Narrating and Narrated: Recasting Australian Short Stories in Audiobook Form

Through our work in the audiobook industry, we have recently been privileged to work precisely on giving ‘older works of short fiction … new resonance in a networked world'. Two major projects of the last two years have been curating, narrating and producing an audiobook collection of short verse novels by C J Dennis; and working with the Mary Grant Bruce Trust, particularly Mary Grant Bruce’s grandson, Ian Bruce, to curate, produce and narrate a collection of her short stories, originally published in Australian newspapers between 1904 and 1925 and not republished since. This paper demonstrates how audiobook versions of classic Australian short stories can recast these stories in a contemporarily packaged medium for new times and places, offering opportunities for fresh engagement and surprising discovery. Connecting us with a sense of communal identity and formation through particularised contexts, short story collections are polyangular in offering diverse windows into Australian experience, narrating to us our unofficial history. We explore the special relationship between narration performance and the short story form, alongside pertinent themes found in the writing of these two country Australian authors, C. J. Dennis and Mary Grant Bruce. This, as reflection on the experience of performing their works.