The Australian Literature Resource
Welcome to the latest newsletter from the AustLit Gateway, bringing you up to date with information on new developments and services on AustLit and the latest literary news on the Australian scene.
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The AustLit Content 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.
Flinders University
In this newsletter we would like to introduce you to the team members based at Flinders University who work under the direction of Professor Gus Worby, Head of the Australian Studies Program.
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Anne Chittleborough works from the English Department of Flinders University. After originally working as a teacher, both in Australia and Papua New Guinea, Anne decided on a change of career and qualified as a Librarian at Kuring-gai CAE. She worked at the Flinders University Library for several years before taking up a research position with the English Department.
Anne became interested in South Australian literature through her involvement with the anthology Hope and Fear : An Anthology of South Australian Women's Writing, 1894-1994, published to coincide with the 1994 centenary of women's suffrage in South Australia.
Having glimpsed the fascinating people and stories that lay behind the writing, and the insights they gave into South Australia's social history, Anne was delighted when the opportunity arose to develop a database of South Australian writers. Anne started with the women writers, as she had already collected information about them for the anthology, but the broader task proved so immense that research to the same extent on South Australian male writers was not possible for that project. The State Library of South Australia's website now hosts the original database, entitled South Australian Creative Writers - Women Writers, which was compiled during 1995-1999. It is this data- set that formeds the basis of the South Australian Women Writers subset published through the AustLit Gateway. Work on South Australian writers of both genders continues through Anne's current work and contributes on a daily basis to the development of both this specialist research area and the Gateway as a whole. -
Gilllian Dooley has been Special Collections Librarian at Flinders University Library since 1999, having worked at the Library since 1990 as a subject librarian and cataloguer. She was nominated to contribute to the AustLit Content Team because she also has an interest in literature as a researcher and writer. Gillian has completed a Ph.D. at Flinders on the novels of Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing and V. S. Naipaul. Her book From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch has just been published by the University of South Carolina Press in May of this year, and she is currently working on an introduction to V. S. Naipaul's work for the same publisher.
Gillian was one of the editors (with Anne Chittleborough) of Alas, for the Pelicans! Flinders, Baudin and Beyond: Essays and Poems, which appeared in December 2002. She is also working on an edition of Matthew Flinders' private journal, covering the period 1803-1814. Gillian is a frequent book reviewer for Writer's Radio and Australian Book Review, and has published articles in journals both in Australia and overseas on various literary topics.
Gillian spends most of her AustLit time working on recent South Australian poetry, and usually enjoys the challenge of subject indexing modern poems.
In our next newsletter we will be introducing you to our contributors from 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, the University of Western Australia and Deakin University can be found in previous newsletters in the AustLit News Archive.
Literary Luminaries Awarded Centenary of Federation Medal
Over 50 writers and academics were recently awarded the Centenary Medal for their services in the fields of writing, literature and education. Professor John Hay, Vice Chancellor at the University of Qld and General Editor of AustLit was awarded a medal for his services to the tertiary education sector in Australia. Professor Bruce Bennett, Chief Investigator and one of AustLit's General Editors, and Professor Elizabeth Webby a member of AustLit's Board of Management, were recognised for their 'service to Australian society and the humanities in the study of Australian literature'. Professor Paul Eggert, also a member of the AustLit Board, was cited for his 'service to Australian society and the humanities in the study of literature'.
Other academics and critics who were honoured include:
Among the creative writers to receive medals were:Chris Wallace-Crabbe, poet and academic, was cited for 'service to Australian society and the humanities in the study of literature and the arts', and West Australians Peter Cowan and Dorothy Hewett, both living at the time of the Centenary celebrations, were awarded medals posthumously.
Palace Engagement for Richard Flanagan
The winner of the 2002 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Richard Flanagan, met Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace on 12 March 2003 as part of the traditional arrangements for the recipient of the prize. While in the United Kingdom, Flanagan also conducted a reading of his book Gould's Book of Fish
at The Royal Commonwealth Society on 13 March.
The Commonwealth Writers' Prize, now in its 17th year, selects its winners from among the 54 countries of the Commonwealth with judging undertaken by four internationally composed, regionally focussed panels of judges. The 2003 award will be announced in Calgary, Canada on 8 May. Sonya Hartnett, winner of the South East Asia and South Pacific Region Prize for Of a Boy will contend with winners from Africa, the Caribbean and Canada, and Eurasia for the overall prize.
