Black Words Research Community
Dr Anita Heiss, national co-ordinator of the Black Words research community, shares news from Australia’s west and north:

A Farewell and a Welcome
AustLit recently said goodbye to Carolyn Moylan from the University of Western Australia desk. We thank her for all the work she did in building up the Western Australian side of Black Words, particularly Noongar writers in and around Perth. We wish Carolyn well in her further studies into Indigenous women’s writing. And we thank her for helping us find a replacement in Josie Harp who is already on the job. Welcome Josie. We look forward to working alongside you.

Black Words showcased at Wordstorm
Black Words featured at this year’s Wordstorm Festival in Darwin, providing the perfect opportunity to showcase to the large Indigenous delegation our new look site and the number of works indexed from the Northern Territory, Darwin and indeed the Larrakia nation (the traditional owners of country in and around Darwin). The ‘launch’ of a kind was attended by about 60 writers and locals and was held in conjunction with the launch at the Mbantua Gallery of the recently released Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature.

Both Anita Heiss and Yvette Holt, poet and AustLit researcher at The University of Queensland, (pictured at right) spoke at the event and also participated on panels throughout the festival. Photo courtesy of Anita Heiss.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank Sandra Thibodeaux, artistic director of the festival and executive officer of the Northern Territory Writers’ Centre, for including us on what was a rich and diverse program of voices from around Australia and south-east Asia.

The trip north also provided the opportunity for Kerry Kilner to meet with Anne Devenish and Cate Richmond from the Northern Territory Library to discuss potential collaboration on a digital storytelling project the Library is currently undertaking. It has long been a goal of Black Words to profile digital stories within the subset to be enjoyed by viewers around the country and the globe.

Multicultural Research Community
Dr Michael Jacklin, from the University Of Wollongong, reports on new research being undertaken by AustLit’s Multicultural research community:

AustLit researchers at the University Of Wollongong have recently been joined by Pipina Elles who will be augmenting the records for Greek-language literary and critical works published in Australia. Of particular interest are additions to the records of Antipodes, the literary journal of the Greek Cultural League of Melbourne, and indexing of the anthology Poietikes Hores, En Hellenike Apoikia: Anthologia Hellenike poiese sten Australia.

Also at the University Of Wollongong, Professor Wenche Ommundsen and Dr Michael Jacklin are engaged on the ‘Mapping Literature Infrastructure in Australia’ project, co-funded by the University Of Wollongong and the Australia Council for the Arts. The study will survey the activities of literature organisations including State Writers’ Centres, professional associations, literary journals, writers’ festivals and genre-based organisations to determine how well they serve the broad objective of offering support for Australian literature. Over the course of this study, Michael will be updating AustLit records for these organisations and adding new materials relevant to each. See, for example, Storyline 21 (2008).

AustLit Team Member a Finalist in the State Library of Queensland Awards

AustLit is delighted to congratulate team member Joan Keating on her nomination in the 2008 State Library of Queensland Awards. Joan was one of two finalists in the Library Board of Queensland category. (This category honours excellence in the work of libraries or distinguished support for libraries in Queensland.) Joan is pictured here at the Awards dinner with Bill Beach (Senior Manager, Arts Faculty Library Service, The University of Queensland) and Dr Spencer Routh (a former Principal Reference Librarian at The University of Queensland) Photo courtesy of Carol Hetherington

Joan's nominees highlighted her 'significant contribution to the development of resources for the study of Australian literature through her involvement with The University of Queensland's Fryer Library and AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource'. The nomination noted Joan's collaborative approach to the development of AustLit's Black Words subset, her involvement in collection development at Fryer Library and her contribution to a number of writers and cultural organisations.

The eventual winner for 2008 was the Winifred Fisher Indigenous Knowledge Centre (IKC) in Cherbourg, Queensland.

A Moment of Mirth
The AustLit team at The University of Queensland (UQ) shared some moments of levity amid the intense final preparations for volume four of The Bibliography of Australian Literature. UQ’s Fryer Library has recently been the beneficiary a romance fiction collection. The inventive names of some the male protagonists featured in the collection have brought smiles to the strained faces of team members.

Here is a sample to whet your appetite:

• Love Thy Neighbour, set in the ‘depths of Tasmania’, features the bothersome, millionaire sheep farmer Dare Fraser
• In Arafura Pirate, Race Morgan skippers a boat, for the appealing Jinx and her research team, into the dangerous waters of Australia's northern coast


and

• Vashti Sinclair is suspicious of Phelan Keene’s motives when he makes advances towards her in A Taxing Affair. (His name alone should have set alarm bells ringing!)

