My husband used to tell people I got paid to read newspapers. While that is true, it’s not the whole truth. This is the story of my AustLit career which began – and ended – with newspapers.

In April 1994, an advertisement appeared in the employment pages of The Canberra Times announcing two vacancies for part-time database indexers. (The ad actually said the positions were for ‘indexes’, but I overlooked that typo.) Applicants needed ‘an interest in Australian literature’ and ‘a general education to Year 12’. Applications had to be handwritten.

My background was in teaching and librarianship, not indexing, but I was an avid reader, and I certainly met the educational requirements. I decided to give it a shot. Happily, I was successful.

Colonial mindsets vs contemporary understandings

In my early days with AustLit (then known as AUSTLIT), I was based at the National Library of Australia, charged with indexing the Australian literary content of late 19th and early 20th century newspapers such as The Lone Hand.

Slowly, the names of poets, short story writers and book reviewers became familiar – Roderic Quinn, Mabel Forrest, Hugh McCrae and Edward Dyson joined those I already knew (Henry Lawson, Norman Lindsay, Mary Gilmore and Dorothea Mackellar).

My ‘interest in Australian literature’ was expanding and I welcomed it. What was less welcome was immersing myself in the mindset shared by many authors from Australia’s colonial past.

I found it unsettling to read and index essays extolling the virtues of the White Australia policy. Here is Mary Gilmore, for example, writing in 1914: ‘If the white races are to stay white there must be no blacklegs among them. There must be one solid, single nation, for if a breach is once made nothing can ever close it, or stay the tide that in time will replace every white man by a half-caste … It is to-day that the white peoples have it in their power to say whether they will keep out Asia till she is more civilised in the white way’ (‘A World’s Union’ by Mary Gilmore, The Lone Hand, 1 June 1914, p.37).

And how to respond to a story that makes casual reference to violence against women? Try teasing out the complex layers in ‘Challabilloo’s Suffragette’ in which news of the suffragette movement is shared around an all-male campfire. The ‘outrages’ of Emmeline Pankhurst’s ‘violent sisterhood’ are detailed along with the claim: ‘Those women in England stop at nothing short of murder … Strong measures have to be taken to deal with them’. An Aboriginal station hand, Challabilloo, who has listened to the story, later discovers his wife has broken a custom at corrobboree. In response, he gives her ‘one big fella beenya (violent beating)’, determined she won’t become a suffragette. (The word used to signify Challabilloo’s identity as an indigenous person would not be printed in any 21st century newspaper.) (‘Challabilloo’s Suffragette’ by Arthur Nash, The Lone Hand, 1 August 1914, p.226)

Part of my task as an indexer was to encapsulate the essence of these essays and stories without imposing my own views or judgements. At the same time, I needed to provide subject access to the writings for today’s researchers. I had a dual responsibility: to the original authors and to contemporary and future readers.

Squirrelled away in the National Library’s basement

In addition to grappling with intellectual and moral dilemmas, I was also wrestling with late 20th century technology.

In the 1990s, old newspapers were mostly accessible via microfilm reels. The spools whirred constantly in the gloomy and airless environment of the National Library of Australia’s lower ground floor; their constant movement even caused travel sickness in some readers.

My work tools at the time comprised a pen, a hard copy of the AUSTLIT thesaurus, and a stack of AUSTLIT worksheets. The information on the completed worksheets was entered into AUSTLIT by data clerks based at UNSW Canberra. (Hence the need for the handwritten job application – my writing had to be easily decipherable.)

If I were indexing a newspaper like The Lone Hand today, I could access it via any internet-connected device. Along with many other publications, it has now been digitised and made available through the National Library’s digital storehouse, Trove. And instead of completing worksheets to be handed on to data clerks, I could have input the details straight into AustLit along with a URL linking the AustLit record directly to the newspaper’s full text.

How had this change occurred?

From card file to OPAC to CD-ROM

I arrived at AUSTLIT nearly six years after its inauguration. Former prime minister Gough Whitlam had launched the database in August 1988 with The Canberra Times declaring it ‘a giant technological leap forward’ (‘Literary Study Plugs into Computer Age’, 10 August 1988). The data that formed the basis of AUSTLIT had been housed in card files before being converted to a machine-readable format.

Initially, the database was accessible via the Online Public Access Catalogues (OPACs) that had become common in large libraries; it was later published on CD-ROMs. But life in the IT world was changing rapidly and further developments were soon afoot.

A shrinking world inspires collaborative change

While I was beavering away in the basement of the National Library, the internet and the World Wide Web were evolving in dungeons inhabited by computer boffins. In 1993 the source code for the web was made freely available. New horizons beckoned.

