This collection of Australian fiction, poetry, plays and non-fictional works, which has been put together from a number of different sources, now consists of over 300 texts, ranging from a seventeenth-century Portuguese account of the discovery of Australia to the novels which make up Henry Handel Richardson's trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, first published in the 1910s and 1920s. Because of the need for all the texts to be out of copyright, a few significant literary works from the period through to 1920 are not included, most notably Miles Franklin s My Brilliant Career (1901) and poems by Mary Gilmore. All the other leading Australian literary figures from the nineteenth and early twentieth century are, however, well represented.
The site includes comprehensive collections of the poems of Banjo Paterson, Henry Kendall, Adam Lindsay Gordon. Ada Cambridge, Lesbia Harford and Christopher Brennan. Other poets represented include Barron Field, William Charles Wentworth, Charles Harpur, Henry Parkes, George Gordon McCrae, Henry and Louisa Lawson, C J Dennis, Marie Pitt and Mary Hannay Foott. While the very prolific novelists of this period are mainly represented at present by only one or two texts, most of the novels of Henry Handel Richardson and the stories of Henry Lawson are included. So are such other canonical novels as Marcus Clarke's For the Term of His Natural Life, Rolf Boldrewood's Robbery Under Arms, and Joseph Furphy s Such is Life. It is possible to teach a course on nineteenth-century Australian Literature entirely from the texts included in the SETIS collection, and this is already being done by Dr Cath Ellis from the University of Wollongong.