Each of these books is by the Canadian-born American resident Gordon Aalborg. Aalborg lived in Tasmania for twenty years and his romance fiction, often with an Australian setting, has been published regularly and translated widely since the late 1970s.

The fourth volume of The Bibliography of Australian Literature, covering authors whose surnames start with the letters P to Z, will be published this year by University of Queensland Press. This final volume will be launched in Brisbane on 5 October. Watch this space for further details.

New AustLit Records
During April and May, the Content Development Team added:

• 7,577 new works
• 1,524 new agents (individuals and organisations)

In addition to these new records, over 11,300 existing work and agent records have been upgraded and enhanced.

UWA Wins Australian Literature Chair
A new chair in Australian Literature will be established at the University of Western Australia (UWA). The Australian government and the University will each contribute $1.5 million towards the initiative intended to reinvigorate the study of Australian literature at university, school and community level. All Australian universities were invited to apply for the chair. Although there were ‘impressive proposals’ from a number of universities, the six-member selection panel was unanimous in its choice of UWA. (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations media release, 9 April 2008)

UWA vice-chancellor, Professor Alan Robson, said that the university’s School of English and Cultural Studies ‘is one of the strongest in Australian literature and creative writing in Australia, and continues our proud tradition of being at the forefront of national literary development’. Professor Robson also noted UWA’s ‘unique position on the western rim of the continent and the eastern rim of the Indian Ocean’ – a position that ‘fosters a unique cultural and artistic perspective on art and literature’. (UWA media release, 9 April 2008)

The initiative to establish the chair was made as part of the Australia Council’s Australian Literature Roundtable held in in 2007. The new position takes the number of chairs in Australian Literature to three: a permanent chair is held by Professor Robert Dixon at the University of Sydney and David Carter is Professor of Australian Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. (The latter chair is not permanently endowed.)

The position of Professor of Australian Literature at James Cook University (JCU) has not been filled since Peter Pierce’s retirement at the end of 2006. In February this year JCU announced the creation of a Colin and Margaret Roderick Chair of English at the university. A spokeswoman told the Australian newspaper that many of the subjects formerly offered within the Australian literature specialisation would now be absorbed under the new chair. (Australian, Higher Education Supplement, 6 February 2008)

Aboriginal Literature Anthology a ‘Revelation’

The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, co-edited by Dr Anita Heiss and Peter Minter, was launched in Sydney on 7 May by Hetti Perkins, Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. (At left, the Anthology's editorial team with Macquarie University supporters.) Photo courtesy of Anita Heiss.

Perkins, daughter of the late Dr Charles Perkins who appears in the anthology, said of the work: ‘if ever there was a powerful advocate for the maintenance and enhancement of our own languages, this volume is it. It’s a revelation of the incredible ability of our people to articulate the private and public realms of Indigenous experience with verve, humour, sorrow, passion and imagination.’

A second launch was held as part of Wordstorm in Darwin, where the Member for Arnhem, Malarndirri Barbara McCarthy, praised the work as essential reading to understand the evolution of Aboriginal Australian writing.

Asia-Australia Literary Award Launched
The Western Australian Premier, the Hon. Alan Carpenter, has launched the inaugural Asia-Australia Literary Award as part of his state’s Ignite package. The package seeks to position Western Australia as ‘a leading international cultural centre’. (Department of Culture and the Arts media release, December 2007)

The Asia-Australia Literary Award is for a book-length work of literary fiction in English, or in any other language and published in English translation, written by an author resident in Australia or Asia. It will be judged by a three-person panel including Pakistani-born Kamila Shamsie and Sri Lankan-born Nury Vittachi. (Vittachi’s The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook is set in Perth.) Vittachi told the West Australian newspaper that the new prize would fill a gap left by other major literary prizes. ‘This part of the world will be the hot spot for cultural creativity through sheer numbers. The consumers are here. There is no Booker or Pulitzer for the eastern hemisphere, and that is a huge opportunity that WA has spotted and jumped into.’ (18 April 2008)

Writers and publishers needed to move quickly to be in the running for new award’s $110,000 prizemoney – the announcement of the new award came in mid-April and submissions closed on 31 May. Full details of the award, and other aspects of the Ignite program, are available on the Western Australian Department of Culture and the Arts website.

