A couple of weeks ago, while I was having coffee with Australian Women Writers’ Challenge team member, Yvonne (of Stumbling Through the Past), she mentioned a project at the AustLit website, World War 1 in Australian Literary Culture. Given this year is the centenary – have you heard?! – of the start of the First World War, and given I’ve done nothing to date to recognise this, I thought I could salve my conscience by telling you about this project.

Coincidentally, author Annabel Smith (whose book, The ark, I reviewed recently), wrote a post just last week on war novels. War, she wrote, is one of the topics she tends to avoid reading, though she names a few war novels she does admire. My response was that I don’t avoid war books. Indeed, I’m often drawn to them – not to war genre adventure stories but to, I suppose, “literary war”. My reason is that in wars we can see the very best and very worst of people, and everything in between. Good writers can do so much with this. Then, on the weekend, I read a beautiful essay by Tim Winton in The Guardian about hospitals. I related to his comment that:

Wars and hospitals*; it’s a surprise we write about anything else. Hospitals make rich fictional settings because from the inside they are such chillingly plausible worlds unto themselves …

I like his reasoning, and would argue that wars too represent “chillingly plausible worlds unto themselves”.

So, back to AustLit. They introduce this part of their site by saying that it is

an AustLit research project expanding our coverage of the way the 1914-1918 war has appeared in literature, film, and other forms of storytelling from the conflict’s beginning to the present.

They have been working on it since 2012, and now have 5,000 records in the project encompassing a wide range of forms including “poetry, short stories, novels, plays, films, popular songs, children’s literature, biographies and personal accounts …” The main way they present these is through “curated exhibitions”, which are located in the sidebar as a randomly organised rather eclectic list of topics for exploration, such as Anzac Field Theatres, Sumner Locke: War Romances, Indigenous Diggers, Soldier and Nurse Writers, and Women Writing Women’s Roles. These pages provide links to further pages related to that topic. The site says that more of these “curated collections of data” will be added.

Through these “curated exhibitions” I discovered Sumner Locke, mother of well-known Australian writer, Sumner Locke Elliott, and unbeknownst to me, a prolific writer herself. She wrote plays, short stories and novels – with most of her output being “contemporary romance”, including war romances. AustLit tells us that:

When World War I broke out, Locke’s stories changed sharply.

She still wrote bright, fashionable romances and stories of selection life–but from November 1914, they were war stories and they were, more often than not, about women: wives coercing their husbands to enlist, wives convincing their husbands not to enlist, mothers struggling with the enlistments of their sons, women keeping rural communities running in the absence of men, sweethearts convincing their wounded lovers to marry them even in the absence of limbs or sight.

In all of them, Locke’s ironic tone shines through.

Sounds intriguing! And worth checking out methinks. Some stories can be found in Trove, either via the AustLit page or a search in Trove itself.

Now if, like me, you want to find a list of war novels, the way to do it is not apparently obvious, but I got there by clicking on another link in the sidebar titled Search and Explore the Data. This page provides a link to three “lists” (generated via pre-set search parameters so presumably the results list will grow as records are added to the database):

• Women Writers and the War
• Gallipoli Poetry
• Novels of World War 1

Clicking on links in the above pages should take you to a list of relevant works, but unfortunately there’s a bug which I’d hoped would be fixed by now**. Parts of the AustLit site is only accessible by subscribers. However, I believe this project is supposed to be accessible to all, so, if you are interested and can’t access it via a subscribing organisation, just keep trying.

If (or when) you can click the Novels link you will find a list of over 200 novels. You can sort it by various parameters, including date, reverse date, author. I was surprised to find that David Malouf’s Fly away Peter does not appear in the Novels of World War 1 because it is a novella. The novella is a unique form – and I love the fact that they specifically index that – but I think that most people looking at a list of novels about the First World War would expect to find Malouf there.

However, it is an excellent resource, providing a comprehensive survey of a centenary of First World War literature. If you hover your mouse over a title, an abstract may pop up, though this is not universal. On the admittedly rare occasion where AustLit has located an online version of a novel – such as in Trove or Project Gutenberg – they provide a link. One example is Scottish writer RW Campbell’s The Kangaroo Marines, published in 1915. Here is the first paragraph of Chapter 2:

Sam Killem, Commanding Officer of the Kangaroo Marines, sat in his Recruiting Office chewing a cigar in the usual Australian style. Now and again he looked at his recruiting figures and smiled. “Five hundred men in three days,” he mused. “Not bad for you, Sam; and good stuff at that”–for Sam was a judge of men. He was a squatter and as rich as Croesus. His big, bony frame spoke of strength, while his eye and face told the tale of shrewdness and resource. He was forty, and successful. Three hundred miles of land was chartered as his own. His sheep were counted in thousands, and his brand as familiar as a postage stamp. Yet, in all his struggles for success, Sam had found time to be a patriot. He had served as a Tommy in the African War, and since then had commanded a corps of mounted men in the back of beyond. He was the fairest yet fiercest, the most faithful and fearless man in the force. A man who disobeyed his orders always received a knock-out blow, for Sam boxed like a pro, and hit like a hammer.

Hmm … “the fairest yet fiercest, the most faithful and fearless man in the force”. There’s some alliteration run amok! Campbell says in his preface that he wanted “to write deep in the annals of our literature and military history this supreme devotion, this noble heroism” of the ANZACS. It’s not an official history, but his attempt to picture the war. “The cloak of fiction”, he says, “has here and there been wound round temperamental things as well as around some glorious facts.”

Even if I don’t read more of this book, I love that AustLit has enabled me to dip into it. I do hope they keep producing projects like this and BlackWords (on which I’ve posted before).

* You never know, but you may see a post in the future on Australian hospital literature!
** I notified “the bug” over a week ago.