One Book One Brisbane 2003
Voting for this year's One Book One Brisbane city-wide reading campaign has closed and the outcome decided. Brisbane's citizens were asked to choose from a list of ten nominated works, most by newer writers and many published by the University of Queensland Press. Over 4 000 votes were cast with over a quarter of voters choosing the ultimate winner, Rosamond Siemon's The Mayne Inheritance, the story of the family who, for a time, owned much of Brisbane's CBD. Siemon's fascinating history of the Mayne family, one of the most generous benefactors of the University of Queensland and Brisbane in general, traces themes of murder and ill-gotten gains, enormous wealth in a colonial city, secrecy, politics and social isolation.
In the final stage of the selection process, Brisbane City Council's Civic Cabinet assessed the three books with the highest number of votes (from the public-voting stage) and decided the winner. The official launch of the campaign will take place in August.
Parallel Importation Restrictions Maintained
Authors, publishers, printers and booksellers were relieved when the Australian Democrats blocked the Government's proposed changes to the Parallel Importation regulations in the Senate on 27 March 2003.
'Parallel importation' or 'grey marketing' refers to the promotion and distribution of works (including books and periodicals) imported without the copyright owner's authorisation. The Intellectual Property and Competition Review Committee argued that, by allowing parallel importation, book prices in Australia would be reduced. (Australian consumers currently pay 10-40% more than buyers in the UK and the USA for items such as books, software and computer games.)
The Australian Society of Authors campaigned strongly against a weakening of the current laws, arguing that the proposed changes 'would dissolve Australia as a separate copyright territory and allow the dumping of remaindered overseas editions here'.
2003 Tasmania Pacific Region Prize
The winners of this year's Tasmania Pacific Region Prize were announced in Hobart on 30 March. The $40 000 Fiction Prize was awarded to The Book of Fame by New Zealand writer Lloyd James. The $10 000 Poetry Prize was won by Poems the Size of Photographs by Les Murray and Arnold Zable's Cafe Scheherazade picked up the People's Choice Award sponsored by the State Library of Tasmania.
The 2003 award has been dogged by controversy. Peter Carey and Joan London withdrew their works from the shortlist, and Richard Flanagan, Tim Winton and others declined to have their books nominated. The writers were protesting Forestry Tasmania's sponsorship of the Ten Days on the Island festival at which the award was announced.
Following the announcement, Zable told reporters ('Prize Writer Chips the Dropouts', The Mercury, 31 March 2003) that, although he agreed that conservation of old growth forests was an important issue, he believed that writers with concerns should 'target the source' and not 'the festival and the foot soldiers of good heart'.
Tales of Family and Politics Share Biography Award
The 2003 National Award for Biography, presented biennially for the best biography or autobiography written by an Australian, was awarded jointly to Peter Rose for Rose Boys, and Don Watson for Recollections of a Bleeding Heart : A Portrait of Paul Keating PM.
Commenting on the winners, Jane Sullivan ('Sitting in the Driver's Seat of Biography', The Sunday Age (Agenda), 6 April 2003) noted the advent of a new, hybrid form of writing, 'biography with a strong touch of autobiography'. She contrasted the styles of Rose and Watson with those of earlier generations of biographers who were accorded authority on the basis of their invisibility. 'Don Watson and Peter Rose succeed because they write intimately about themselves, and also about someone else. We feel we can trust them because they let us know where they are coming from. ... It's actually a fantastically difficult balancing act where the writer has to combine a willingness to be painfully honest with a high degree of artifice and technical skill.' AustLit has recently revised the criteria for inclusion in the Gateway to include biography and life writing, recognising the importance of the area to general readers, research and teaching.
Melbourne Author Wins Inaugural $10 000 Literature Prize
Melbourne author, Andrew Belk, has won the inaugural Josephine Ulrick Literature Prize, administered by Griffith University's School of Arts (Gold Coast campus) on behalf of the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Foundation for the Arts. Belk won the $10 000 prizemoney for his short story 'The Big Jesus', described as 'road trip meets doomed romance'. According to the award's sponsor, the story is about 'a couple (one of whom is dying) who decide to go on a search for a mythical Big Jesus, visiting a lot of other Big Things along the way'.