LiNQ Relaunched in Townsville

Gillian Barrett and Dr Jane Frugtneit, members of AustLit’s content team at James Cook University (JCU), were among an appreciative lunchtime audience entertained by poet Geoff Page at the relaunch of the literary magazine LiNQ (Literature in North Queensland) at JCU on 19 March. Geoff Page (right) at LiNQ's re-launch. Photo courtesy of Jane Frugtneit.

Here Gillian provides some background on the journal and its future plans:

Sponsored by the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies (FALS) and described as a ‘revival and survival’, the relaunch was a moment of celebration for General Editor Associate Professor Cheryl Taylor and her editorial associates, Poetry Editor Dr Dosia Reichardt, Fiction Editor Dr Sylvia Kelso, and Reviews Editor Linda Wight.

LiNQ’s first edition, in roneo format, was published in 1969. LiNQ continued regular publication until October 2006, when Arts Queensland declined to continue funding. LiNQ is now published with the support of FALS and the School of Arts and Social Sciences at James Cook University. It aims to support all Australian writers and to stimulate connections between Northern Australian writers, as well as those in other parts of and around the world. In her foreword to LiNQ’s newest issue, Associate Professor Taylor points out that this ideal of connectedness is enshrined in the journal’s name. The editorial collective is optimistic that a revitalised LiNQ will be able to forge ahead and build on the achievements of its long publishing history.

The next issue of LiNQ will be built around the theme of ‘country’, particularly the Antipodean North. Submissions on this theme, to be received by 31 July, are invited. See LiNQ’s website for further information.

Voting Opens for Best of the Booker
Public voting for the Best of the Booker is now underway. The contest, a ‘one-off celebratory award to mark the 40th anniversary of the Booker Prize’, is between the following six novels:

• Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road
• Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda
• J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
• J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur
• Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist

and

• Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Votes can be cast online or via SMS Text Message until midday on Tuesday, 8 July. The winner will be announced two days later on 10 July. Full voting instructions are available on the Booker website.

Also in the News

• In May, Melbourne audiences watched the premiere season of Sue Gore and Bill Garner’s play ‘The Future Australian Race’. The play, exploring the relationship between Sir Redmond Barry and Marcus Clarke, was performed at the State Library of Victoria’s Queen’s Hall. Barry and Clarke worked together at the Library during the 1870s and, completing that institution’s trifecta, the play was researched by Gore and Garner during a Creative Fellowship at the Library in 2003.
• Michael Robotham has written a specially commissioned novella to help promote reading during the 2008 Books Alive campaign. Robotham’s Bombproof will be given away free with the purchase of any book from the Books Alive 50 Recommended Reads catalogue. The campaign will be launched on 27 July and runs until 31 August.
• La Mama Theatre is fighting to maintain its presence in the building from which it has operated for the past 40 years. Supporters of the Theatre have raised the $170,000 deposit needed to secure an option on the building in Faraday St, Carlton. La Mama needs a further $1.3 million by the end of August to complete the purchase. More information is available on the La Mama website.

and

• Macmillan Australia has launched its digital publishing program with an initial list of 400 titles. Digitised books are available in three formats – Adobe eReader, Microsoft Reader and Mobipocket. Macmillan is aiming towards simultaneous publication of print and digital editions from the beginning of 2009. Bestsellers to date include Matthew Reilly’s Seven Ancient Wonders and Di Morrissey’s Barra Creek. The full list of digitised books is available on the Macmillan Digital Australia website.

A Window of Hope for the Bulletin
The Bulletin seemingly published its final issue in late January 2008 (see ‘Demise of the Bulletin’ in AustLit’s February/March 2008 newsletter), but suggestions are now circulating that Australia's oldest, continuously-published periodical may be revived. Peter Hall, founder of the investment group Hunter Hall, is ‘in discussions’ with Australian Consolidated Press over a possible purchase of the Bulletin. Following premature reports that the magazine had actually been sold to Hall, the funds manager told the Australian: ‘I believe Australia needs an intelligent weekly magazine of comment and analysis … it is part of a country having a conversation with itself’. (26-27 April 2008)

Hall said that it is ‘the brand and the heritage’ of the Bulletin that he finds exciting. ‘It’s an Australian institution’. If the results of his due diligence are positive, Hall’s plan as proprietor would be to maintain the Bulletin’s tradition of attracting the best writers and to focus on the environment, politics and business. (Age, 26 April 2008)

