Australian literature and culture resources

Contents
Australian literature AustLit (Australian literature database) Reference works Australian Dictionary of Biography Australian journals and newspapers	Australian literature and culture texts Book reviews Literary awards Australian culture

Australian literature

Australian Literature in Education Roundtable: The Australia Council for the Arts hosted a roundtable discussion on the study of Australian literature in schools and universities on Tuesday 7 August 2007, including 20 eminent authors, publishers, teachers and academics. Here is the text of this important communiqué.
Ozlit: Now part of Australian studies resources at the University of Sydney; still one of the major resources for Australian literature on the web.
Australian Literature on the Internet: A very comprehensive site maintained by the National Library of Australia.
The Centre for Australian Language and Literature Studies (CALLS): CALLS was established at the University of New England in 1989 to co-ordinate and promote the research into and teaching of Australian Language and Literature, and to encourage Australian writing.
Association for the Study of Australian Literature: ASAL promotes the study, discussion and creation of Australian writing. It also seeks to increase awareness of Australian writing in the wider community and throughout the world.
It includes a Postgraduate news page for postgraduate students interested in upcoming conferences, scholarships and the work of other postgraduate students throughout Australia, including lists of ongoing and completed theses.
Literature: A personal page maintained by Perry Middlemiss. Perry has produced information pages on a number of Australian authors with, typically, a brief biography, a bibliography with links to discussions of individual works, and links to other web pages on that author.
Full text of his 'favourite Australian poems' is provided as well as pages on the Miles Franklin Award and the The Australian/Vogel Award.
Eclectic, but well worth a visit.
The Australian Literary Review: The Australian newspaper is once again publishing a monthly literary review as a supplement to its regular pages. From 1996-2001, with the support of the Australia Council, the Australian published The Australian's Review of Books. After a five-year hiatus the newspaper has launched The Australian Literary Review (ALR).
The new magazine aims to 'encourage lively, controversial and provocative debate not only on books and writing but also on culture, politics, philosophy, international conflict, public policy, education and economics'. It seeks a community of readers who 'value the life of the mind'. (6 September 2006).
South Australian creative writers: women writers: A database of women writers in South Australia from 1836 to 1999 aiming to provide brief biographies and lists of their published writing. Compiled by researchers at the State Library of South Australia and Flinders University.
You can search the site in a number of ways, including by author and title.
The database is sometimes unavailable: in this case you may prefer to look for SA women writers in the AustLit: Australian Literature Gateway, which holds much of the same material.
Literature in Australia and New Zealand: A curious site, with no indication of who is in charge of it. It is very much under construction and many of its menu categories don't work. There's potential, though, and you'll find some useful bibliographies [there's one on colonialism and another on gender, for example]. A case of 'watch this space'...
Australian Literary Studies: Australian Literary Studies is a refereed journal which publishes critical articles on Australian literature. The Library has both paper (complete set from volume 1, 1963) and electronic (1990 onwards) subscriptions to this journal.

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AustLit

AustLit is our most valuable index to critical writing on Australian creative literature.
Users can access rich biographical information, enhanced bibliographic description using sophisticated search strategies, together with a Library Holdings facility based on links with Kinetica, the National Bibliographic Database. AustLit also provides access to a growing number of full-text documents and electronic resources, including: scholarly electronic Australian Literature texts produced by the University of Sydney Electronic Text and Image Service (SETIS); electronic journals and their contents; and a range of quality websites relating to Australian writers and their works. Once copyright release arrangements have been finalised, AustLit's full-text component will increase significantly with the addition of a substantial body of full text documents, including selected criticisms, reviews, electronic publications, and out of print literary works.
Most AustLit records originate from the general bibliographic records of the former AUSTLIT database and the Bibliography of Australian Literature project. [Note: we have a copy of the printed version of The Bibliography of Australian literature in the Barr Smith Library Reference collection at 820.9A A756b. So far we have received volume 1, A-E, which was published in 2001.]
You can restrict your search to Specialist Subsets, which are small filtered sets of AustLit records. The following subsets are currently available: Drama; Multicultural; Children's Literature; Western Australia; SA Women; Responses to Asia; Indigenous.

There is a useful SearchTips page with advice on using Boolean search operators AND, OR, NOT in AustLit, and other helpful information.

For in depth information about searching, go to the AustLit Help page and look under the Subscriber search Options heading.

Keep up to date with AustLit News for information on new services and literary news.

AustLit has developed a Personal Alert Service so that subscribers can be kept up-to-date with new publications in self-defined areas of interest.
The Personal Alert Service allows you to define search criteria that will be automatically executed by the system at periodic intervals to find newly added or updated resources of interest to you in the field of Australian literature. The results of the search are then emailed to you as often as you choose.

