Tag: Archive

The secret history of Australia’s unpublished literature

SoutherlyBlog

Nic Low For five of us over the last week, life’s been defined by the chug-and-whir of digital copiers sucking in page after page of reject literature. With the support of the State Library of Victoria’s Storage and Digital Collection Services, a small group of volunteers has been digitising a portion of the archive relating to Australian literary magazines. Edmund La Touche Armstrong, Chief Librarian from 1896-1925 after working his way up from junior assistant, championed a policy of archiving unofficial as well as official culture. His vision meant that from the 1940s until the late 1990s, the SLV stored…

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Iceberg Theory: rules on style from the New Writing for the Real Australia Manifesto

SoutherlyBlog

Nic Low After long weeks of open-ended writing, I crave concrete tasks. Out at my house in the national park north of Castlemaine, if a chapter ending’s giving me grief I might head into the garden of an evening to pick slugs off the basil. If I can’t pin down a character or find the rhythm for my prose, I might take a break and dig a hole. It’s always a purposeful hole – a flat area for a new watertank; stairs up to the outside toilet – but the digging is really the point. It gives a sense of…

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New Writing for the Real Australia

SoutherlyBlog

Nic Low   Last week I mentioned the State Library of Victoria’s archives relating to Australian literary magazines. I’ve since learned that their existence is well-known among literary scholars, and several studies of individual magazines have drawn on the material. But I think the original point stands: it’d be valuable to look at that body of rejected work collectively, as an expression of Australia’s literary unconscious. A week of fruitful conversations with various editors and archival staff means we’ve come up with a method for analysing what’s there. More on that in a moment, but for now, the manifesto I…

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