The prize attracted 340 entries and was judged by Nigel Krauth, Frank Moorhouse and Amanda Lohrey. Krauth stated that 'there is not another short writing prize of this magnitude in Australia and the winner will receive significant national recognition in the writing industry'.
Griffith University's website announcement of the prize explains that it will be awarded for a different genre of short literature each year over a three-year cycle. The 2003 prize was for a short story, 2004 will be for short non-fiction, and 2005 for less recognised forms such as 'arts criticism, visual arts catalogue essays, writing for new media, or the essay as a literary form'.
Starke Recognised in 2003 UNESCO Award
Every two years UNESCO awards the Prize for Children's and Young People's Literature in the Service of Tolerance. This year an honourable mention in the Under-13s category was given to Ruth Starke for her novel, Nips XI, set in a racially mixed urban school. Starke's book was the only Australian entry for the 2003 prize.
The Prize, founded in 1995, is awarded in recognition of 'works of fiction for the young that best embody the concepts and ideals of tolerance and peace and promote mutual understanding based on respect for other peoples and cultures. Emphasis is placed on the context in which such books are published in a world where intolerance is at the root of so much human misery'. In 2003, 353 entries written in 36 languages from 54 countries made up the Prize field.
Starke, who travelled to Paris to be part of the UNESCO Awards ceremony on 23 April, has recently published a sequel to Nips XI. In Nips Go National the team, introduced in the first book, head to Melbourne to take part in a multiracial primary-schools cricket competition.
Shortlists for Upcoming Prizes
A number of shortlists have recently been announced:
- The 2003 NSW Premier's Literary Awards and NSW Premier's Translation Prize and PEN Medallion, with a combined prize pool of $147 000, will be announced on 19 May at Parliament House, Sydney.
In the category for literary and cultural criticism, two members of AustLit's Editorial Board are included in the nominations. In commenting on Bruce Bennett's Australian Short Fiction: A History the judges highlighted the work's thorough and judicious coverage and suggested that it would be 'valued both by the student and the interested general reader'. Dennis Haskell's Attuned to Alien Moonlight: The Poetry of Bruce Dawe was praised for being 'free from jargon, direct and touched with wry humour'.
The shortlist, together with the judges' comments in their entirety, can be viewed via the Awards' homepage. - This year's Helpmann Awards feature four nominations for Joanna Murray-Smith's Love in the Age of Therapy, including Best Opera and Best New Australian Work. The full list is available at the Helpmann Awards website.
- The Children's Book Council of Australia (CBC) has released its shortlist for 2003. The list includes a dual nomination for Simon French. His 2002 picture book Guess the Baby (his first publication in over ten years) and his children's novel Where in the World have been nominated respectively in the Early Childhood and Younger Readers categories. Where in the World also has two nominations in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards. The CBC Award winners will be announced and presented in Hobart on 15 August. The complete shortlist is included on the CBC website.
- The shortlisted works for this year's $20 000 Nita B Kibble Literary Award are: Black Mirror by Gail Jones, The Truth About My Fathers : A Memoir by Gaby Naher and The Boyds: A Family Biography by Brenda Niall. Nominated for the $2 500 Nita Dobbie Literary Award are: Borrowed Eyes by Saskia Beudel, The Bean Patch : A Memoir by Shirley Painter and Unearthed : The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island by Rebe Taylor. The winners of both awards will be announced in May.
Representing 'Australia' - Print, Stage and Screen
Familiar themes for the Australian psyche have found their way into publication and performance in recent months, albeit sometimes under new guises.
Bushfires
During a summer of extreme fire threat and bushfire damage, Adelaide audiences at the Come Out Festival revisited the experience of Marguerite Hann Syme who lost her house in the Ash Wednesday fires of 1983. Hann Syme initially told the story of her loss in the picture book, Bushfire, describing the writing as 'both a cathartic and therapeutic exercise'. This year she has adapted the book for the stage, in a play also titled Bushfire. Hann Syme commented that her writing enabled her to identify 'what it is that I have loved and have lost'.