Clive James, beginning his contribution in honour of Australian Book Review's 300th issue:
‘In Australia, one of the penalties for having survived long enough as some kind of literary figure is to be asked, in one’s senior years, to write a chapter in the latest distinguished volume devoted to the history of Australian literature. Such requests, though flattering, oblige the victim to write a story from which he must leave himself out. My powers of self-abnegation stop well short of that, so I always say no. Why should I leave myself out when I have so many contemporaries to do it for me?’
(ABR, April 2008)

Carmen Callil, in an article on the experiences that led her to establish Virago Press in 1968:
‘I came to feminism through the offices of Ink newspaper … an offshoot of Oz. Whatever we women did for Ink – and there were many of us – in my memory the lovely men of the left and of hippiedom treated us like fluttering tinkerbells, good for making tea and providing sex … I remember my ambitions clearly. I started Virago to break a silence, to make women's voices heard, to tell women's stories, my story and theirs. How often I remember sitting at dinner tables in the 1960s, the men talking to each other about serious matters, the women sitting quietly like decorated lumps of sugar.’
(Guardian (UK), 26 April 2008)

Premier Doubles Prizemoney for NSW Awards
The Premier of New South Wales, the Hon. Morris Iemma, doubled the prizemoney offered to winners of this year’s New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards. Mr Iemma proclaimed that his government would remain ‘proud and generous supporters of Australia’s writers’ and stated that ‘literature will always have an honoured place in the affairs of this State’. (Message to the Awards presentation)

The major prize for 2008 went to Michelle de Kretser for The Lost Dog. De Kretser won the $10,000 Book of the Year and the $40,000 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction. The Lost Dog is structured around one week in the life of Indian-Australian Tom Loxley – the week in which his dog goes missing. In the frame with Tom are his ageing mother and his artist friend, Nelly Zhang. The judging panel for the Premier’s Awards wrote:

The Lost Dog is a love story with a difference…. This is a novel about contemporary multicultural Australia. It moves Australian literature into a new phase by taking cultural difference and multiplicity as a given in contemporary Australian life. It confidently portrays a world of cultural hybridity but without being programmatic or pedagogical. The complex family backgrounds of the two central characters inform their actions, their emotions, their art and their general identity…. Although they seem very much part of the urban world they live in, they nonetheless have traces of feeling ‘native yet foreign’; their family histories set them apart from mainstream ‘Australians’.

The $20,000 Special Award was presented to Thomas Keneally for his ‘outstanding contribution to Australian literature’. The award citation noted the breadth of Keneally’s writing across ‘issues, geographies and timeframes’. It also emphasised Keneally’s capacity to bring readers ‘face to face with the moral dilemmas and contradictions inherent in everyday life’ and his desire to ‘broaden our sense of common humanity’.

Other winners include Kathryn Lomer for Two Kinds of Silence (Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry), Jacob G. Rosenberg for Sunrise West (Community Relations Commission Award) and Li Cunxin and Anne Spudvilas for The Peasant Prince (Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature). A full list of winners, with judges’ comments, is available on the Arts NSW website. The website also carries the full text of Peter Goldsworthy’s Awards Address, ‘Dead White Females’.

Killing the Messiah Proves a Winning Idea
Kain Massin’s ‘God for the Killing’ is the winner of the 2008 ABC Fiction Award. Massin’s novel tells the story of a young woman taken from her Nazareth home as a child and trained as an assassin for the Roman empire. In 30AD the woman’s target is identified – she must kill the new ‘Messiah’, the Galilean Jesus, whom she knew as her childhood sweetheart, ‘Joshua’.

Massin beat 400 entries to win the $10,000 prize. Judge Luke Davies describes ‘God for the Killing’ as ‘a good, historical novel’ with a ‘wacky and mystical’ bent. Massin’s book will be published later this year by ABC Books.

Abdel-Fattah Wins Kathleen Mitchell Award
Ten Things I Hate about Me depicts the life of a Lebanese Muslim teenage girl in Sydney’s western suburbs. It’s a story that has won the 2008 Kathleen Mitchell Award for Melbourne-raised, Sydney-based lawyer and writer Randa Abdel-Fattah. Judges of the award praised Abdel-Fattah’s ‘ability to tell a story with clarity and passion’ and the ‘entertaining and stimulating way’ in which she tackled issues such as ‘teenage sexuality, family relations, politics and cultural identity’.

