Two Books One Brisbane in 2004
Brisbane residents will have a choice of two books for this year's One Book One Brisbane event after controversy broke out over the selection procedures. On Monday, 19 April, Brisbane's new Deputy Mayor, David Hinchliffe made the initial announcement that David Malouf's 1975 novel, Johnno would be the official title for 2004. Hinchliffe revealed that Rebecca Sparrow's The Girl Most Likely had topped the public voting with 1,515 votes, followed by Johnno's 1,334 votes. Sparrow's book had been popular with those voting via the Internet and with young female voters; Malouf's novel was the favourite among voters at libraries and ward offices.

The announcement drew strong reactions from Brisbane Civic Cabinet members, writers and voters who all expressed concern about the selection process. Even the Australian Foreign Affairs minister, Alexander Downer entered the debate saying, 'If you have the public express a view, doesn't that count for something? I would have thought you put the public's view first.' (The Courier-Mail, 22 April 2004)

Two days after the original declaration Hinchliffe conceded that 'something interesting might emerge' from the controversy and by Friday, 23 April the Civic Cabinet had unanimously accepted a recommendation that both books share the spotlight for 2004.

This year's programme will run from 11 July to 15 August and will include author talks and workshops, book discussions and walking tours. Further details are available on the Our Brisbane website.

McPhee Calls for 'Words from Our Part of the World'
Hilary McPhee, former publisher and Chair of the Australia Council, and current Vice Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Melbourne, has delivered this year's Colin Simpson Lecture. McPhee highlighted areas of vulnerability in Australia's written culture and suggested measures for strengthening that culture. She was adamant that 'only strong local cultures have a chance to thrive in a globalised world' and nostalgically recalled the 1970s when 'Western Australia, Tasmania, far north Queensland spoke with different voices, told stories, cracked jokes that were not the same as inner Melbourne or Sydney.' McPhee asserted that 'probably more than at any time I can remember, Australian culture - as we know it - is up for grabs.' However, she suggested that 'It is possible to be neither a protectionist nor a "made in Australia" nationalist [...] arguing that we have a unique antipodean cultural mix which ought to be able to flourish in the globalised world alongside all the other cultural villages.'

McPhee said that potentially uncomfortable questions need to be asked about the direction of funding for books, films and plays, and that further questions should focus on the diminishing rate of Australian literature teaching in schools and the lack of support offered to scholars to write in an academic environment. Passionate about the contemporary importance of words in Australian life, McPhee emphasised that 'Words are needed more than ever before - words that identify what is going on here, words that pose difficult questions and dismantle what can sometimes sound like a sense of entitlement or a reluctance to face the future. Words are all we have if there is to be any hope of persuading those who have stopped listening.'

The full text of McPhee's speech can be viewed on ABC Radio National's website.

Australian Aboriginal Theatre Performed in New York
By 18 May 2004 five plays written by Australian Aborigines will have been performed for New York audiences in the space of ten weeks. The staged readings are part of a project organised by Melbourne's Playbox Theatre, the Australian Aboriginal Theatre Initiative and New York's Immigrant Theatre Project. The Victorian and Australian governments funded the performance of an Aboriginal actor for each reading and also the attendance of the playwright. Each production involved Native American directors and actors, and a post-show forum to discuss the issues raised.

The five plays on the programme were:

• Jadah Milroy's cultural identity tale, Crow Fire
• Andrea James's exploration of the Yorta Yorta's legal struggle for land rights, Yanagai! Yanagai!
• the award-winning Stolen by Jane Harrison, depicting the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their families
• Leah Purcell's acclaimed one-woman show Box the Pony

and

• Conversations with the Dead, Richard Frankland's powerful story of Aboriginal deaths in custody

New Plays Highlight Asylum Seekers and Sports Culture
A number of new plays being performed on Australia's stages in 2004 cluster around two topical themes: Australia's conduct towards asylum seekers and male sports culture. In the first category are CMI, In Our Name and Through the Wire. Each play uses the technique of verbatim theatre, a sub-set of docu-theatre, where the script is based on factual documents and interviews with ordinary people. CMI uses the text of the 2002 Senate Select Committee inquiry into 'a certain maritime incident'. In our Name and Through the Wire both employ the voices of people who were held in Australian detention centres.

