Australia only, based on public records and public metadata, typed by narrative role, source family, publicness, date, and location evidence. A map flag is a reviewed display location for one record — never proof of an event, a habitat, or a population.

NOT 01

Proof that any supernatural entity exists

NOT 02

A complete census of Australian folklore

NOT 03

A habitat or population map

NOT 04

An authoritative Indigenous knowledge repository

NOT 05

Permission to reproduce restricted cultural material

NOT 06

A tourism or haunted-place directory

1. 01Discovery — Find a public trace.
2. 02Admission — Preserve provenance.
3. 03Classification — Keep research layers separate.
4. 04Location review — Map only reviewed evidence.

LAYER SEPARATION

Public records, mapped records, metadata-only items, and research leads are counted separately and never summed as one total.

REVISION

The corpus is auditable and revisable, not a complete authority.

Public discoverability does not by itself authorise reproduction. A public catalogue record is a signal that something exists, not permission to extract restricted cultural knowledge from it. Restricted, secret/sacred, unpublished, or community-controlled material is not collected. Where a source uses its own community's terminology, that terminology and its original context are preserved rather than rewritten.

Every narrative record carries a display state, set at review time: shown in full with a neutral summary and short excerpt; shown as a neutral summary only, with sensitive substance not reproduced; shown as source metadata only, with no narrative content; or withheld entirely from public display. This state is a review decision, not a default — sensitivity is assessed per record, not assumed from a source's origin.

Some concepts are not merely handled with caution — they are excluded from the archive outright. Where a narrative concept functions as sacred or creation knowledge rather than a locally circulating legend, it falls outside this project's scope entirely and is not catalogued, labelled, or cross-referenced here.

A smaller set of traditional narrative concepts carry an elevated sensitivity setting by default, set before any individual record is reviewed. This does not suppress them from the archive, but it raises the bar for what can be shown in full and keeps source-community terminology intact rather than replaced with an analytical label.

FULL

Neutral summary and short excerpt shown.

SUMMARY ONLY

Neutral summary and metadata shown; sensitive substance is not reproduced.

METADATA ONLY

Source metadata shown; no narrative content.

SUPPRESSED

Withheld entirely from the public export.

The archive separates what a source literally says from how it is analytically classified, then grades the source itself before a record is admitted.

1. 01Concept — entity_concepts group related figures for analysis, an analytical class, not a species.
2. 02Label — entity_labels preserve the literal wording a source used.
3. 03Source chain — narrative_source_links tie a narrative to its sources through eighteen tracked relationship types.
4. 04Location role — narrative_locations tags each place with a role; only narrative-internal roles are eligible for a map flag.

TIER A–B

Primary/near-primary and public institutional sources — Trove, NLA, AIATSIS, state libraries and archives.

TIER C–D

Public circulation/reputable retelling and scholarly secondary study — ABC, SBS, accepted academic sources.

TIER E

Discovery-only or specialist aggregator — accepted only with substantive narrative and visible source mediation.

ADMISSION LADDER

Accepted → secondary/context → discovery-only → excluded. Tourism pages and aggregators can point to a lead; they are not evidence on their own.

1. 01Narrative-first — built around narratives, not sightings.
2. 02Exclusion as policy — some concepts are excluded outright, not just flagged.
3. 03Export-derived numbers — every count traces to one generated file.

RESEARCH THREAD

These points are the empirical basis for a methods paper in development, on how archives like this one should separate discovery from evidence.

Use one project citation for the aggregation and coding layer. When discussing an individual record, also cite its permanent AusFigures URL and the original public source shown on that record page.

Pan, D. (2026). Australian Public Text Archive of Supernatural Humanoid Narratives and Encounters (Public export generated July 6, 2026) [Data set and digital archive]. https://ausfigures.com/

Pan, Dai. “Australian Public Text Archive of Supernatural Humanoid Narratives and Encounters.” Digital archive and dataset. Public export generated July 6, 2026. https://ausfigures.com/.

Pan, Dai. “Australian Public Text Archive of Supernatural Humanoid Narratives and Encounters.” AusFigures, public export generated 6 July 2026, ausfigures.com. Accessed 1 September 2026.

@dataset{pan_ausfigures_2026,
  author       = {Pan, Dai},
  title        = {Australian Public Text Archive of Supernatural Humanoid Narratives and Encounters},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {07},
  day          = {06},
  publisher    = {AusFigures},
  version      = {Public export 2026-07-06},
  url          = {https://ausfigures.com/},
  urldate      = {2026-09-01},
  note         = {Source-grounded digital archive; cite the original public source for record-level claims}
}

No DOI is assigned to this live export. Original-source rights, access conditions, and culturally specific context continue to apply.

narrative_unit

The archive's core research object: one documented narrative, legend, or account.

source_item

One cited public source — a newspaper article, book, catalogue entry, or page.

source_tier

A–E grading of how strong a source is as evidence.

display_mode

How much of a record is shown publicly: full, summary only, metadata only, or suppressed.

location_role

What a place means to a narrative — an event site, a source's address, and a cultural region are not treated the same.

lead

An unresolved pointer to a possible source, not yet an accepted record.

publicness

Whether a source is publicly accessible and citable, tracked independently of evidentiary strength.

EXPORT CONTRACT

frontend-data/v1

EXPORT GENERATED

2026-07-06

MOBILE PAYLOAD

mobile-archive/v2

Source code, data policies and revision history are available in the public repository.