The judges commended two other books – Andrew Hutchinson’s Rohypnol and Emily Maguire’s The Gospel According to Luke – but were disappointed in the overall number and quality of entries in this year’s Kathleen Mitchell Award. They observed that ‘more substantial editorial input and literary guidance might have helped the writers develop a deeper understanding of their characters and storylines’ and emphasised the need to ‘expand access to mentoring and development programs for both writers and editors’. (Judges’ Formal Comments, 8 May 2008)

Kibble and Dobbie Winners Announced
Carol Lefevre’s Nights in the Asylum is the winner of this year’s $20,000 Kibble Literary Award. Lefevre beat two other shortlisted contenders – Gail Jones (Sorry) and Mireille Juchau (Burning In). The Dobbie Award for 2008 goes to Karen Foxlee for The Anatomy of Wings. Foxlee was also part of a shortlist of three – A Curious Intimacy by Jessica White and Nine Parts Water by Emma Hardmann were also nominated.

Judges praised Foxlee’s ability to make the reader ‘feel the sinister, stifling nature of the deeply and recognisably suburban setting’. They were also impressed with Lefevre’s ‘outstanding’ achievement in her first novel, reporting that she ‘skillfully draws the reader into a tale of journeys and characters whose lives coincide briefly in a quintessentially Australian outback town. Nights in the Asylum is a remarkable novel.’

The Kibble and Dobbie Awards honour the pioneering women librarians Nita Kibble and her niece Nita Dobbie. The Kibble Award recognises an established female writer while the Dobbie is an encouragement award for a first published work.

SMH Nominates Best New Novelists
The Sydney Morning Herald has announced its Best Young Australian Novelists for 2008. The judges, who each read 14 novels by writers who were 35 or younger at the time of publication, were unanimous in their choice of the four winners. These are their selections:

• Belinda Castles for The River Baptists
• Max Barry for Company
• Jessica Davidson for What Does Blue Feel Like?

and

• Jessica White for A Curious Intimacy

Judge Matt Buchanan suggested that the range of writing styles and genres found in the novels considered for the award reflect ‘publishers' awareness of a highly diversified reading market. It might also reflect the desire people have to write the sort of book they would like to read themselves.’ Buchanan described the four winning novels as ‘a corporate satire [Company], a literary soap [The River Baptists], a verse novel [What Does Blue Feel Like?] and a period romance [A Curious Intimacy]’. (Sydney Morning Herald, 24-25 May 2008)

Other Recent Award Winners

• Canadian Lawrence Hill and Bangladeshi Tahmima Anam are the winners of the overall Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2008 for Best Book and Best First Book respectively. Hill’s The Book of Negroes ‘dramatises the all but forgotten story of 18th century Africans forced into slavery in the Americas, liberated after many years and miraculously returned to the mother continent in the same lifetime’. Anam’s A Golden Age ‘is the first major fictional account in English of the creation of Bangladesh’. (Commonwealth Foundation media release, 18 May 2008)
• Timothy Daly and Angus Cerini tied for this year’s Patrick White Playwright’s Award. Daly acknowledges Patrick White as his literary hero: ‘He showed me that from the little things there’s a connection to the highest realm of human experience’. (Sydney Morning Herald, 24-25 May 2008) Daly and Cerini will each receive a half-share of the $20,000 prize.
• This year’s National Biography Award also saw joint winners splitting $20,000 in prizemoney. Philip Dwyer’s Napoleon, 1769-1799: The Path to Power tied with Graham Seal’s These Few Lines: A Convict Story: The Lost Lives of Myra and William Sykes.

and

• Raimondo Cortese’s ‘Holiday’ won the Best New Australian Writing category in the recently announced 2007 Green Room Awards. Cortese’s play ‘Holiday’ was described by Age reviewer Cameron Woodhead as ‘a charming and distinctive piece of theatre from one of the most exciting playwrights around…. Cortese has a marvelous ear and the level of craftsmanship that goes into creating such seemingly uncrafted naturalism is extraordinary.’ (Age, 13 August 2007)

And Watch Out For…
The Miles Franklin Literary Award winner will be announced on 19 June. The shortlisted works are:

• The Fern Tattoo by David Brooks
• The Time We Have Taken by Steven Carroll
• Love Without Hope by Rodney Hall
• Sorry by Gail Jones

and

• Landscape of Farewell by Alex Miller

Hall and Miller have each won the award on two previous occasions – Hall for Just Relations (1982) and The Grisly Wife (1994) and Miller for The Ancestor Game (1993) and Journey to the Stone Country (2003). Carroll and Jones are shortlisted for the third time; David Brooks is making his first appearance on a Miles Franklin shortlist.