Writing in The Bulletin on 20 April (' Theatre of the Displaced'), Linda Jaivin comments on the resurgence of this type of theatre in Australia in recent years. She quotes from an article by British playwright, Steve Waters, who also examined this renaissance in 'The Truth Behind the Facts' (The Guardian 11 February 2004). Waters alludes to a problem for today's writers - 'namely that modern life in its unimaginable complexity seems to defy invention itself.' He suggests that 'The theatre of fact offers a necessary challenge to writers to embrace contemporary life [...] the playwright's imagination should be chastened, but not defeated, by actuality; in a world flooded with information, its task remains to reveal the facts behind the facts.' Waters acknowledges that this is a difficult task for verbatim theatre as it 'chooses to tell rather than show'. Jaivin is hopeful that the new Australian plays in this genre will incorporate sufficient theatrical effects to enable the story to be heard through the medium of the facts.

New sports-related plays in production include Run Rabbit Run!, Torrez and Amigos. Run Rabbit Run! (also a docu-theatre project) addresses the campaign to re-instate the Sydney Rabbitohs in the National Rugby League competition. The play highlights the battle between community identity and large corporate and global interests. Torrez deals with the situation of a former Australian Rules football player seeking to make a career in the media, but dogged by a sex scandal. West Australian playwright Ian Wilding re-wrote the play several times as life imitated art. Eventually, he let the play stand because 'You can't be worried people will think it's about a particular person, because there's so much coming out of the woodwork.' (The Australian, 12 April 2004) Wilding examines the 'hypocritical relationship' that the public has with sporting stars. 'On the one hand we make them royalty, which gives them certain concessions; yet when they behave badly we complain it's unacceptable and still get great pleasure from reading about it'. The new Artistic Director of Griffin Theatre Company, David Berthold hopes the play 'challenges football clubs to look at whether they implicitly create a culture that allows these actions to take place.' Berthold is directing Griffin's and Black Swan Theatre Company's joint production of the play in Sydney until 22 May. The production moves to Melbourne on 29 May.

David Williamson has already delved into the male culture of the football club in his 1970s play, The Club. In his most recent play, Amigos, Williamson looks at an ageing group of rowers who tasted some success at the 1964 Mexico Olympics. Far removed from their sporting glories, the remaining friends - one of the foursome has died - reflect on the current state of their lives and their relationships. Amigos plays in Sydney until 29 May and then begins a three-month tour of other cities including Newcastle, Melbourne and Canberra.

Clendinnen Shares Kiriyama Prize
Inga Clendinnen has won the non-fiction section of the eighth annual Kiriyama Book Prize, sharing the 2004 award with fiction winner, Chinese-born novelist Shan Sa. Clendinnen's winning entry, Dancing with Strangers, depicts the cultural clash between Aboriginal peoples and British settlers in the colony of New South Wales. It centres on the events surrounding the spearing of Governor Arthur Phillip at Manly Cove in 1790. Clendinnen is the first Australian to win the prize.

A noted historian, Clendinnen is now working on a follow-up to Dancing with Strangers in which she examines the current state of race relations in Australia. The new book has the working title, After the Dancing. Clendinnen's other publications include the award-winning collection Tiger's Eye : A Memoir.

Other Australians featured in the list of finalists. Also nominated in the non-fiction section was Mara Moustafine for Secrets and Spies: The Harbin Files, and in the fiction section Peter Carey's My Life as a Fake and Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire were both shortlisted.

Belonging in Tasmania Offers Rewards
A sense of 'belonging' in Tasmania has helped Canadian author Isabel Huggan to a win in the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. Huggan's Belonging : Home Away from Home is part memoir, part fiction and part travel book and covers the periods of her life spent in Kenya, the Philippines, Tasmania and France. Speaking to the Canadian National Post newspaper on 20 April, Huggan said 'Writing is a way of belonging and making a home for yourself [...] I'm at home in Canada, and I'm at home in Tasmania and I'm at home in France.'

2004 Griffin Award Winner
Debra Oswald's new play Mr Bailey's Minder has won the $5,000 Griffin Award. Oswald's play was chosen from among more than 150 nominations. Artistic Director of Griffin, David Berthold noted that the play had a 'deep humanity' and also provided 'two great roles for actors'. Mr Bailey's Minder is one of five plays in Griffin's 2004 season. Other productions include Stephen Sewell's The Secret Death of Salvador Dali and Louis Nowra's The Woman With Dog's Eyes.

Tale of Country Life Wins Kathleen Mitchell Award
Lucy Lehmann has won the Biennial Kathleen Mitchell Award for Young Writers with her first novel, The Showgirl and the Brumby. The Award, established in 1996, is designed to encourage 'the advancement, improvement and betterment of Australian literature, to improve the educational style of the authors and to provide them with additional amounts and thus enable them to improve their literary efforts'. The prize money for this year is $7,500.

