The AustLit team is dispersed across this wide nation, working 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.

AustLit team members are located at the following Australian universities. Each of these universities has devoted considerable resources to establish and continue the AustLit service.

• UNSW@ADFA (University of New South Wales@Australian Defence Force Academy)
• University of Queensland
• Monash University
• Flinders University of South Australia
• University of Western Australia
• Deakin University
• University of Sydney
• University of Canberra

Over the next several newsletters we will be introducing you to the team members at each of our contributing institutions, so that you may appreciate (as we do), the wide ranging skills and experiences of the literary, research and information professionals that make up the energetic AustLit team.

The key development in the AustLit service over the last couple of months is the release of the full texts of critical articles by leading scholars that have been encoded by the Scholarly Electronic Text and Image Service ( SETIS) at the University of Sydney. These texts can be accessed by subscribers from AustLit's homepage, or from within the AustLit record of the critical article, eg. Michael Wilding's critical article Marcus Clarke : His Natural Life

Design your own search form... A new information page with visual examples has been added to assist you in using the Advanced search form to its fullest capacity. This help page is available at: http://www.austlit.edu.au/help/advancedSearchHelp

Georgia Blain has been elected Chair of the Australian Society of Authors.

Wesley Enoch left Australia at the end of April to take up a three month residency in Paris. The 2002 Cite Internationale des Arts residency was awarded by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board of the Australia Council. Enoch plans to review his previous body of work and to develop a new project on the story of three generations of Aboriginal women, tentatively titled Cookie's Table.

Ian Templeman has been appointed as the new Chair of the Australian Capital Territory Cultural Council.

Jacqueline Kent has won both the National Award for Biography and the Nita Kibble Literary Award for A Certain Style : Beatrice Davis, a Literary Life. (The biography was also shortlisted for the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction, a section of the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards.)
The other shortlisted works for the 2002 Nita Kibble Literary Award were The Fog Garden by Marion Halligan and Other People's Words by Hilary McPhee.

Following on from his Commonwealth Writers' Prize sectional award (Best Book, South East-Asia and South Pacific Region), Richard Flanagan has won the major award of Overall Best Book for 2002 for his novel Gould's Book of Fish : A Novel in Twelve Fish.

The winners of the 2002 New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards have been announced. They include:

• Book of the Year and Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry to Alan Wearne for The Lovemakers : Book 1 : Saying All the Great Sexy Things.
• Christina Stead Prize for Fiction to Tim Winton for Dirt Music.
• Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children's Books to Shaun Tan for The Red Tree.
• Ethel Turner Prize for Books for Young Adults to Anthony Hill for Soldier Boy : The True Story of Jim Martin the Youngest Anzac.
• Play Award to John Romeril for Miss Tanaka, a play adapted from Xavier Herbert's short story Miss Tanaka.
• Special Award of $5 000 awarded to Thea Astley.

The full shortlist with judges' comments can be viewed on the website of the New South Wales Ministry for the Arts.

Peter Porter is this year's recipient of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Porter will be presented with the medal in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace later in the (English) Summer. Previous Australian recipients of the Gold Medal are Les Murray (1998), Judith Wright (1991) and (of The Kings's Gold Medal for Poetry) Michael Thwaites (1940).

The shortlist for the 2002 Miles Franklin Award has been announced. There are five nominated novels:

• The Architect : A Tale by John Scott
• The Art of the Engine Driver by Steven Carroll
• Dirt Music by Tim Winton
• Gilgamesh : A Novel by Joan London
• Gould's Book of Fish : A Novel in Twelve Fish by Richard Flanagan

The award winner will be announced in Sydney on 13 June.

The first novel by Melbourne writer Chloe Hooper, A Child's Book of True Crime, is one of six shortlisted works for this year's Orange Prize. The award has been given each year since 1996 for the best full-length novel written in English by a woman. It was won by an Australian in 2001 when Kate Grenville took out the prize for The Idea of Perfection. This year's winner will be announced on 11 June.