Slessor’s ‘Five Bells’ Still Sounding
During May 2008 ABC Radio National’s The Book Show ran a series of ‘Poetry Specials’ featuring classic Australian poems. The first program highlighted Kenneth Slessor’s ‘Five Bells’, a poem pondering the death by drowning in Sydney Harbour of Slessor’s friend Joe Lynch.

During the discussion, Emily Maguire explained that, in a period clouded by personal ill-health and the death of a family member, she had found solace in Slessor’s poem (which was to become her favourite). ‘It's always made sense to me to turn to literature and to poetry to – well, sometimes as guidance through life, you know, wiser heads, but also to gain strength and resolve and to see how other people have coped with things. And so I turned to poetry…. I consciously began to seek out poems that spoke to grief and spoke to the problem of dealing with death without recourse to an afterlife…. What really connected with me in 'Five Bells' is – I mean it's a poem about grief, so the whole thing is important to me – but it's a really angry, kind of raging and frustrated grief. And it really to me conveyed the agony.’

Maguire particularly noted the lines:

You have gone from the earth
Gone even from the meaning of a name;
Yet something's there, yet something forms its lips
And hits and cries against the ports of space.

The artist John Olsen also contributed briefly to the ‘Poetry Special’ on ‘Five Bells’. In 1970 Olsen accepted a commission to paint a mural, based around Slessor’s poem, for the Sydney Opera House. He had already completed two other paintings on the poem, one of these, the 1963 oil Five Bells, is considered one of his most significant works.

Speaking of that 1963 painting, Olsen told the Art Gallery of New South Wales that he had ‘painted images drawn from metaphors and similes in Slessor's poem of our harbour-city, and from my own emotional and physical involvement with the harbour, and with my young family in Watsons Bay, my 'Milkwood' fishing village. I wanted to show the Harbour as a movement, a sea suck, and the sound of the water as though I am part of the sea ... The painting says directly what I wanted to say: “I am in the sea-harbour, and the sea-harbour is in me.” So too is much of Slessor's poem of “one life, of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells”.’ (Art Gallery of New South Wales collection description)

While working on the Opera House mural, Salute to Five Bells, Olsen kept a visual diary documenting his progress. The diary is held with Olsen’s papers in the manuscripts collection of the National Library of Australia and will feature in an episode of Hidden Treasures: Inside the National Library of Australia with Betty Churcher. The Hidden Treasures series will be broadcast on ABC1 on Tuesday evenings from 3 June to 5 August. The program featuring Olsen’s visual diary is the last of the ten episodes.

Further details on the Hidden Treasures series can be found on the Film Australia website; transcripts and audio downloads from ‘Poetry Special: Five Bells by Kenneth Slessor’ are available by following the links on The Book Show’s website. (Downloads are also available for the other four programs in the poetry series: ‘Rockpool’ by Judith Wright, ‘The Glugs of Gosh’ by C. J. Dennis, ‘The Continuance of Poetry’ by Rosemary Dobson and ‘The Death of the Bird’ by A. D. Hope.)

An Invitation to Participate in the Teaching Australian Literature Survey

What is the current state of Australian literature education in our schools and universities? Is it in decline as some in the mainstream media suggest? Is it being pushed aside in the drive for vocationally-orientated learning? Have 'postmodern' approaches to teaching literature come at the expense of studying the national literary 'heritage'?

These are the kind of questions being tackled through the Australian Literature Teaching Survey. This project, funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council, involves a systematic surveying of the current and recent-past teaching of Australian literature. The aim of the project's directors, Dr Philip Mead, Kerry Kilner and Dr Alice Healy, is to enhance and sustain a new paradigm for the teaching of Australian literature by:

• Gathering and sharing comprehensive educational data on current and recent past teaching practice of Australian literature in Australian tertiary, upper secondary and overseas institutions
• Enabling on-going collaborative communication between disciplinary stakeholders and teaching practitioners across the field of Australian literary studies

and

• Analysing the needs of the discipline and supporting a new internationalised paradigm of Australian literature teaching

A particular emphasis is the first-year undergraduate experience of Australian literature learning and teaching, focusing on what students bring with them from Year 12 studies and what is offered to them upon entry to tertiary level.

