Endangered Literary Personalities: Thea Astley

Hidden in the stacks of the Fryer Library are multiple manuscripts of the late Australian literary author Thea Astley.
In truth my education on Australian literature had been crude at best, Fryer librarian Penny Whiteway admitted that she too had not been exposed to this lauded author either.
The reasons for Astely’s exclusion from Australian education will not be looked into here. Instead the Fryer Library must be celebrated for prying into its vaults and exposing fragments from Australian history in its Treasure of the Month spectacle.
Thea Astley was the star of October. Her display consisted of the ‘typer’, a Hermes ‘Baby’ typewriter used to express her creative masterpieces in print form between the 50s and 70s; transcripts of the Miles Franklin Award winning The Slow Natives; and cigarettes to emphasise her addictive nicotine habit.
The display is just a glimpse of a 23 box collection that contains among other things, another ‘typer’ purchased in the 1980s; handwritten drafts and edited typescripts of her novels; awards including her 1992 Order of Australia medal; and her Bachelor of Arts Certificate from The University of Queensland in 1948.
The existence of such material is a treasure trove for researchers keen to learn about Astley or even perhaps mid twentieth century publishing trends in Australia. Penny Whiteway exclaims that the breadth of material “shows the evolution from the very early books to the very last books that she wrote”.
For those of us unfamiliar with Thea Astley I would recommend that you head straight to the UQ Library catalogue and borrow out some of her many published works. Astley is said to have written with a distinctively Queensland flavour, often locating most of her novels in the sunshine state. Many of her books won awards, and she was receiver to four Miles Franklin Awards, Premier Awards and multiple other merits.

UQ offers students award winning referencing support

I hated referencing when I first started university. It was a process I was not familiar with and the very mention of it made me yawn.

My assignment would be ready to go the night before submission. Or so I led myself to believe. In reality I knew that I would have to trawl through my work and fix up the referencing or be accused of intellectual plagiarism.

It was not until third year that I was introduced to EndNote. I never actually mastered the program but it shone a light and caused a stir within me, henceforth I became superbly diligent with referencing.

Last week I spoke to Noela Yates, e-learning coordinator of The University of Queensland (UQ). I was surprised to hear how passionate she and the rest of her team are about educating students about programs like EndNote and Refworks. Her passion has not remained unnoticed. In August this year UQ Library won the Australian Learning and Teaching Citation in recognition of the referencing support they provide to students.

I admitted to Noela that a library assistant had tried to teach my history class EndNote but to no personal prevail. She laughed and asked how long the session was. I stated that it would have been perhaps an hour, and she said that it was hardly possible to gain competency with EndNote within that timeframe.

She does however, encourage all current undergraduate and postgraduate students of UQ to book in for a class. She says the major reaction of students after they finally stumble over the classes is “why didn’t I find out about this earlier.” She is particularly conscious that the modern student is time-poor, often working 25 hours a week in part-time work; she therefore would love for as many students as possible to find out about the time saving effects of referencing software.

UQ Library offers both EndNote and Refworks because each program, although similar has slightly distinct advantages and disadvantages. Refworks is, according to Yates “marginally easier to use” especially because it has a web presence and can be logged into much like a social networking site. While EndNote, favoured by biomedical researchers, deals better with long article and journal titles.

For more information visit http://www.library.uq.edu.au/services/referencing.html