Completion of the Academy Editions of Australian Literature

In July 2007 the tenth and final volume of the Academy Editions series of scholarly editions appeared: volume 2 of Mary Gilmore’s Collected Verse, edited by Jennifer Strauss, was launched by David Malouf. This followed the launch by Justice Michael Kirby at the High Court of Australia in November 2006 of Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery Under Arms, edited by Paul Eggert and Elizabeth Webby. The various Academy Editions, published by the University of Queensland Press and sponsored by the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Australian Research Council, have attracted much praise from reviewers.

In 2004 the Centre’s other major project, the Colonial Texts Series, was brought to completion with its eighth volume. Samples from each volume of both series and details of other Centre publications also appear on this website, including Margaret Roberts’s variorum electronic edition of the Collected Verse of John Shaw Neilson (2005) and Elizabeth Perkins and Elizabeth Holt’s Analytical Finding List (2002) of the poems of Charles Harpur.

Ongoing projects

The completion of the Academy Editions project marked the end of the Centre’s formal activities, which had begun in 1993. Some important projects continue under the aegis of the host School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and applications by intending Masters and doctoral students are warmly welcomed.

• The Centre’s director Paul Eggert’s monograph Securing the Past, which arises from the editorial activities of the Centre, will be published by Cambridge University Press in late 2008.
• Eggert is editing, together with Elizabeth Webby, a scholarly edition of Henry Lawson’s collection of short stories While the Billy Boils to be published by Pickering and Chatto in 2010.
• A variorum edition of Charles Harpur’s complete poetry (and his notes to those poems) is also projected, with the collaboration of the Mitchell Library  and SETIS at the University of Sydney.

Contact: Professor Paul Eggert  
School of Humanities & Social Sciences 
UNSW at ADFA   
Canberra ACT 2600
Ph: 61 2 6268 8900 
Fax: 61 2 6268 8899 
Email: p.eggert@adfa.edu.au

Last Updated: 25 March 2008