Printable version 
The Australian Literature Resource
AustLit is now available free of charge to all Australian schools. Enquiries about access arrangements should be directed to your school's education authority.
Contact us if you have access difficulties.
As a professional development tool AustLit provides teachers with up-to-date information on the publication of Australian literature and related critical texts. Teachers at all educational levels can use AustLit in preparing to teach Australian literary texts whether at primary or secondary schools, or university. Students can also use AustLit to find out about authors whose texts they are reading, and to explore the ways Australians tell, retell, and think about stories
The TAL Resource stores information about the teaching of Australian literary texts and the contexts in which they are taught at universities and tertiary institutions around Australia and internationally. It provides links to AustLit records, some teaching resources, and allows teachers to consider the ways that other teachers have combined specific Australian literary texts within particular contexts.
TAL is useful for discovering the ways, for example, that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander texts are taught, or how eco-criticism is incorporated in Australian literary studies, or how Australian texts are taught with non-Australian texts in thematically driven courses.
Search TAL now by entering an author, title, or tertiary institution in the box below.
The National Curriculum for years up to and including Year 10 was implemented in Australian schools in 2012. The Senior Secondary Curriculum is due to be implemented in 2014. Here are some tips for using AustLit to address the three primary cross curriculum objectives of the national curriculum:
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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures
BlackWords provides a wide range of information about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers, storytellers and their published and unpublished books, stories, plays, poems and criticism, including works in English and in Australian languages. Read Dr Jeanine Leane’s essay on using BlackWords in the National Curriculum context.
Explore the BlackWords Information Trails which gather together detailed information on themes relevant to the inclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures in teaching.
Explore the BlackWords Calendar of Events and other informative pages.
Otherwise, strike out on your own at the BlackWords homepage. From there you can conduct a keyword, author, or title search using the Quick Search box found in the grey column.
More complex searches can be made using the guided/advanced search options.
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Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia
The Asian-Australian Children’s Literature and Publishing (AACLAP) project provides information about
- Australian children’s literature set in Asia, and/or representing Asian-Australian cultures and experiences; and,
- literature that is published in selected Asian languages.
Be sure to explore the Children’s Literature Research and Learning Trails made available through the Children’s Literature Digital Resources (CLDR) project.
The Australian Literary Responses to 'Asia' tracks literary responses by Australian writers to that diverse region called 'Asia'. It includes information on works about, set in, or in some cases, containing references to or images of countries in Asia, North East Asia, South East Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East and Papua New Guinea. It does not cover the Asian diaspora (e.g. Indians in Fiji).
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Sustainability
From 'An Appele to Yung Australyer' (1863), through the life work of Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Judith Wright, to Tony Park's adventure novel The Delta (2010) featuring mercenary-turned-'eco-commando' Sonja Kurtz, Australia's literary obsession with the environment extends far and wide from the traditional concerns of 'drought and flooding rain'.
The Anthology was compiled by Professor Leigh Dale and Linda Hale and published by AustLit in 2010. The selection is designed to support the teaching of Australian literature at both secondary and tertiary levels. It contains 75 full text scholarly articles on authors and their works including Henry Lawson, Judith Wright, Peter Carey, Jack Davis, and many others. The Anthology also makes available selective bibliographies on each included author to assist with the discovery of other relevant, authoritative, secondary material for teaching and study.
The AustLit Toolkit provides ideas and tools for the innovative use and analysis of data. The Toolkit includes directions for downloading LORE, the extension to the Firefox browser that can be used to create collections of Internet resources, and export these into a variety of formats, including Word documents and learning trails (such as the BlackWords Information Trails). These tools provide teachers with many opportunities for incorporating digital literacy training in their instruction and collaborating with colleagues on the development of resource collections.
AustLit acknowledges the funding assistance of the Australian Research Council, the ALTC and NCRIS in the development of the material made available here. The School of EMSAH at The University of Queensland and the Faculty of Education, Cultural and Language Studies in Education at Queensland University of Technology have been developing resources with teaching in mind for the past five years.
Contact us with your ideas for using AustLit in teaching.