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Reference works

There are printed works in the Library's Reference collection that are essential tools for the study of Australian Literature.

Australian literature, 1788-1914
: 429 pages covering all the major writers (Miles Franklin, Henry Lawson, David Unaipon, for example) with a portrait of each author (and lots of other beaut illustrations) as well as excellent bibliographies. Edited by Selina Samuels.
Volume 230 in the DLB series.
Australian writers, 1915-1950: I'm not sure why the title has changed from Australian literature... to Australian writers..., but the quality and coverage are just as good as they were in the first volume. By the way, the entry for C. J. Dennis is by our very own Philip Butterss. Edited by Selina Samuels.
Volume 260 in the DLB series.
Australian writers, 1950-1975: Edited by Selina Samuels.
Volume 289 in the DLB series.
Australian writers, 1975-2000: The final volume. Edited by Selina Samuels.
Volume 325 in the series.

Another essential reference work is:

The Bibliography of Australian literature: Under the general editorship of John Arnold and John Hay, this work plans to record all separately published creative writing by Australian writers.
The first volume, A-E, was issued in 2001, followed by F-J in 2004 and K-O in 2007.
Shelved in the Barr Smith Library Reference collection at 820.9A A756b.

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Australian Dictionary of Biography

Australian Dictionary of Biography Online

The Australian Dictionary of Biography is the major reference source for background information on Australian literary and culturally-significant figures. It contains over 10,000 scholarly biographies of significant Australians who died before 1980.

The Australian Dictionary of Biography Online is the web version of the traditional print volumes. [If you prefer to use the 16 volumes plus the Supplement of the print version you'll find them in the Barr Smith Library Reference collection.]

The most eminent people in Australia's history are given articles of 2000 to 6000 words; other significant figures have entries that range in length from 500 to 2000 words. While the dictionary covers the orthodox fields of politics, business, religion, the land, the professions and the arts, it also attempts to reflect the rich variety of Australian life by including representatives of every social group and sphere of endeavour. Articles on these representative people are usually 500 to 750 words in length.
A growing number of entries include a portrait of the subject.

ADB Online has taken a number of key elements from each article - date and place of birth and death, cultural heritage, religious influences, and occupations - and placed them in a database. The database is used to generate output to the web and provide a wide variety of means or pathways by which users can find biographies that are of interest or useful for research. See the Biographies help section for further details.

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Australian journals and newspapers

Australian journals online [AJOL]: AJOL is the National Library of Australia's database of Australian electronic journals, newspapers, magazines, webzines, newsletters and e-mail fanzines. The database provides details and links to over 2000 titles that include local and overseas works with Australian content, authorship and/or emphasis as well as entries for sites which advertise or promote Australian journals. AJOL is searchable and browsable by title or by subject.
Australian Newspapers Online: The National Library of Australia's database of Australian newspapers that are available in electronic format. You can search by title, by state or by name of city or town.
Nineteenth century Australian periodicals: An annotated bibliography by Lurline Stuart.
Barr Smith Library Special Collections Call number 052 S931n.
Australian periodicals with literary content, 1821-1925: An annotated bibliography compiled and introduced by Lurline Stuart.
Barr Smith Library Reference collection Call number 052 S931n 2003.

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Australian literature and culture texts

Australian Literary and Historical Texts: A collection of 18th, 19th and early 20th century Australian literary and historical texts maintained by SETIS, the Scholarly Electronic Text and Image Service at the University of Sydney Library. The database may be searched by Keywords and Phrases or by other entry points such as Author. The texts have been encoded according to the Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (TEI-2) and are converted to HTML as users search or retrieve sections of the texts.
PANDORA: PANDORA [Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources of Australia], Australia's Web Archive is a growing collection of copies of Australian online publications, established initially by the National Library of Australia in 1996, and now built in collaboration with nine other Australian libraries and other cultural collecting organisations.
The purpose of the PANDORA Archive is to collect and provide long-term access to selected online publications and web sites that are about Australia, are by an Australian author on a subject of social, political, cultural, religious, scientific or economic significance and relevance to Australia, or are by an Australian author of recognised authority and make a contribution to international knowledge.
You can browse by broad subject areas or use the excellent Advanced Search function.
Project Gutenberg Australia: An Australian off-shoot of the US-based archive, providing e-texts which are public domain in Australia while still under copyright in the US. This site has a specific focus on Australiana.
Australian explorers: Part of the fantastic collection of electronic texts, eBooks@Adelaide, which is maintained by Steve Thomas, the Library's Senior Systems Analyst.
RAAM: Register of Australian Archives and Manuscripts: RAAM is an online searchable guide to collections of personal papers and non-governmental organisational records held by Australian libraries and archives. It provides researchers with a convenient, centralised register of locations for primary research material. It does not provide detailed descriptions of the collections themselves; rather, it alerts researchers to the existence of collections and enables them to pursue further enquiries about the material, either online or through direct contact with repositories.
There are index entries to more than 600 Australian authors.

