AustLit Research Priorities for 2003
Kerry Kilner, AustLit's Executive Manager, has recently outlined the research priorities for AustLit in 2003. Three new Chief Investigators from current partner universities have joined the AustLit endeavour as a result of a successful ARC LIEF application for funding. AustLit welcomes Professor Elizabeth Webby, University of Sydney, Associate Professor David Carter, University of Queensland and Professor Paul Eggert, University of New South Wales at ADFA to our current team of experts.

The strong focus on developing new content through these associations in 2003 will include:

• The incorporation of thousands of descriptive records (currently held in card files at the University of Sydney) with fully annotated bibliographical information on the entire literary content of the 19th/20th century magazine, The Australian Journal. This journal ran for almost 100 years and was edited during the 1870s by Marcus Clarke. It serialised many original versions of early Australian novels such as Clarke's His Natural Life and published early works by other important Australian writers such as Rolf Boldrewood, Charles Harpur, and Ada Cambridge. Similar numbers of citations to the content of other early post-settlement 'little magazines' will become available through AustLit over time. An introduction by Elizabeth Webby to this specialist subset of research material will published through AustLit towards the end of the year.
• The conversion of the results of extensive research by David Carter into literary culture in Australia recording the direction, focus and content of magazines and literary periodicals during the 20th century. This large body of foundation research material will be translated into hundreds of records describing the history, content, editorship, span and publication story of numerous literary journals and cultural magazines from the 19th through to the 21st centuries. The identification of magazines of major cultural significance in relation to developments in Australian literature will be undertaken and appropriate indexing and description within AustLit will occur, creating a large volume of new primary research material for research into the history of magazine publishing in Australia.

Alongside these new research priorities, AustLit will continue to increase its coverage through the ongoing indexing and description of current creative writing, literary non-fiction, criticism and reviews published in monographs, journals (including e-journals), newspapers, collections and websites. In addition, retrospective content indexing of hundreds of anthologies, selected and collected works and back runs of important literary journals will create thousands of new individual records on poetry, short stories and criticism.

Full bio-bibliographic research on over 2,300 literary authors will be undertaken so that each agent's record will contain a brief biography, citations and descriptions of all monograph publications, including all editions, translations and related critical material. Elements of this material will be extracted and used in the publication of the next volume of The Bibliography of Australian Literature (BAL). Publication of BAL Volume 2 is planned by the end of the year.

As mentioned in previous newsletters, the AustLit team is widely dispersed across Australia. Team members work together to contribute their indexing, bibliographic and research knowledge and expertise to provide AustLit users with valuable information relating to Australian authors and their writings from the 1780s to the present day.

University of Western Australia
In this newsletter we would like to introduce you to the member of the team based at University of Western Australia.
Dan Midalia has a BA (majoring in English) from the University of Western Australia. He has been a clerk, a writer, a powder monkey, a watchseller and an Angus & Robertson shop assistant. From 1984 until 1997, he worked at the National Archives of Australia, assisting researchers to locate government information and making government records more accessible. He was principally responsible for compiling Kalgoorlie-Boulder : A Source Analysis of Records Held by Australian Archives and Collections in Perth: A Guide to Commonwealth Government Records. In 1999, Dan was asked by the University of Western Australia's Centre for the Study of Australian Literature (CSAL) to update Western Australian Writing: A Bibliography, a project which led to him becoming a part-time member of the AustLit team. Dan also works for the Australian Bureau of Statistics, assisting with the collection of data for the Labour Price Index.

In coming newsletters we will be introducing you to our contributors from the other partner institutions: Flinders University of South Australia, Deakin University and the University of Sydney. Information on contributors from the University of Canberra, the University of New South Wales at ADFA, the University of Queensland and Monash Univeristy can be found in previous newsletters in the AustLit News Archive.

Annette Scarvell Trades Management Roles
Annette Scarvell, a founding Content Manager of AustLit, delivered a healthy (and sizeable) baby girl on 27 December 2002. Arianna Joy weighed in at 4.46 kilograms or, as Annette says, 'just a whisker under 10 pounds'. We send Annette our heartfelt congratulations and wish her, Andrew and Arianna a wonderful 2003.

