Audiobooks and Australian Literary Studies, ASAL mini conference

The annual mini-conference of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL), this event is supported by ASAL, ARC DECRA Project DE240100466: Audiobooks and Digital Book Culture and the ANU Research School for Humanities and the Arts.

This event will be in-person only, at the Australian National University, Canberra.

For further information about the conference, including program and speaker details, please visit the website: https://slll.cass.anu.edu.au/events/conferences

For further information about ASAL and to register as a member, please visit the website: https://www.asal.org.au/

For any enquiries, please contact the conference convenor, Dr Millicent Weber: millicent.weber@anu.edu.au  

Audiobooks and Australian Literary Studies

Audiobooks have seen a recent and unexpected surge in popularity among Australian publishers and readers. AustLit began indexing audiobooks as distinct expressions in 2024 and has so far identified over 9,000 Australian audiobooks. Research conducted by Creative Australia in 2023 shows that over a third of Australians listen to audiobooks, and that they are particularly popular compared to print with Indigenous and Culturally and Linguistically Diverse readers. Yet the prevailing attitude towards audiobooks in Australia remains equivocal, with audiobooks not systematically collected in Australian cultural institutions such as the National Library of Australia or the National Film and Sound Archive, and unregulated by legislative bodies like the Australian Classifications Board. There remain significant barriers to the production and distribution of Australian audiobooks as a result of Australia’s peripheral relationship to the geopolitical publishing centres of the USA and UK. Australian writers, publishers and narrators are debarred from participating in ‘global’ marketplaces like Amazon’s Audiobook Creation eXchange (ACX), at the same time as Australian readers are prevented by territorial rights agreements from accessing notable Australian literary titles as audiobooks. Gerald Murnane’s Border Districts and Stream System, for example, are both available as audiobooks in the USA and the UK through a rights agreement between Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Audible, but cannot legally be purchased in Australia.

Helen Groth and Joseph Cummins have asked “whether it is possible to claim a distinct sonic texture for Australian literary and cultural formations”. This conference invites the extension of this question beyond the embedding of the sonic in the textual, to the realisation of the textual in the sonic. In asking what is distinctively Australian, and distinctively audiobookish, about Australian audiobooks, scholars are encouraged to consider all aspects of the incursions of audio technology in their teaching and research practice, from the new layers of interpretive possibility offered by audiobook versions of texts, to the development of methodologies suited to the audiobook form and its production and reception contexts, and the role of the audiobook in the tertiary undergraduate literary studies classroom. The audiobook is an inherently hybrid object from a disciplinary perspective, and interdisciplinary contributions include papers from media and communication studies, publishing studies, sound studies, music, library and information sciences, education, and other disciplinary areas.