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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.

Deakin University
In this newsletter we would like to introduce you to the team members based at Deakin University.

• Clara Ichov is the Bibliographic Standards Librarian at Deakin University having begun work at Deakin in the early 1980s while it was still Victoria College. Clara has a long interest in, and knowledge of, languages and although she professes to proficiency in 'only' three (her favourite being Russian) she has some degree of competency in many more.
  
  Clara's association with AustLit is via her role with the Australian Multicultural Writers subset. Clara suspects that she inherited responsibility for Deakin University Library's Australian Multicultural Literature Collection due to her interest in languages and the fact that she was 'the most "ethnic" librarian on the floor'. As a migrant herself, Clara is attracted to writing that depicts migrant experience or that strongly represents a non-dominant culture. Apart from her formidable knowledge of languages and literature, Clara confesses that her real passion is travelling.



• William Dolley is a qualified teacher and librarian and has worked in both capacities in the secondary and tertiary education sectors in Victoria since 1977. He is an experienced senior secondary English and Ancient History teacher and served from 1973 to 1984 as a State Examiner in the latter before undertaking studies in Information Services specializing in Librarianship in 1990.
  
  William joined Deakin University in 1997 and worked in the Arts Faculty at the Geelong Campus, Waurn Ponds, where he assisted on several projects including the development of an online Australian Citizenship Database in the Centre for Citizenship and Human Rights.
  
  In early 2000 William transferred to the Technical Services Division of the library at the historic Waterfront Campus of Deakin University and accepted a part-time appointment as project officer for the updating of two Deakin University initiatives: 'A Bibliography of Australian Multicultural Writers' and 'The Australian Multicultural Literature Database' both of which were later incorporated into AustLit.
  
  William also possesses a Master's Degree in Classics and Archaeology and has tutored in Ancient History and Classical Studies in recent years at the University of Melbourne and at Ormond College and Medley Hall. Since 1998 William has served as Honorary Treasurer for the Australian Society of Classical Studies.

In coming newsletters we will be introducing you to our contributors from the other partner institutions: Flinders University of South Australia 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, Monash Univeristy and the University of Western Australia can be found in previous newsletters in the AustLit News Archive.

Authors in absentia from Honours List
The Australia Day 2003 Honours revealed no honours had been given for services to literature. Honours recipients with connections to AustLit who were awarded for their services to the arts are:

• Ian Callinan, Companion of the Order of Australia
  For service to the judiciary and the practice of law, to the arts and to the community.
  (Justice Callinan was one of only four recipients of the Companion of the Order of Australia, the highest award offered.)
• Michael Blakemore, Officer of the Order of Australia
  For service to the performing arts as a leading international director of stage and screen.
• John Krummel, Medal of the Order of Australia
  For service to the arts, particularly through the Marian Street Theatre.
• Garry McDonald, Officer of the Order of Australia
  For service to the community by raising awareness of mental health issues and the effects of anxiety disorders and depression on sufferers and carers, and to the arts as an entertainer.

More Authors Boycott 2003 Tasmania Pacific Region Prize
Peter Carey and Joan London have joined the list of authors who have withdrawn from contention for this year's Tasmania Pacific Region Prize. Last year Richard Flanagan and Tim Winton declined to have their books nominated for the prize in protest at the involvement of Forestry Tasmania as a sponsor of the Ten Days on the Island festival at which the award winner will be announced.

In adding their voices to the protest, Carey and London have drawn the ire of organisers as their works had already been placed on the shortlist announced in December 2002. The shortlist for the Fiction Prize as it now stands retains two Australian and two New Zealand authors:

• Kate Jennings for Moral Hazard
• Arnold Zable for Cafe Scheherazade
• Patricia Grace for Dogside Story

and

• Lloyd Jones for The Book of Fame

This year the Prize includes a poetry section for the first time. The shortlisted poets are:

• John Tranter for Ultra : 25 Poems
• Les Murray for Poems the Size of Photographs

and

• New Zealander Bernadette Hall for Settler Dreaming

The Premier of Tasmania, Jim Bacon, will announce the award winners on 30 March.

