I don’t imagine Project Gutenberg needs any introduction to bloggers and blog readers, but I’m not sure how many are aware of the Australian sister site, Project Gutenberg Australia. This site is not formally connected with the original Project Gutenberg but, like the original, it provides access to international texts that are in public domain – specifically, in public domain in Australia. This means you’ll find George Orwell‘s Animal farm here, F Scott Fitzgerald’s The great Gatsby, and so on. But, due to different copyright legislations (prior to the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement), it also means that you’ll find some texts not yet available via Project Gutenberg, such as Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the wind,.

However, Project Gutenberg Australia’s main value is that it provides an entrée to Australian material, through various pages (sections) which organise the content by subject/type. One of these sections is the Library of Australiana containing:

ebooks by Australian writers, or books about Australia. There is a diverse range; from the journals of the land and sea explorers; to the early accounts of white settlement in Australia; to the fiction of ‘Banjo’ Paterson, Henry Lawson and many other Australian writers.

It is an excellent resource.  Some of the explorers whose journals are available include Gregory Blaxland (who, with Wentworth and Lawson, found a way over the mountains west of Sydney in 1813), William Bligh (famous, or is it infamous, for the Mutiny on the Bounty), and James Cook (who claimed our Great South Land for England back in 1770).

But, my main reason for writing this post today is that for readers here who find it hard to locate classic Australian fiction it’s a treasure trove. Some of the writers and works available are:

• Barbara Baynton‘s Bush Studies
• Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery under arms
• Ada Cambridge‘s Sisters
• Miles Franklin’s My brilliant career
• Steele Rudd’s On our selection

South of Bermagui

The Library of Australiana also includes books by foreign authors but set in Australia, such as DH Lawrence‘s Kangaroo. Lawrence completed this novel while living in Thirroul, on the south coast of New South Wales. This is the coast nearest to my inland city, so I’ll conclude with an excerpt from another foreign writer on this coast, Zane Grey:  

It seems, as the years go by, that every camp I pitch in places far from home grows more beautiful and romantic. The setting of the one at Bermagui bore this out in the extreme. From the village a gradual ascent up a green wooded slope led to a jutting promontory that opened out above the sea. The bluff was bold and precipitous. A ragged rock-bound shoreline was never quiet. At all times I seemed aware of the insatiate crawling sea. The waves broke with a thundering crash and roar, and the swells roared to seething ruin upon the rocks. Looking north across a wide blue bay, we could see a long white beach. And behind it dense green forest, “bush,” leading to a bold mountain range, and the dim calling purple of interior Australia. (American angler in Australia)

Grey captures perfectly the reason I, whose preference is for mountains over coasts and who has no interest in fishing, love the south coast. It’s beautiful. And so is Project Gutenberg Australia (in function, if not in look!). Try it next time you are looking for something Australian that is in public domain. There’s a good chance you’ll find it.