AustLit NewsTime & Tide

Remembering Bruce Bennett

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 02:46:21 GMT

Friends and colleagues of the late Professor Bruce Bennett are invited to share their thoughts and memories via the comments function on AustLit’s News Blog.

We begin with the following words from US scholar Nicholas Birns:
'With the passing of Bruce Bennett, all literary scholars of Australia have lost a friend, a helping hand and an esteemed, guiding sensibility. He was a commanding figure in the field, but even more he was simply a gracious and likable man...

'Bruce had the intellect and the breadth to be an intimidatingly erudite scholar but he added to that an availability, an affable if not necessarily matey graciousness, and a humility that has made him not only profoundly respected but also widely admired. The way he pursued his career exemplifies what an academic life can and should be: a vocation in which one’s daily conduct is in synch with the ideals of learning and scholarship that inspire so many to enter it...

'His passing leaves a huge gap in Australian literary study. He knew the field; encouraged the young, and called attention to the deserving. He was a teacher, reader, and colleague. He was liked and respected. I will miss him tremendously.'

Please click on 'Read More' (below) to read the full version of Nicholas Birns's message or to leave your own comment.

Champion of Australian Literature Dies in Canberra

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 02:41:16 GMT

Emeritus Professor Bruce Bennett, AO, has died at his home in Canberra. A Rhodes Scholar, Professor Bennett was a graduate of the Universities of Western Australia, Oxford and London. He taught at the University of Western Australia from 1968 to 1992 and at the University of New South Wales, Canberra from 1993 until his retirement.

Professor Bennett wrote and edited numerous books and articles on Australian literature, culture and society. He was still working in the final weeks of his life. As his friend and colleague Professor Paul Eggert commented: ‘One remarkable thing is that he went out as a scholar, "with the ink still wet on the page"—as Mary Gilmore said of her mother’. In recent months, Professor Bennett, with Anne Pender, completed a book on Australian expatriate writers. Another title, ‘The Spying Game: An Australian Angle’ is also with the publisher.

Professor Bennett was a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Among his many professional roles, he chaired the Modern Language Association of America's Division 33 (Literatures in English Other Than British and American) and was Vice-Chair of the Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies. In 2005-2006, he was the Group of Eight Chair at The Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies at Georgetown University, Washington DC.

Professor Bennett was chair of the AustLit Board from its beginnings until 2004. AustLit’s Board, partners and contributors extend their deepest sympathy to Bruce’s wife, Trish, and to their family.

Dickens Celebrations

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 23:45:00 GMT

Tuesday, 7 February 2012, marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens. World-wide celebrations include a British Council-sponsored read-a-thon that begins in Australia with a reading from Dombey and Son. (Follow the reading on Twitter via the hashtag #Dickens2012.)

Dickens's connections with Australia have been well-documented. They manifested themselves in his fictional characters and in his personal life. Dickens transported a raft of characters to New South Wales including Uriah Heep in David Copperfield, Abel Magwitch in Great Expectations and Wackford Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby. Two of Dickens’s sons, Alfred and Edward, also made the journey – in their case as free settlers.

Dickens wrote regularly about Australia in the journal Household Words. A collection of his essays from this source has been gathered in the five-book set Charles Dickens' Australia. Coral Lansbury, in her Dickens article for the Australian Dictionary of Biography notes that these articles were ‘widely published in the Australian press and helped to impose Dickens's own view of Australia on Australian life and society’. ('Charles Dickens 1812-1870')

Death of NT Writer

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 22:16:26 GMT

Writer Andrew McMillan has died at his home in Darwin. Born in Brisbane, the journalist, poet and musician settled in the Northern Territory after covering the 1988 Midnight Oil / Warumpi Band tour. In a statement released following his death, McMillan was described as ‘one of the Territory’s great eccentrics — but also one of its best contemporary writers’.

McMillan’s book An Intruder's Guide to East Arnhem Land, first published in 2001 and then in a revised edition in 2007, won the Northern Territory Chief Minister's Book of the Year Award in 2009. The book speaks to McMillan’s deep connection with the Yolngu people over many years.

The Age newspaper reports that proceeds from McMillan’s estate ‘will be dedicated to setting up a writer's retreat in his favourite place, the tiny settlement of Larrimah, 430 kilometres south-east of Darwin’. ('NT Writer Loses Cancer Fight') An anthology of McMillan’s writing, in preparation at the time of his death, will be published posthumously.

The statement released after McMillan’s death is available on the Crikey.com website.

Farewell Boitran Huynh-Beattie

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 01:08:00 GMT

The AustLit community is saddened to learn of the sudden passing of Boitran Huynh-Beattie. Boitran has been a researcher and indexer with the Australian Multicultural Writers section of AustLit at the University of Wollongong for the past three years. She died as a result of a stroke on Monday 16 January 2012, in Singapore.

Farewell Sarah Watt - Acclaimed Filmmaker and Director

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 00:45:37 GMT

Filmmaker, director, and animator Sarah Watt has died at her Melbourne home from secondary bone cancer. Watt won great acclaim for her 2005 film Look Both Ways; her 2009 movie My Year Without Sex was also well received.

Watt had very recently published the autobiographical Worse Things Happen at Sea, co-authored with her husband William McInnes. Publisher Hachette Australia says the book 'celebrates the wonderful, messy, haphazard things in life — bringing home babies from hospital, being a friend, a parent, son or daughter, and dog obedience classes ... It is also about understanding that sometimes you have to say goodbye; that is part of life too.'

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.

Vale Di Gribble

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 03:12:35 GMT

Australian publisher Diana Gribble has died from cancer at the age of sixty-nine. Gribble, together with Hilary McPhee, established the publishing house McPhee Gribble in 1975. With Eric Beecher, she set up the Text Media Group in 1990. (The group's publishing arm is Text Publishing.)

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.

Vale Sara Douglass

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 01:00:00 GMT

Twitter and Facebook are awash with tributes for pioneering, award-winning, speculative fiction author Sara Douglass, who passed away this morning from cancer.

Hazel Rowley's Literary Legacy

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 01:38:51 GMT

Friends and family of biographer Hazel Rowley have established funds to commemorate Rowley’s life and her writing legacy. In Australia, the Hazel Rowley Literary Fund will support an annual lecture and a literary fellowship. In the USA, a plaque in memory of Rowley has been placed on a bench seat surrounding Eleanor Roosevelt’s statue at Riverside Park, New York. Both the Australian and US funds are open for donations. Further information is available on the Hazel Rowley website.

Death of Janice Bostok - A Gifted Haiku Writer

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 02:30:42 GMT

Australia's haiku community has farewelled award-winning poet, mentor and teacher Janice Bostok. Bostok was one of the forerunners in bringing the Japanese poetry form haiku into the Australian consciousness. She founded the haiku journal Tweed in 1972 and was co-editor (with John Bird) of The First Australian Haiku Anthology in 1999.

According to Bostok's obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald, Bostok had more than 4,000 haiku published in journals and anthologies in Australia and overseas. Her haiku 'featured in unconventional places' — they were 'carved (by invitation) onto rocks in New Zealand, programmed into computer games in the US and printed on the labels of green tea bottles in Japan.' ('Catching the Essence of Life in a Single Breath')

A selection of Bostok's writing, including haiku, tanka and haibun, is available on her website.