Poets Deliver Protest to the Prime Minister
5 March was designated an International Day of Poetry Against the War. The organisation Poets Against the War, begun by US poet Sam Hamill, reported that over 120 readings and protests took place across the world including in the USA, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, Germany and Italy.

In Canberra, a delegation of poets presented the Prime Minister, John Howard with an anthology of poems about war. Acting on behalf of Australian Poets Against War, the delegation delivered two collections, one by more than 90 Australian poets, including Les Murray, Peter Porter, Judith Rodriguez and Tom Shapcott, and the other an international anthology of over 13 000 poems. Coinciding with the presentation was a dawn poetry reading at the Pool of Remembrance in Sydney's Hyde Park.

Speaking on behalf of Australian Poets Against War, Alison Croggon described the contributions to the Australian anthology as a 'flotilla of poems which matches our military presence in the Middle-East - small, but symbolically significant.' Croggon hoped that the poets' words could balance 'the simplistic rhetoric' of war mongering with 'a bit of complexity'. Contributions to the Australian anthology can be read at the Poets Union website.

Hartnett's Of a Boy Takes the Regional Commonwealth Writers Prize
Sonya Hartnett has been awarded the Best Book prize in the South East Asia and South Pacific Region in this year's Commonwealth Writers Prize for her short novel Of a Boy. The judges commented that: 'In Of a Boy Sonya Hartnett manages the almost impossible combination of being tightly controlled and simple-looking, yet at the same time extraordinarily rich and layered. The density and complexity of meaning in this book come from that kind of stylistic precision, which gives the book real substance of a kind you wouldn't usually expect from a relatively short novel. In that sense it work[s] the same way that a poem does - the episodes and images are very carefully and deliberately crafted and sequenced, and not a single word is wasted. This is an utterly compelling read.' The full list of regional winners is available on the Commonwealth Writers Prize website.

Josephine Ulrick National Poetry Prize 2003
This year's winner of the Josephine Ulrick National Poetry Prize is Judith Beveridge with the poem sequence 'Between the Palace and the Bodhi Tree'. Adrienne Eberhard was highly commended for her sequence 'Earth, Air, Water, Fire : A Love Poem in Four Elements.'

Venero Armanno made the announcement of the 2003 winners at an event hosted by The Brisbane Institute on 25 February. The award is one of Australia's richest poetry prizes with the winner receiving $10 000 and highly commended entries garnering $1 000.

National Biography Award
The National Biography Award is presented every two years for the best biography or autobiography written by an Australian. The shortlist for the 2003 Award is:

• Brenda Niall for The Boyds : A Family Biography
• Mike Richards for The Hanged Man : The Life and Death of Ronald Ryan
• Peter Rose for Rose Boys : A Memoir of Life with Robert
• Time Rowse for Nugget Coombs : A Reforming Life
• Don Watson for Recollections of a Bleeding Heart : A Portrait of Paul Keating PM

The winner will be announced on 3 April when the National Biography Award Lecture will be delivered by Peter Rose, coincidentally one of the nominees.

Fantasy Genre Revives Fiction Sales

In a January 2003 cover story for The Sydney Morning Herald's 'Spectrum' magazine titled 'Fiction's Lost Plot', Mark Mordue provocatively opens with the declaration 'Fiction is dead. Long live non-fiction.' Mordue surveys the books that are filling the shelves of local bookstores and questions whether the trend in booming non-fiction sales suggests 'some missing connection, a breach in fiction's ability to commune with a public it had somehow forgotten or left behind'.

In a counter to this argument Van Ikin has lately drawn attention to the significant sales success of Australia's fantasy genre authors. In 'Nothing Too Fancy', Ikin suggests that the achievement of these writers 'is an important qualification to the debate bemoaning the death of fiction....'

A small sample of recently published top-selling fantasy series (each including between three and six separate books) is:

• The Bitterbynde Trilogy by Cecilia Dart-Thornton
• The Seventh Tower by Garth Nix
• Sevenwaters Trilogy by Juliet Marillier
• The Change by Sean Williams

and

• The View from the Mirror Quartet by Ian Irvine

Works that will eventually form the first book of a series and are already selling prolifically include:

• Across the Nightingale Floor from The Otori Trilogy by Lean Hearn
• The Gift from Pellinor: The Treesong Trilogy by Alison Croggon
  and
  
• Hades' Daughter from The Troy Game by Sara Douglass

Giramondo Launches New Imprint
Giramondo Publishing Company was established in 1995 with the intention of 'publishing quality creative and interpretive writing by Australian authors' and seeking to 'build a common ground between the academy and the marketplace'. Giramondo's aim is to foster works with a 'subtle commercial appeal' which may otherwise not be published.

