Review of List of Australian Writers 1788-1992, comp. by John Arnold, and The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, by William H. Wilde, Joy Hooton, and Barry Andrews

Abstract

After Sue Murray's Bibliography of Australian Poetry 1935-1955 (1991), John Loder's Australian Crime Fiction: A Bibliography (1994) and Love Brought to Book: A Bio-bibliography of 20th-century Australian Romance Novels by Juliet Flesch (1995) the two-volume List of Australian Writers is the fourth publication of an ambitious team of bibliographers at Monash University who are aiming high: their 'Bibliography of Australian Literature Project' (BALP) is supposed to become--as soon as it is completed--the definitive bibliography of Australian literature, in which all monographs published by Australians since 1788 will be listed. This database will then be available in book form, through the World Wide Web on the Internet and in CD-ROM format. It is to replace E. Morris Miller and Frederick T. Macartney's Australian Literature: A Bibliography to 1938, Extended to 1950 (rev. ed. 1956) as well as several smaller bibliographies which the scholars interested in Australian literature have had to consult up to now in order to draw together in a painstaking way the bibliographical information they need. The publication of the List, however, marks the end of the first stage of the BALP project, in which the names and dates of writers (up to 1992) have been collected.