The survey findings will be compiled in a published report in March 2009, and stored in the Teaching Experience Database which will form the foundation for a new way of accessing information and resources to support the teaching of Australian literature.

The Australian Literature Teaching Survey directors will hold a forum for teachers and researchers at the forthcoming Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) conference. The forum will provide an opportunity to discuss the project and to seek the participation of ASAL delegates.

If you have any queries, suggestions or information on courses, or would like to participate in an initial survey questionnaire, interview or focus group, please email the project manager, Anna Gray (Anna.Gray@utas.edu.au).

Novel Manuscripts Sought
Melbourne-based journal Overland is seeking original full-length novel manuscripts. If a suitable novel is found, Overland will publish it in a special issue in late 2009 and distribute it to all subscribers as well as through bookstores.

Announcing the plan, editor Jeff Sparrow recalled Overland’s association through the 1950s with the Australasian Book Society – an organisation that created ‘a model of production and distribution based upon subscriptions collected from ordinary people who loved literature’. Sparrow hopes Overland’s initiative ‘will uncover a high-quality manuscript while highlighting the difficulties facing Australian novelists and focusing attention on alternative publishing models capable of uniting books with readers into a new century’. (Overland 190 (2008): 2)

Writers are invited to send the first 10,000 words of a completed novel, together with a synopsis and their CV (outlining publication and writing experience), to:
Overland novel
Overland Magazine
VU-Footscray Park
PO Box 14428
Melbourne VIC 8001

For further details see Overland’s website.

New Online Journal
The Journal of Australian Writers and Writing is a new, peer-reviewed, online journal. It forms a major component of The Australian Literary Compendium, a project funded by the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) ‘to provide new ways of studying, reading, and reviewing Australian writing and creative practice.

The journal’s first issue will be posted in late 2008 on the theme ‘Rethinking Contemporary Australian Fiction‘. Articles of up to 7,500 words (including notes) are sought on any aspect of Australian fiction writing. Send abstracts by 25 July 2008 to:
Professor Catherine Cole
Creative Writing, School of Creative Media, RMIT University, Melbourne
catherine.cole@rmit.edu.au

Antipodes Facing Fear in Australian Culture
Nathanael O'Reilly and Jean-François Vernay are currently working on a special issue of Antipodes. The issue will deal with ‘fear’ in Australian culture’ and is due out in June 2009. Creative writers and book reviewers are invited to send contributions, addressing the theme of ‘fear’, to the relevant editor:
Fiction Editor – Jack Bennett:
jbennett@oregon.uoregon.edu
Poetry Editor – Paul Kane:
kane@Vassar.edu
Reviews Editor – Richard Carr:
ffrsc@uaf.edu

For further information, email the general editor, Nicholas Birns (nicbirns@aol.com), or the guest editors, Jean-François Vernay (vernay@yahoo.com) and Nathanael O'Reilly (nathanael_o@earthlink.net).

Poetry’s Turn in Tribe Awards
In 2005 The University of Sydney announced the establishment of the Tribe Awards to ‘encourage Australian-based creators of fiction, poetry, philosophy, sculpture and symphony’. The awards are funded by a gift to the University from author and humanist David Harold Tribe. This year the award focuses on poetry and provides prizemoney of $11,000. The money is intended to provide poets with ‘funds that might enable them to further their education in the field of poetry, to continue to refine their work as poets and to improve the general public's appreciation of Australian poetry’.

Entries of original, previously unpublished poems of up to 100 lines are invited. Entries close on 12 September 2008. Further details, including conditions of entry, are available on the ‘Prize’ section of the website of the English Department, The University of Sydney.

For more submission opportunities, and news of upcoming conferences and festivals, see the AustLit Events Directory. If you have new events of interest to the Australian literature, teaching and research communities and the general public please complete the form provided on the Events Submission page on our website.

Nance Donkin (1915-2008)
Nance Donkin began her writing career as a child through the pages of the Sunday newspapers; by the age of sixteen, she had joined the staff of the Maitland Mercury. She began publishing book-length works in her early thirties. Donkin’s first books featured children partying and picnicking, holidaying and swimming – common themes for the times. After publishing a number of non-fiction books in the 1960s, Donkin turned her attention to fictional presentations of Australian history for children. House by the Water (1970) and Johnny Neptune (1971) both explore the colonial and convict era, as do later works The Best of the Bunch (1978) and Two at Sullivan Bay (1985).

