous authors, and others from less celebrated sources. These extra-textual traces can contribute to cultural memory of the past by providing evidence of how books were collected and exchanged, and what kinds of books were presented as prizes in schools and Sunday schools. They also provide insight into Australian literary and artistic networks, particularly of the first few decades of the 20th century. This article describes the kinds of material uncovered in the digitisation process and suggests that the material provides insights into literary and cultural histories that might otherwise be forgotten. It also argues that the indexing of this material is vital if it is not to be lost to future researchers (Author abstract). -
A Token to the Future: A Digital ‘Archive’ of Early Australian Children’s Literature
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Papers : Explorations into Children's Literature , vol. 22 no. 1 2012; (p. 94-108)This essay considers a specific digital ‘archive’ of early Australian children’s literature, known as the Children’s Literature Digital Resources (CLDR), which is located in AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource. Our paper discusses how early Australian children’s literature included in the CLDR collection rhetorically constructs nation and place, and in so doing constructs an Australian identity for its implied readers.
Source: Author's abstract.
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Colonial Girls’ Literature and the Politics of Archives in the Digital Age
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Papers : Explorations into Children's Literature , vol. 22 no. 1 2012; (p. 33-42) In this paper we examine the politics of print and digital archives and their implications for research in the field of historical children's literature. We use the specific example of our comparative, collaborative project 'From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Australian, New Zealand and Canadian Print Cultures, 1840-1940' to contrast the strengths and limitations of print and digital archives of young people's texts from these three nations. In particular, we consider how the failure of some print archives to collect ephemeral or non-canonical colonial texts may be reproduced in current digitising projects. Similarly, we examine how gaps in the newly forged digital "canon" are especially large for colonial children's texts because of the commercial imperatives of many large-scale digitisation projects. While we acknowledge the revolutionary applications of digital repositories for research on historical children's literature, we also argue that these projects may unintentionally marginalise or erase certain kinds of children's texts from scholarly view in the future (Author abstract).
-
Representations of Aboriginal Australians in a Selection of CLDR Texts
Cherie Allan
,
2008
website
bibliography
— Appears in: Children's Literature Digital Resources 2008; Many of the texts in the CLDR full text collection represent Aboriginal Australians from a colonist or imperial point of view. These representations typically rely on a number of stereotypes including depicting Aboriginal characters as childlike, comic relief or the fool, uncivilised savages or sly, cunning manipulators. Other texts exclude any reference to Aboriginal peoples and thus create a silence around the original inhabitants of Australia thereby reinforcing the notion of terra nullius. This Trail endeavours to raise awareness of these representations and promote resistance to them. It is centred on a number of journal articles which interrogate these representations (Bradford) and/or provide alternative readings of the texts (Collins-Gearing). -
Colonial Girls’ Literature and the Politics of Archives in the Digital Age
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Papers : Explorations into Children's Literature , vol. 22 no. 1 2012; (p. 33-42) In this paper we examine the politics of print and digital archives and their implications for research in the field of historical children's literature. We use the specific example of our comparative, collaborative project 'From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Australian, New Zealand and Canadian Print Cultures, 1840-1940' to contrast the strengths and limitations of print and digital archives of young people's texts from these three nations. In particular, we consider how the failure of some print archives to collect ephemeral or non-canonical colonial texts may be reproduced in current digitising projects. Similarly, we examine how gaps in the newly forged digital "canon" are especially large for colonial children's texts because of the commercial imperatives of many large-scale digitisation projects. While we acknowledge the revolutionary applications of digital repositories for research on historical children's literature, we also argue that these projects may unintentionally marginalise or erase certain kinds of children's texts from scholarly view in the future (Author abstract). -
A Token to the Future: A Digital ‘Archive’ of Early Australian Children’s Literature
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Papers : Explorations into Children's Literature , vol. 22 no. 1 2012; (p. 94-108)This essay considers a specific digital ‘archive’ of early Australian children’s literature, known as the Children’s Literature Digital Resources (CLDR), which is located in AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource. Our paper discusses how early Australian children’s literature included in the CLDR collection rhetorically constructs nation and place, and in so doing constructs an Australian identity for its implied readers.
Source: Author's abstract.
-
Digital Archives and Cultural Memory : Discovering Lost Histories in Digitised Australian Children’s Literature 1851–1945
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Papers : Explorations into Children's Literature , vol. 22 no. 1 2012; (p. 109-119) A recent Australian literature digitisation project uncovered some surprising discoveries in the children’s books that it digitised. The Children’s Literature Digital Resources (CLDR) Project digitised children’s books that were first published between 1851 to 1945 and made them available online through AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource. The digitisation process also preserved, within the pages of those books, a range of bookplates, book labels, inscriptions, and loose ephemera. This material allows us to trace the provenance of some of the digitised works, some of which came from the personal libraries of now-famous authors, and others from less celebrated sources. These extra-textual traces can contribute to cultural memory of the past by providing evidence of how books were collected and exchanged, and what kinds of books were presented as prizes in schools and Sunday schools. They also provide insight into Australian literary and artistic networks, particularly of the first few decades of the 20th century. This article describes the kinds of material uncovered in the digitisation process and suggests that the material provides insights into literary and cultural histories that might otherwise be forgotten. It also argues that the indexing of this material is vital if it is not to be lost to future researchers (Author abstract). -
Networked Reading: Using AustLit to Assist Reading and Understanding of Texts from the Past
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: English in Australia , vol. 47 no. 2 2012; (p. 18-26) In response to a focus on reading, this paper examines the notion of reading online; as such it uses the term 'networked reading' to describe any act of reading in an online or digital environment. In accordance with this notion of 'networked' reading, the paper provides a broad introduction to AustLit: the Australian Literature Resource. This is followed by an examination of a suite of services and digital tools (LORE) developed by the Aus-e-Lit project that extends the scope of AustLit records and facilitates links to external resources. The focus of the final section of the paper is on a collection of full-text resources located within the AustLit subset Children's Literature Digital Resources (CLDR). It proposes a number of ways in which these texts, and an accompanying anthology of critical articles, can be utilised in classrooms across the primary, middle and senior school spectrum (Author abstract).
- 1850-1945