Engaging in a similar process, residents of Canberra and the Australian Capital Territory have told their stories of the 18 January 2003 firestorm in the new Ginninderra Press publication, How Did the Fire Know We Lived Here?, launched at the National Museum of Australia on 29 April.
(The earliest works of Australian literature identified by AustLit as being about 'bushfires' date back only as far as the 1850s. The first known published works are Mary Theresa Vidal's story The Cabramatta Store (1850) and Charles Harpur's poem The Bush Fire (1853). With AustLit's strong focus in 2003 on developing new content through retrospective indexing, earlier works may emerge. However, it is interesting to note that the first recorded deaths in Australia due to bushfire, as cited in The Macquarie Book of Events (1983), were in the 'Black Thursday' fires of February 1851. This time frame equates with AustLit's research to date, and it may be that bushfires did not feature prominently in the Australian consciousness until they were associated with loss of life and property.)
ANZAC Day
Alan Seymour's The One Day of the Year, is currently being revived by the Sydney Theatre Company. The play, which observes the Cook family's emotional hostilities refracted through the prism of an ANZAC Day remembrance, was first performed amidst controversy at the Adelaide Festival in 1961.
Also being performed in Sydney, to coincide with ANZAC Day, is Ken Clift's Sister Street. Clift, now 87 years of age, has previously written military histories detailing events in the campaigns of World War II. In this instance, he has dramatised his experiences (and those of fellow members of the Bondi Surf Club) in Alexandria, Egypt amid 'the beach, the battlefields and the brothels'. In an interview with Steve Meacham ('After an Evening in the Brothel, a Beer with the Lad Reborn', The Sydney Morning Herald, 26-27 April 2003), Clift describes the main setting of the play as 'more of a bordello than a brothel. They served tea and cakes and played dance music'.
Beaches
Unique to date in AustLit annals is Stephen Sewell's new film, Lost Things, combining a beach location with the horror genre. Envisioned through the iconic setting of the Australian beach, two teenaged couples expect a weekend of sun, surf, sex and sand. However, this film is no Puberty Blues. Its horror genre is undergirded by Nietzsche's gloomy concept of 'Endless Return', an examination of the human response to a constantly recurring reality. Unable to generate finance from any recognised funding body, the film's makers pressed ahead on a small budget and have now been invited to take the film to the Cannes Film Festival in May 2003.
Scriptwriter Sewell and director Martin Murphy plan two further films together. The next film will be an adaptation of Sewell's 1991 play, Sisters.
Tales of Desire Sought for Publishing Project
The Centre for Research for Women, a joint initiative of Curtin University of Technology, Edith Cowan University, Murdoch University and The University of Western Australia, has awarded a publishing grant to Christina Houen to produce an anthology of Australian women's writing around the theme 'Hidden Desires'.
Houen writes, 'We've challenged the patriarchal view of woman's place, but we still need to claim our difference and our freedom to connect with the flow of desire. We need to hear the stories of women's experience that lie beneath the surface of ordinary daily life - the secret, inner life, the repressed, the unrepresented, the unacknowledged.'
Houen requires expressions of interest for her project by 31 May 2003; the deadline for submissions is 31 July 2003. For further information, contact her via email: shangri_la1@optusnet.com.au or phone (08) 9252 0089.
Norman McCann Summer Scholarships
Applications for the Norman McCann Summer Scholarship are invited by 13 June 2003. A Scholarship enables young Australian scholars to undertake research in Australian history and Australian literature, based on the National Library of Australia's collections.
Application forms and information about the Scholarships are available from Ms Gianoula Burns via email gburns@nla.gov.au or phone (02) 6262 1232 or from the Library's web site: http://www.nla.gov.au/jobs/infoserv/summer_schol.html
Nick Enright (22 December 1950 - 30 March 2003)
Following a private cremation, friends and colleagues of Nick Enright gathered at the National Institute of Dramatic Arts (NIDA) theatre in Sydney on 6 April to honour and celebrate the life and work of a much-loved figure of Australian theatre. The affection and regard in which Enright was held was clearly marked in the obituaries and tributes that appeared in newspapers in the days after his death.