Michelle Taylor has been awarded the Harri Jones Memorial Prize. The prize is given annually to an Australian poet, not yet 36 years of age, whose work in the field of poetry is judged to be outstanding.

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey was shortlisted for this year's International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award along with six other works. The winner, announced on 13 May, was Atomised by French writer Michel Houellebecq.

This year's Sydney Writers' Festival began on Monday 27 May with the announcement of the NSW Premier's Literary Awards. The Festival features activities for students, literary lunches, evening lectures, book readings, drama performances and author presentations.

The launch of The Boyds : A Family Biography by Brenda Niall took place on 14 April in the gardens of Glenfern in East St Kilda, Melbourne. Glenfern is one of the old Boyd homes and is now a National Trust property. The book was launched by the Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, Gerard Vaughan. One of Brenda Niall's previous works is the award winning Martin Boyd : A Life.

Images of Australia : A History of Australian Children's Literature 1941-1970 is a complete re-write of Maurice Saxby's 1971 publication A History of Australian Children's Literature 1941 - 1970 . Paying particular tribute to the resources of the extensive Ken Pound Collection (housed at the State Library of Victoria), Saxby's new work brings to light many publications of the World War II and post-war era which were often printed on flimsy paper and poorly bound, thus hastening their disappearance from library shelves. Saxby places Australian children's literature in the context of an Australia "re-inventing" itself after the Depression and World War II and maps the literary representation of migrants, Aborigines, urban and rural families and the Australian landscape during this period.

While many of the periodicals indexed by AustLit : Australian Literature Gateway are available only in hard-copy print-versions, there are some that publish either solely electronically or in both electronic and hard-copy formats. When an "AustLit" periodical is available electonically, access is provided to our clients via Pandora, a national collection of Australian Online Publications archived by the National Library of Australia. (With the relevant publisher's permission, Pandora archives and preserves Internet resources to provide long term access to online publications.) This month the Links of the Month invites you to view some of the electronic versions of periodicals available via AustLit : Australian Literature Gateway.

• Australian Women's Book Review (AWBR) is the review magazine of the feminist periodical Hecate. For over a decade, AWBR was published in hard-copy format, but since 2000 it has been available only electronically.
• Screaming Hyena : E-Journal of Queer Writing and Review covers lesbian, bisexual, transgender, gay, feminist, homosexual, queer, bent and sometimes straight contemporary literature. Early issues were available in hard-copy, but publication changed to an electronic version in 1998.
• Founded by Cassandra Pybus, Australian Humanities Review (AHR) is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary electronic periodical. Published quarterly, AHR also incorporates fortnightly updates.

The first three performances of the London season of David Williamson's Up for Grabs have been postponed due to technical problems. The two month season at the Wyndham Theatre was due to begin with a preview performace on 9 May, but will now start on 18 May. The production will feature Madonna making her West End debut in her first stage performance for 13 years. The American, best known for her singing, has insisted on a number of changes to the play including the names of the two main characters and a shift in setting from Sydney to New York.
Meanwhile, in Australia, Williamson's newest play, Soulmates, has opened at the Drama Theatre of the Sydney Opera House where it will run until 15 June. Soulmates tackles the literary debate over "high" and "low" culture.

Scriptwriter, playwright and poet Louis H. Clark died in April. Clark published 12 volumes of poetry, short stories and plays between 1949 and 1980. He was also the writer of a number of episodes of the television police drama Homocide in the early 1970s.

New Zealander Cherry Wilder has died in Wellington. A resident of Australia for over 20 years during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Wilder has said that "I was definitely inspired to write SF in Australia and will always be, in some way, an Australian SF writer". (Quoted in the MUP Encyclopaedia of Australian Science Fiction & Fantasy.)

Newcastle resident, Lisbet De Castro Lopo, died on 11 April. Originally from Denmark, De Castro Lopo migrated initially to Perth and later moved to the Hunter region of New South Wales where she was one of the founding members of Catchfire Press which promotes writers of the Hunter and Manning Valleys.

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