Giramondo's first venture was the publication of the literary journal HEAT, now in its second series, under the editorship of Ivor Indyk, but it has recently launched its second phase with the establishment of a book imprint. In the last few months Giramondo has published:

• Anything the Landlord Touches, a poetry collection by Emma Lew
• Summer Visit, a selection of three novellas by Antigone Kefala

and

• Shanghai Dancing, the latest novel by Brian Castro

For further details go to Giramondo's website.

Three 'Missing' Novels Discovered
Some co-operative detective work has brought to light three 'missing' novels by Maud Jeanne Franc, the first South Australian woman to have a novel published in South Australia (Marian, or The Light of Someone's Home : A Tale of Australian Bush Life ).

Terry O'Neill, a co-compiler of the second volume of The Bibliography of Australian Literature (BAL), which is part of AustLit's research activity, with the help of Franc's biographer, Barbara Wall, and The British Library, has tracked down copies of Jem's Hopes and What They Grew To, At the Well and Fern Hollow. Although these novels are listed in Thomas Gill's Bibliography of South Australia, their existence as separate publications has been called into question as no copy had been discovered. Undeterred, Terry enlisted the help of British Library Australian Literature specialist, Jim Egles, who, using the clues provided in the Gill Bibliography, was able to locate the novels, even though they are not listed under title or author in the Library's catalogue. The books are part of the Crystal Stories series and were published in London by Richard Willoughby in the 1880s. Jim Egles has been of invaluable assistance to AustLit's and BAL's bibliographical research for the past decade.

Bibliographers, particularly Barbara Wall, are eagerly awaiting the arrival in Australia of copies of the texts. Nothing is known of Australian sources for Fern Hollow or At the Well, but Jem's Hopes and What They Grew To was published as a serial in the South Australian Temperance Herald in 1872. Until now, Jem's fate has remained a mystery as there are no known library holdings of those issues of the Herald in which the second half of the novel was serialized. Jem's outcome is about to be revealed!

Gary Catalano : A Footnote
Eight days after his untimely death in December 2002, the National Library of Australia announced Gary Catalano as one of the intended recipients of a 2003 Harold White Fellowship. Catalano was to have taken up a fellowship to produce a biography of the poet, grazier, fighter pilot and Rugby Union international, David Campbell who died in 1979.

The Prickle Farmer
Mike Hayes, creator and personification of 'The Prickle Farmer', has died from a heart attack at age 58. Remembered by many for his tales of hobby farming and his humorous depiction of life in rural communities, Hayes' stories ran for more than six years as part of the 'Australia All Over' programme on Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) radio.

Hayes came to Australia as young child in 1949 and grew up in Victoria. He worked in various media outlets, including The Age and the ABC. After leaving the ABC in 1983 Hayes worked as a freelance writer and filmmaker. He published several volumes of Prickle Farm stories as well as a number of books of Australian yarns. In his later years he developed a strong interest in environmental issues and wrote on these subjects as well.

Hayes' funeral was held at Willawarrin near Kempsey, NSW on 17 February.

Woomera Chronicler
Jean Brooks, an English immigrant, spent her early years in Australia as a resident of Woomera, South Australia, the township constructed as a residential base to support the joint British-Australian rocket testing facilities. Her eight years there provided abundant ideas for novel plot-lines but, due to security restrictions, Brooks was not permitted to write these stories until the lifting of a thirty-year ban in the 1990s. At the time of her death Brooks was working on the final book in her Woomera Trilogy, the first two instalments having been published in 2001 and 2002.

Unable to write of her early Australian experiences, Brooks turned her attention to the far north of South Australia and wrote two novels on the opal fields, The Opal Witch (originally written as a television drama) and The Other Side of the Moon, both published in the late 1960s.

Although her health declined in her latter years, Brooks continued to be an active member of the Queensland Writers Centre until the time of her death.

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