Disparate Mix Nominated for Miles Franklin Award
The six authors represented on this year's Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlist range widely in age, publishing output and background. They include expatriate Shirley Hazzard, who published her first novel in the 1960s, Nobel prize-winning immigrant, J. M. Coetzee, and Generation X's Elliot Perlman whose first novel appeared in 1998.

The 2004 shortlist is:

• My Life as a Fake by Peter Carey
• Elizabeth Costello : Eight Lessons by J. M. Coetzee
• Three Dog Night by Peter Goldsworthy
• The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard
• Slow Water by Annamarie Jagose
• Seven Types of Ambiguity by Elliot Perlman

Forty-four novels were nominated for this year's award and the winner, to be announced on 17 June, will be judged by a panel comprising Professor Kerryn Goldsworthy, David Marr, Mark Rubbo, AustLit Board member Professor Elizabeth Webby and the State Librarian of New South Wales, Dagmar Schmidmaier. Prize money for 2004 has been increased to $42,000.

NSW Premier's Literary Awards Add New Category for 2004
Over 50 books have been nominated in the ten categories of the NSW Premier's Literary Awards for 2004. Being judged for the first time this year is a category for literary scholarship. The three shortlisted works are:

• Rosemary Campbell's scholarly edition of An Australian Girl
• Barry Hill's Broken Song : T. G. H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession

and

• Penny Gay's Jane Austen and the Theatre

Commenting on Campbell's work, the judges noted that her new edition includes some 50,000 words of previously excised text. This restoration allows Catherine Martin's novel to be re-appraised 'as a contemplation of social and philosophical possibilities' and provides an opportunity to view Martin as a writer 'with a deep understanding and commitment to European rather than only British social and cultural ideas.'

The judges described Barry Hill's work in Broken Song as combining a 'scholar's skill' and a 'poet's sensibility'. The judges acknowledged that Hill had placed the ancient songs of the Aranda people 'not merely within the context of the society that invented them but also - and perhaps even more significantly - within the broader context of a general theory and history of poetry and poetic inspiration [...] Hill's study survey's an impressive array of aesthetic, anthropological, religious and political concerns. Like all literary criticism of the first order, Broken Song testifies that wide-ranging concerns such as these are essential if the significance and value of great poetry is to be valued and appreciated.'

The full list of nominated works is available on the NSW Ministry for the Arts website. The Premier, Bob Carr, who is also the Minister for the Arts, will announce the winners of each category at an awards dinner at the NSW Parliament House on 17 May.

WA Premier's Awards Favour Local Flavour
From a field of 115 entries, 24 works have been shortlisted for the 2003 Western Australian Premier's Literary Awards. Many of the shortlisted works have a distinctive West Australian feel. In the Fiction section, The Mindless Ferocity of Sharks by Brett D'Arcy is set on the WA coast and is an encounter with the world of adolescent boys and bodysurfing. Also nominated for the Fiction prize is Kathryn Heyman's The Accomplice. Once again, the WA coastline is a feature, but on this occasion the story weaves around the 17th century shipwreck and subsequent mutiny on the Batavia.

Moving further north to Broome, Nights in the Sun by Colin Bowles is nominated in the Writing for Young Adults section. The novel again features adolescent boys, this time growing up among the coastal town's pearl fishers. Still in the north-west of the state, but reaching inland, Alison Tilson's Japanese Story is nominated for the Script Award and set in the same region, Ngarla Songs brings to light the stories of the Wangka Maya people of the Pilbara.

WA Premier, Dr Geoff Gallop, will announce the winners of the awards at a dinner in the Alexander Library Building, State Library of Western Australia on 4 June.

Orange Prize for Fiction 2004
Two days prior to her shortlisting for the 2004 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Shirley Hazzard was also shortlisted for this year's Orange Prize for Fiction, once again for The Great Fire. The UK-based prize is an annual award, now in its ninth year, that 'celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women's writing'. The winner will be announced in London on 8 June and will receive prize money of 30,000 pounds. More information about the shortlisted writers and their books is available on the Orange Prize website.

Stasiland Longlisted for British Award
Anna Funder's Stasiland has been included on the longlist of 23 books for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. Sponsored by BBC Four and considered Britain's leading prize for non-fiction, the award winner will be announced in London on 15 June. Published in Australia by Text Publishing, Funder's book explores the effect of the Stasi regime on the German psyche. Stasiland has been published in the UK by Granta and has recently been released in Germany. Publisher at Text, Michael Heyward says Stasiland's overseas success is 'outstanding proof that Australian authors can write about whatever they want with an Australian accent and be read anywhere.' (The Age, 27 March 2004)

Lives Under the Microscope
Several recent publications are shedding further light on some already closely examined lives.

