AustLit is a unique record of Australia's literary and storytelling history and culture. It has been developed to support scholarship, research, teaching and general enquiry.
We welcome approaches from scholars and others to discuss ideas that might form new Research Projects or which make use of the AustLit infrastructure to organise, analyse and present research findings.
Research projects supported by AustLit are designed to extend and share knowledge about Australia's cultural history by adding rich and diverse content streams while supporting scholarship in specific fields.
World War I in Australian Literary Culture is an AustLit research project expanding 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.
BlackWords provides access to both general and specific information about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander literary cultures and traditions, providing a platform for the investigation and articulation of what 'Black writing' and 'Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander literatures' might be. BlackWords also contains records describing published and unpublished books, stories, plays, poems, and criticism associated with eligible writers and storytellers and includes works in English and in Indigenous languages. Team members contextualise AustLit's timeline by adding ancient stories and songs.
Trauma Texts is 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.
Click here to access the project.
This collection of projects explore and give access to data that deals writing in and from an Australian perspective.
In addition to BlackWords, the collection includes the following projects:
This research presents the impact of censorship on reading in Australia between 1901 and 1973. By collecting details of literary publications that were prohibited as imports into twentieth-century Australia, it traces the main arc of federal publications censorship. The bibliography relies on the documented evidence of department and agency practice held by the National Archives of Australia. It has an international scope and includes titles from all over the world, including works by Australian writers published abroad.
Explore Banned in Australia.
These projects explore the rich history of screenwriting in Australia, from silent film, through talkies and early television, to the mini-series of the 1980s and the big-budget productions of the twenty-first century.
Explore the projects below:
Explore the thousands of theatre works listed in AustLit through these projects.
These projects explore the rich history of children's literature in Australia, including full-text versions of some out-of-print children's books.
These projects explore aspects of print culture in Australia, from convict narratives to magazines to distribution patterns.
These projects explore various aspects of reading, from Copyright Australia's Reading Australia resource trails to questions of translation.
From pulp fiction covers to seminal Australian science fiction works, AustLit provides access to details bibliographical and biographical records, cover images, and full text collections.
Explore the links below to discover how, for example, medieval themes appear in contemporary Australian popular novels, or where we hope to go with our examination of other popular fiction collections.
Over the years, AustLit has been used to compile collections of data relating to particular geographical regions in Australia. Some of these projects have been underway for many decades.
The Bibliography of Australian Literature was one of AustLit's foundation projects. Three of the four volumes were compiled in and extracted from AustLit between 2000 and 2008. It may well be the last national bibliography to be published in print.
Find out about the Bibliography of Australian Literature here.