Strong History
In the English program at UNSW Canberra there is a strong history of research projects in colonial Australian literature going back to the 1970s, including the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, AUSTLIT (launched online in 1988), predecessor of the current AustLit database, the Oxford Literary History of Australia (1998), and two series of scholarly editions: the Colonial Texts Series (1988–2004) and the Academy Editions of Australian Literature (1996–2007). Recent ARC Discovery grants for scholarly editions of Henry Lawson’s While the Billy Boils and the complete poetry of Charles Harpur (1813–1868) have been and will be relying on AustLit indexing to open up and map bibliographically the colonial literary culture.