Other themes to emerge in Donkin’s writing were the experiences of Greek migrants and the destruction of the environment. Donkin published several books in the 1970s and 1980s focusing on the lives of Greek children, both as migrants in Australia and as returned emigrants in Greece. Yellowgum Gil (1976) looks at the protection of a national park.

Donkin continued publishing until 1990, her writing career by then spanning over 60 years. Her contribution to children’s literature was officially recognised in 1986 when she was made a Member of the Order of Australia.

Richard Lane (1918-2008)
The Australian Writers’ Guild (AWG), responding to news of Richard Lane’s death, described him as a ‘luminary of the Australian radio and television industries’. (AWG media release, 25 February 2008) Lane’s first radio play, ‘No Escape’, was broadcast in the mid-1930s. He went on to become a prolific writer of radio drama, enjoying a stint as senior playwright with 2GB Macquarie. As well as writing his own plays, Lane displayed a talent for adapting classic novels for radio dramatisation. His adaptations included Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and James Hilton’s Goodbye Mr Chips.

Lane embraced the new medium of television in the 1950s. He wrote the first locally produced serial, Autumn Affair, that ran for over 150 episodes on ATN 7, and then worked on other long-running shows such as the ABC’s Bellbird and Crawford Productions’ Homicide and Carson’s Law.

A founder of the Australian Writers’ Guild, Lane became its third president from 1964 to 1968. His endeavours on behalf of others in the industry are, according to Peter Yeldham, one of Lane’s enduring legacies. ‘His work in forming the Australian Writers’ Guild, was an immense personal sacrifice. He worked tirelessly as president, leading the Guild through its formative years, setting up state branches, lobbying for an Australian quota, introducing the AWGIE awards for writers and helping establish the film and television school’. (Sydney Morning Herald, 11 March 2008)

Lane’s achievements were honoured by the AWG in 1988 when he became the first recipient of the Richard Lane Award. The award continues to be presented annually to an AWG member ‘in recognition of their outstanding service to the Guild’.

Alan Collins (1928-2008)
Copywriter, businessman, woodworker, reporter, advertiser – all these epithets fit Alan Collins at different stages of his varied working life. Beginning as a printer’s apprentice at the age fourteen, Collins successively worked for small and large companies, and at one stage operated his own advertising business.

Most of Collins’s writing grew not out his adult life, but from the experiences of his childhood. Collins’s mother died on the day of his birth and he was sent to several children’s home before being re-united with his father who had re-married. Members of his family wrote that ‘the archetypal cruel stepmother ill-treated the boy to such a degree that a magistrate ordered that he be sent to the Isabella Home for Jewish refugee children’. (Age, 21 May 2008) The trilogy A Promised Land? uses elements from Collins’s life to track the coming of age of a Jewish boy from Bondi. The three novels are framed around significant markers in Australia’s history – the Great Depression, a post-World War II society struggling to embrace displaced persons, and the Vietnam War.

Collins’s memoir, Alva’s Boy, will be published by Hybrid later this year.

John Hooker (1932-2008)
Following five years in publishing with Frank Cheshire, John Hooker took up a position with Penguin in 1969. It was the year Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint hit the Australian book market. Moves by the federal government to ban the book were thwarted by the actions of Hooker and others at Penguin who, according to obituarist Robert Sessions, ‘had copies printed in secret and stored in fleets of moving trucks’. The failed attempt to prosecute Penguin is described by Sessions as ‘a milestone in greater freedom of speech’. (Sydney Morning Herald, 8 May 2008)

Hooker remained at Penguin until 1980 when he moved to William Collins. During his time as a publisher, Hooker’s own writing took a back seat. Although he had published Jacob’s Season in 1971 it would be another thirteen years before the appearance of his next novel, The Bush Soldiers. Peter Corris, writing in response to Sessions’s obituary, said that The Bush Soldiers ‘is on my list of all-time best Australian novels’. In Corris’s opinion, ‘Hooker deserves to be remembered not only as an anti-censorship warrior and publisher, but as a very good writer’. (Sydney Morning Herald, 9 May 2008)

We welcome your feedback on our service, and will work hard to develop content and services to meet your needs. If you have any comments and suggestions, please contact us at:

info-austlit@austlit.edu.au

Or spend two minutes filling out our User Survey form.