Enright began employment in the theatre world on the day after leaving school, initially in a job with the J. C. Williamson company. He went on to work with the State Theatre of South Australia, the Hunter Valley Theatre Company, the National Theatre Company (Perth) and the Australian National Playwright's Centre. Enright was loved and respected for his commitment to teaching. He had a profound impact on his students at NIDA, the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) and the Actors Centre, Sydney.
In the late 1970s, Enright's translation and adaptation of Goldoni's The Venetian Twins : A Musical Comedy proved highly successful. He translated further stage works from Italian (another of Goldoni's plays) and from Greek and French.
After some lean years in the mid to late 1980s (both in terms of financial income, and writing and directing output) Enright achieved wide acclaim in 1990 with his adaptation of Come in Spinner for ABC Television. This adaptation of Florence James' and Dymphna Cusack's World War II novel earned Enright an AFI Award for Best Screenplay (1990) and a Logie Award for Best Mini Series (1991). The 1990s proved a time of praise and recognition from both audiences and prize-givers. Daylight Saving, A Property of the Clan, its re-worked version Blackrock and Cloudstreet (a co-adaptation with Justin Monjo of Tim Winton's novel of the same name) all received Australian Writers' Guild (AWGIE) awards.
Obituaries by Ron Blair and David Marr, both close friends of Enright's, made particular reference to Enright's capacity for deep and enduring friendship. Ron Blair ('A Lifelong Affair for Beloved Son of Stage', The Australian, 2 April 2003) wrote: 'He was held close to our hearts because he was a man of singular grace and charm who, despite his vast network of friends, never forgot the endearing courtesies: a note on one's birthday, a card for an opening night, a thankyou-note for a dinner enjoyed'.
David Marr ('Adored Member of Stage's Family', The Sydney Morning Herald, 2 April 2003) recalled the final days of Enright's life: 'when the news got out, there were queues of friends, flowers, tears, phone calls from all corners of the film world and cards from friends telling him what they had always found hard to say to his face: that they loved him and were deeply indebted to him. He lay there listening to these messages like a great playwright getting his reviews. The notices were good.'
Joan Phipson (16 November 1912 - 2 April 2003)
In the 1950s and 1960s much of the literature read by Australian children was dominated by the works of British and American writers. Joan Phipson was part of a small band of Australian authors (including Patricia Wrightson, Nan Chauncy and Eleanor Spence) whose work featured the Australian landscape and the dangers and difficulties of living within it.
The Oxford Companion to Australian Children's Literature describes Phipson's early works as 'straightforward rural adventures' set 'against a strongly realised landscape'. By the 1970s, Phipson had turned her attention to the psychology of fear, placing her characters in confined settings that were often outside the characters' control. The other major theme to emerge in her later writing was an exploration of human impact on the environment.
Phipson's second novel, Good Luck to the Rider, was joint winner of the 1953 Children's Book Council (CBC) Book of the Year Award and, in 2001, it was included in the John Marsden Presents Australian Children's Classics series. Phipson's success in the CBC Awards was repeated in 1963 when she won Book of the Year for The Family Conspiracy. In addition to other awards for individual books, Phipson also received the Dromkeen Medal in 1987 and the Medal of the Order of Australia in 1994, both for her overall contribution to Australian children's literature.
Other Recent Deaths
Other recent deaths among the Australian literary community have been:
- Richard Hall - journalist, reviewer, speechwriter, biographer, playwright and novelist
- Julie Lewis - columnist, reviewer and short story writer
- Susan McGowan - poet
and
1923 - An Auspicious Year for Australian Women Writers
A number of prominent women writers share 1923 as the year of their birth. Born in successive months of that year were:
- Dorothy Hewett (24 May)
- Elizabeth Jolley (4 June)
- Ninette Dutton (24 July)
- Ruth Park (24 August) and Charmian Clift (30 August)
- Nancy Keesing (7 September)
and
Jolley, Dutton and Park will celebrate their 80th birthdays in the coming weeks.
Bicentenary Celebration
A somewhat longer milestone has recently been celebrated for The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser. This newspaper began publication on 5 March 1803 and continued (with a nine-month hiatus) until 20 October 1842. In recognition of the importance of the paper to Australia's colonial era, Michael O'Connor has published
Pig Bites Baby! : Stories from Australia's First Newspaper. The anthology includes a selection of thematically arranged extracts spanning the period 1803-1810.
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