Over 100 famous works by Australian authors rescued from oblivion by literary heritage endeavour
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Three-year project returns out-of-print classics – including six Miles Franklin winners – to circulation and into ebook format for the first time. More than 160 books by noted Australian authors have been rescued from oblivion, including six winners of the Miles Franklin literary award.
The three-year project, which culminated at the end of last year, has put out-of-print titles by Thea Astley, Mem Fox, Charmian Clift and Anita Heiss back in circulation and into ebook format for the first time. Five volumes of poetry and verse novels by Dorothy Porter and four titles in Garry Disher’s Wyatt crime thriller series have also been resuscitated, under the Australian project Untapped. Researchers from Melbourne Law School and Macquarie Business School have collaborated on the literary heritage scheme with authors, agents, libraries, the Australian Society of Authors, and digital publishing platform Ligature Press.
And along the way, invaluable data on how Australians consume ebooks in a rapidly expanding market has been collected – published in the report Untapped Potential, released late last year. Lead author of the report, Paul Crosby, a cultural economist at Macquarie Business School, said the main impetus for the project was the realisation that six winners of Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Miles Franklin, had gone out of circulation: Vance Palmer’s The Big Fellow (1959), George Turner’s The Cupboard under the Stairs (1962), The Well Dressed Explorer (1962) and The Acolyte (1972), both by Thea Astley, Tom Flood’s Oceana Fine (1989), and the controversial The Hand that Signed the Paper, the 1994 creation of Helen Dale (formerly Darville/Demidenko).