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Book reviews

Australian Book Review: The Barr Smith Library has all issues from the first, in 1961, onwards. The latest few years are in the Reference collection at Call number 05 A926.2.
Visit the ABR website for the contents of current and previous issues. They also provide online indexes for the last few years.

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Australian literary awards

The Australian/Vogel Award: The The Australian/Vogel Award is an annual prize of $A20,000 promoted by The Australian newspaper, sponsored by Vogel's Bread, and awarded to a writer under 35 years of age for an original unpublished manuscript of fiction or Australian history or biography.
Our own Eva Sallis won the award in 1997 for her novel Hiam [Barr Smith Library call number: BSL Main Collection 823A S168h].
The Miles Franklin Award: The Miles Franklin award was set up under the terms of the will of the late Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, the famed Australian author who died in September 1954. It is given annually for the novel or play of the highest literary merit, written by an Australian, presenting aspects of Australian life, and published during the preceding year.
The information above is from Perry Middlemiss' excellent Larrikin Literature page.

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Australian cultural studies links

Australia's Cultural and Recreation Portal: The online gateway to Australian cultural organisations, websites, resources, events and news, is an initiative of the Australian Federal Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts.
Australian stories: Australian 'stories' on specific topics about Australian history and culture. Part of the Australian Government's Culture and Recreation Portal. Each article has evaluated links to additional information.
Cultural Studies Association of Australasia: The Cultural Studies Association of Australia was established in 1992, and in 2002 became the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia. The broad aims of the Association are to develop the study, teaching and public profile of Cultural Studies throughout Australasia.
The Association published what was possibly the first cultural studies journal, Australian journal of cultural studies from volume 1 1983 to volume 4 1986. The journal was transformed into the journal now called Cultural Studies from 1987 onwards.
ARC Cultural Research Network: The Cultural Research Network's disciplinary base is in cultural, media and communications studies. From this foundation it has built collaborative links with researchers from cultural history, cultural geography, cultural anthropology and creative industries to develop the capacity for innovative research into media and cultural technologies, cultural literacies, cultural histories, geographies and identities.
Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies: The Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies was established at the University of Queensland in 2000. Its objective is to develop humanities research within the university and to promote its benefits within the wider community.
Australian work within the broad fields of critical and cultural studies is on the cutting edge of contemporary humanities research internationally. As a key area within the 'new humanities' literary and critical theory, film and media studies, and cultural studies research in critical and cultural studies has played a crucial role in extending our capacity to understand our social, political, and cultural environments.
Australian Studies International Database (ASID). This searchable database lists details of all Australian studies centres and associations internationally, and those of all individual scholars, researchers, teachers and enthusiasts.
Electronic Australiana: The National Library of Australia maintains this selection of useful links. Always up to date with the latest.
The National Centre for Australian Studies: The National Centre for Australian Studies (NCAS) is the designated Australian Research Council key centre for teaching and research in Australian studies. Established in 1989, the Centre is located on the Clayton Campus of Monash University. Its aim is to disseminate knowledge about Australian society and culture to interested parties.
Excellent links and always kept right up to date.
Australian Studies Network: The Australian Studies Network is aimed primarily at academics located outside Australia. Their aim is to 'provide a central location from which all manner of information may be shared by all interested academics...'.
OzLife: Australian biography index: OzLife commenced in September 2000 and provides access to the citations of biographical articles in major Australian newspapers. It indexes articles on prominent Australians in all walks of life, including musicians, authors, politicians and business executives.
Ozlife is fully searchable or you can browse under Persons, Book titles or Occupations.
Australian Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights: Here you can read the full text of the Our Culture: Our Future report, the first of its kind to comprehensively map the rights indigenous Australians want to their cultural heritage and to comprehensively analyse the laws and policies that affect the ability of Indigenous Australians to realise these rights. The Report also lists a range of measures for protecting indigenous cultural and intellectual property.
Australian Humanities Review: A peer-reviewed interdisciplinary electronic journal, published quarterly. You can add your name to a mailing list if you want to receive regular updates.
There's also an archive where you can search all issues from Number 1, 1996 onwards, by Subject, Author, Isue number or Keyword.

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