AustLit NewsBlackWords

National Biography Award to ANU Historian

Tue, 15 May 2012 02:51:52 GMT

Dr Martin Thomas, an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of History at The Australian National University, is the winner of the 2012 National Biography Award. Thomas won the $25,000 award for his 2011 biography, The Many Worlds of R. H. Mathews: In Search of an Australian Anthropologist.

Mathews was a nineteenth-century surveyor and anthropologist who produced a large volume of writing resulting from his field investigations into Indigenous communities in New South Wales.

Alex Byrne, the NSW State Librarian, commented that Thomas’s ‘forensic research’ and ‘superb writing’ produced a biography that reminds Australians of Mathews’s ‘immense contribution’ as an ‘outstanding early investigator of our first peoples and their cultures’.

One of the National Biography Award judges, Peter Rose, said that Thomas’s biography stood out ‘because of its originality, its immense detail and scholarship, and its luminous engagement with his subject’. (NSW State Library media release, 14 May 2012)

For further information on the National Biography Award, click here. To learn more about R. H. Mathews, view his biographical entry at the Australian Dictionary of Biography Online.

Jeanine Leane Shortlisted for New Commonwealth Prize

Tue, 01 May 2012 03:55:13 GMT

Jeanine Leane is one of four Australians shortlisted for the inaugural Commonwealth Book Prize. Leane, a former co-ordinator of AustLit’s BlackWords Research Community, is shortlisted for her intertwined collection of stories, Purple Threads. Other Australians on the shortlist are Christopher Currie, for The Ottoman Motel, Mette Jakobsen, for The Vanishing Act, and Cory Taylor, for Me and Mr Booker.

The Commonwealth Book Prize is being offered by Commonwealth Writers, a new cultural program running under the auspices of the Commonwealth Foundation. Prizes will be awarded for each of five regions — Africa, Asia, Canada and Europe, the Caribbean, and the Pacific — and an overall winner will then be selected.

Book Prize chair Margaret Busby commented that the judges were looking for ‘potential and promise from the entries. We certainly found what we were hoping for with some consummately accomplished writing from some very interesting writers.’

The five regional winners will be announced on 22 May and the overall winner on 8 June. To see the full shortlist and read more of the judges’ comments, follow the links on the Commonwealth Foundation’s news site.

BlackWords Fifth Anniversary Symposium – Call for Papers

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 03:25:17 GMT

Proposals for the BlackWords fifth anniversary celebration and symposium are due by Saturday, 10 March 2012. BlackWords is a rich resource representing a wide variety of cultural and creative fields and genres in which Indigenous writers and storytellers in Australia are working. The symposium is being sponsored by AustLit, the University of Queensland’s School of English, Media Studies and Art History, and the UQ Art Museum.

Proposals for 15-20 minutes papers are invited from writers, researchers, teachers and others engaged in relevant fields. Papers should address ideas around the place of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Writing and Storytelling in contemporary Australian education, research and publishing.

The symposium will held the UQ Art Museum on 20 October 2012, and will be convened and chaired by Dr Anita Heiss, inaugural BlackWords National Coordinator. For further details, see the BlackWords website. Please email Dr Peter Minter and Kerry Kilner with your abstract and contact details at blackwords@austlit.edu.au

Victorian Government Announces Indigenous Honour Roll Inductees

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 00:25:44 GMT

The Victorian government has established an Indigenous Honour Roll to celebrate the lives and accomplishments of Indigenous people ‘whose efforts have significantly impacted society’.

The names of the first twenty inductees have been revealed. Their contributions range across the fields of education, politics, the arts, sport and health. Included on the list are singer, songwriter and storyteller Archie Roach, cricketer and pastoral worker Johnny Mullagh, boxer and former Australian of the Year Lionel Rose, and writer and speaker on spirituality Elizabeth Pike.

For details of all inductees, follow the links on the Victorian Department of Planning and Community Development website.

Australia's First Children's Laureates Announced

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 01:57:07 GMT

Alison Lester and Boori Monty Pryor are to be Australia’s first Children’s Laureates. The inaugural announcement was made in Adelaide on 6 December and the appointment is the culmination of a campaign by the Australian Children’s Literature Alliance (ACLA). ACLA is working to ‘promote the transformational power of reading, creativity and story in the lives of young Australians’.

Lester was delighted with the joint appointment. ‘We come from very different backgrounds and perspectives’, she said, ‘but we are both incredibly passionate about sharing our stories and encouraging children to share theirs’.

Pryor was equally pleased. ‘Accepting the Laureate role together means we can reach more children, no matter where they may be in Australia, and double our focus on bringing children in this country into the circle of reading.’

For further details on the role of the laureates and the work of the Australian Children’s Literature Alliance, see the ACLA website.

Dr Aunty Ruby Langford Ginibi : January 1934-October 2011

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 04:50:00 GMT

Dr Aunty Ruby Ginibi was born on Invasion Day, 26 January 1934, and, sadly, passed away on 1 October 2011. Aunty Ruby was given the title Ginibi, meaning 'black swan', by her Bundjalung Elders, and she was one of Australia’s foremost Aboriginal authors and historians.

Born of the Bundjalung Nation, Aunty Ruby was educated in Casino until the age of 15. She moved to Sydney, where she qualified as a machinist, before returning to the country and working in various rural towns, clearing scrub, fencing, pegging kangaroo skins, and burning off. Later, she returned to Sydney where she resumed a position in the clothing industry.

Aunty Ruby dedicated her life not only to many Aboriginal causes but also, first and foremost, to her nine children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren. Like many women writers, she began her writing career later in life.

Death of Ruby Langford Ginibi

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 04:56:15 GMT

Respected Bundjalung woman and writer Ruby Langford Ginibi has died in Sydney at the age of seventy-seven. 'Aunty Ruby' Ginibi came to public notice in 1988 through her autobiography Don't Take Your Love to Town. The book, published during Australia's Bi-centennial Year, won a Human Rights Commission Award for Literature and Other Writing.

Heiss among Deadly Winners

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 00:53:36 GMT

Anita Heiss is the winner of the 2011 Outstanding Achievement in Literature Award in the Deadly Sounds Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Music, Sport, Entertainment and Community Awards. Heiss's win, for her novel Paris Dreaming, is her fourth in this category since 2007.

The national Deadly Awards 'recognise the achievement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and their contribution to their communities and to wider Australia'.

BlackWords Endorses the YouMeUnity Conversation

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 01:10:00 GMT

BlackWords endorses the YouMeUnity conversation about recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in the Australian constitution. Add your voice to the conversation by going to http://www.youmeunity.org.au/.

Deadly Nominations Announced

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 01:00:00 GMT

The nominations for the 2011 Deadly Sounds Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Music, Sport, Entertainment and Community Awards were announced at the Sydney Opera House on Monday, 18 July. Categories include Outstanding Achievement in Literature and Film of the Year.