Securing the Past now available

Paul Eggert’s monograph Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture and Literature (2009) is available from January 2009 from Cambridge University Press: for details and an excerpt see www.cambridge.org/978052172591. This book is the first concerted effort to examine together the linked philosophies of the different arts of preserving and uncovering the past: the restoration of buildings, conservation of works of art, and editing of literary works to retrieve their original or intended texts. By investigating a series of recent crises in each of the areas, Securing the Past shows how their underlying justifications relate closely to one another. Paul Eggert shows how they have been philosophically undermined by postmodern theories but then charts another, richer way forward to a new future for the past.

ARC grant for Harpur project

An Australian Research Council grant has been awarded for 2009-2013 for the preparation of a variorum edition of the complete poetry of the most important colonial Australian poet, Charles Harpur. The grant includes an Australian Research Council professorial fellowship.

While the Billy Boils

A scholarly edition of Henry Lawson’s famous collection of short stories While the Billy Boils, edited by Paul Eggert and Elizabeth Webby, is nearing completion. The texts are based on the original newspaper versions where Lawson found his voice.

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.

The completion of the Academy Editions project marked the end of the Centre's formal activities, which had begun in 1993, with Paul Eggert as its director. The ongoing projects continue under the aegis of the host School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

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: 13 November 2008