Watch this Space
The AustLit website is currently undergoing a major review. New search functions will be launched by the end of January and other upgrades and improvements will follow. This section of AustLit news will be updated as alterations come into effect and links will be provided to new search pages and help information.

The New York Times Book Review Notable Books for 2002
Six books by Australian writers were included in the recently published 2002 Notable Books list of The New York Times Book Review. On the list for 'Fiction and Poetry' were A Child's True Book of Crime by Chloe Hooper, Gould's Book of Fish : A Novel in Twelve Fish by Richard Flanagan, The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville and Moral Hazard by Kate Jennings.
Included on the 'Non-Fiction' list was American Scoundrel : The Life of the Notorious Civil War General Dan Sickles by Tom Keneally. Across the Nightingale Floor by Lian Hearn was on the 'Science Fiction' list. There were no works by Australians in the 'Children's Books' or 'Mysteries' categories.

Carey Changes Stables
Random House Australia has recently added Peter Carey to its list of fiction writers. Carey had previously had a long association with University of Queensland Press. His first novel with Random, My Life as a Fake, centres on the literary hoax generated by Ern Malley and will be published mid-2003.

Sydney Premiere of Murray-Smith's Opera
After premiering at the Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne in October 2002, Joanna Murray Smith's comic opera Love in the Age of Therapy was produced in Sydney as part of the 2003 Sydney Festival. The opera examines the themes of love, passion, infidelity and betrayal in a modern setting.

Writers Boycott 2003 Tasmania Pacific Region Prize
Tim Winton and Richard Flanagan are among a group of writers who have withdrawn their work from contention for the 2003 Tasmania Pacific Region Prize. Their decision is in protest at the involvement of Forestry Tasmania as one of the sponsors of the Ten Days on the Island festival at which the award winner will be announced. Winton said he had withdrawn his novel, Dirt Music, from the $40 000 prize due to his opposition to logging in old-growth forests. Quoted in The Sydney Morning Herald, 6 November 2002, Winton said 'It just would have looked hypocritical for me to enter a prize in a festival where a sponsor was a foresting enterprise - as they call themselves - or loggers'. After winning the Miles Franklin Award for Dirt Music, Winton donated his prize money to the campaign against old-growth logging.

2002 ACT Book of the Year Award
Jackie French has won the 2002 ACT Book of the Year Award with her multi-genre Young Adult novel, In the Blood. Combining elements of the thriller, science fiction and crime, French's book is the first in the Outland series which depicts a futuristic, utopian world 'peopled' by genetically-engineered human-animal crossbreeds. Book 2 in the series, Blood Moon, was also published in 2002.

2003 ACT Creative Arts Fellowships
Creative Arts Fellowships, each valued at $35,000, have been awarded to Alan Gould and Jennifer Martiniello. Gould intends to use the Fellowship the complete work on his novel Tapestry while Martinello will undertake a range of projects including the writing of her novel Blossoms of the Mulga.

Gary Catalano
Gary Catalano died at the Royal Melbourne Hospital on 8 December 2002 after a long illness. Catalano's literary career commenced when he started writing poetry in his late teens. His first poems were published in his twenties and soon after he began writing book reviews for The Bulletin. His first volume of poetry was Remembering the Rural Life, published by University of Queensland Press in 1978.

During the 1980s, Catalano established himself as both poet and art critic. He wrote several major books and many critical essays on Australian art and art criticism. These include his meticulously researched volume The Solitary Watcher : Rick Amor and His Art, on the life and work of the significant Australian painter, printmaker and sculptor.

The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature (second revised edition, 1995) says Catalano's reputation as 'one of Australia's finest prose stylists gained from his critical writings has been confirmed in his purely literary works'. Catalano acknowledged the association between his two forms of writing. In an interview in The Age, 19 August 2001 (the newspaper at which he had worked as art critic from 1985-1990), Catalano reflected on his art reviews. 'Occasionally, I used to look at them visually on the page and notice that the paragraphs are nearly all of exactly the same length and one or two of those reviews are a little bit like the prose poems I wrote.'

In the last decade of his life, Catalano returned more intentionally to poetry writing and largely discarded his activity as an art critic. He published four volumes of poetry between 1991 and 1998, the last being Jigsaw : Poems and Prose Poems. In recent years he has been working on poems which he developed during his 1997 residency at the Australia Council's Keesing Studio in Paris.

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