In the mid-1990s, AUSTLIT began the move towards a web-based product. Coinciding with this, the Australian Research Council (source of regular grant funding for AUSTLIT) was favouring applications from collaborative projects. AUSTLIT joined with other literary projects across Australia and this new consortium formed AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource.

In August 2002, then Minister for Education, Science and Training, Dr Brendan Nelson, formally launched the newly named AustLit at the National Library of Australia. At the time, the database comprised around 390,000 works. (In March 2023, AustLit reached the 1,000,000 works milestone.) It was rightly described by AustLit Executive Manager Kerry Kilner as ‘one of the world’s most comprehensive, efficient and user-friendly online research tools in what was one of the largest humanities projects ever funded in Australia’. (‘Revolutionary Electronic Literature Database To Be Launched’, UQ News, 26 August 2002).

It’s a wrap

I began my life at AustLit with late 19th and early 20th century newspapers; after indexing the Australian literary content of thousands of contemporary newspapers, together with tens of thousands of other works in various literary forms and genres, I finished my nearly 21-year-run back in the 19th century. In my final two years, I worked on The Colonial Newspapers and Magazines Project.

This project focused on specific years from Australia’s colonial era – 1838, 1868 and 1888. What could the newspapers reveal? We aimed to capture a snapshot of the reading habits and broader literary interests of colonial (largely white) Australians. Which international and local theatrical troupes toured the colonies? Whose plays were performed in the newly built theatres? Which books and journals were imported?

The 19th century newspapers did reveal answers to those questions but they also threw up a raft of curiosities. There was the Sydney butcher Philip McCarroll who preceded his weekly advertisement of meat prices with a poem, usually reflecting a political or social issue of the day. His versifying for 17 March 1868, for instance, highlighted the attempted assassination of ‘that beloved royal one’ Prince Alfred, ‘our own Victoria’s son’. (Empire, 17 March 1868, p.4, column 5)

And then there was the ‘experiment’ of employing women as compositors in printing workshops which did not meet with the approval of the editor of The Australasian. The colonial newspaper quotes the London Press News about the retirement of a female compositor. The London paper said: ‘let all those philanthropic and disinterested individuals who would elevate women find some better way of doing it than by putting them into a workshop, and thrusting their fathers, brothers, and husbands out of it’. The writer for The Australasian concurs: ‘In spite … of much oral humbug, the female compositor idea is yet another proof that whatever may be a woman’s mission, or whatever her proper place may be, it is not in the workshop’, especially when she does not wish to remain at work after eight o’clock but would prefer to ‘slope off in a mysterious manner’ in order to enjoy a social life. (‘Employing Women as Compositors’, The Australasian, 8 February 1868, p.168, column 4).

Under my skin

That advertised ‘interest in Australian literature’ back in 1994 certainly got under my skin. When my time at AustLit finally ended, I went back to some of the notes I’d kept on newspaper columns that had piqued my interest. One such was a mention in the pages of Empire of a reading of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol by Derwent Moultrie Coleridge, grandson of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, at the Woollahra and Paddington Library Society. (17 January 1868, p.2). How had Coleridge’s grandson come to be in Sydney? I spent many happy hours back at the National Library, where my AustLit journey had begun, finding the answer to that question. (You can read the results of my research in three articles titled ‘On Being Ruined by a Fondness for Beer’.)

Links and sources

• AustLit
• National Library of Australia
• The Lone Hand
• ‘A World’s Union’ by Mary Gilmore, The Lone Hand, 1 June 1914, p.37
• ‘Challabilloo’s Suffragette’ by Arthur Nash, The Lone Hand, 1 August 1914, p.226
• Trove
• ‘Literary Study Plugs Into Computer Age’, The Canberra Times, 10 August 1988
• Australian Research Council
• ‘Revolutionary Electronic Literature Database To Be Launched’, UQ News, 26 August 2002
• The Colonial Newspapers and Magazines Project
• ‘Philip M’Carroll, Pitt Street’, Empire, 17 March 1868, p.4, column 5
• ‘Employing Women as Compositors’, The Australasian, 8 February 1868, p.168, column 4
• ‘Mr Derwent Coleridge’s Reading at Woollahra’, Empire, 17 January 1868, p.2
• ‘On Being Ruined by a Fondness for Beer’, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3

Note

Parts of this blog post are adapted from ‘How a Nine-Month Contract Turned into a 21-Year Career’, published as part of AustLit’s 20^th anniversary celebrations in 2021.