• Charmian and George : The Marriage of George Johnston and Charmian Clift by Max Brown
  Max Brown was a colleague of George Johnston when both men worked at The Argus in Melbourne. Brown, who died in September 2003, has re-visited the marriage of Johnston and Charmian Clift through the lens of personal knowledge combined with interviews and an extensive re-examination of the couple's writings. Sue Williams (The Age, 24-25 April 2004) says that Brown 'doesn't pull any punches in apportioning blame [...] he ultimately comes down hard on Johnston, quoting a friend predicting that Clift would have gone on to become a great writer had her husband died first - as had been expected - and accusing Johnston of perjuring himself in court in his testimony about her death.'



• Art & Life by Philip Jones
  Philip Jones discreetly shares an insider's view of the world of John Reed and Sunday Reed. Jones, with his long time friend Barrie Reid, had a close relationship with the Reeds and the artistic community that gathered around their Heide home. Patricia Anderson (The Weekend Australian, 17-18 April) believes Jones's memoir will 'interest those who have been around long enough to compare the heady, experimental and much-maligned 1950s with the grim, narrowly-focused professionalism of the postmodern art world.' Literary friends of the Reeds who appear in Jones's work include Barry Humphries, Geoffrey Dutton, Hal Porter, Max Harris and the Ern Malley poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart.



• John Wren : A Life Reconsidered by James Griffin
  James Griffin has long harboured a doubtful hope that before his death Frank Hardy detailed 'the research that was allegedly carried out to justify his charges against sports entrepreneur and political fixer John Wren in his acclaimed novel, Power Without Glory.' (The Australian Financial Review, 10 February 1994) Griffin was doubtful because he was convinced that Hardy's depiction of Wren (as the fictional character John West) bore little resemblance to the truth. Ten years after expressing this view, Griffin has published his own version of Wren's life. His conclusion is that 'Wren wasn't a hoodlum. Hardy was.' (The Australian Financial Review, 6 March 2004) Griffin accuses Hardy of poor research and alleges that cumulative errors have been made by those (such as Manning Clark) who relied on a novel as a reliable historical source.

Email Chat Leads to New E-Journal
poetryespresso, an email discussion list for poets, has given rise to Foam:e, a web-based poetry journal. Angela Gardner has taken the reins as editor of the new journal and hopes to publish it bi-annually. Foam:e aims 'to showcase immediate, strong work being produced now' and will use the internet as a tool to foster a 'community [that] can be enjoyed by people in disparate places, societies and time zones.' Issue one features poets from Australia, New Zealand, the U.S.A. and Ireland. Prominent Australian writers include Andrew Burke, M. T. C. Cronin Laurie Duggan, Jill Jones, and S. K. Kelen.

The Broadway Poetry Prize 2004
The Poets Union is calling for entries in The Broadway Poetry Prize for 2004. Sponsored by the Broadway Shopping Centre in Sydney, this year's entries will be judged by Jennifer Compton and Peter Bishop and the winner will receive $6,000. The competition is open to all citizens and permanent residents of Australia and the deadline for submissions is 26 July 2004. An entry form is available online or by contacting The Poets Union at:
PO Box 91 Balmain NSW 2041

Further information on the Poetry Prize can be found on The Poets Union website.

National Short Story Competition
The University of Canberra National Short Story Competition was inaugurated in 1992 and is an initiative of the Creative Writing specialisation in the School of Creative Communication. Entries in this year's competition are invited in both Tertiary Student and Open sections with prize money totaling $8,000. Entrants may submit up to five stories on any theme and in any style of creative writing. An entry form is available online and further details can be found on the University of Canberra's Short Story Competition website. The site includes the winning entries for the last four years.

Information is also available by phoning (02) 6201 2541 or emailing: short.story@comedu.canberra.edu.au

And also...
A reminder that entries are still open in this year's Vogel Award (until 31 May) and in the Inaugural John Iremonger Award (until 30 July). More details can be found in AustLit's March/April newsletter.

150 Years for the State Library of Victoria and The Age
The State Library of Victoria, one of Australia's oldest cultural institutions, celebrates the 150th anniversary of the laying of its foundation stone on 3 July 1854. To mark the occasion, the Library has organised special events, exhibitions and activities in a programme running until November 2004. A full description of events is available from the Library's website.

Sharing this sesquicentenary is the Melbourne newspaper, The Age. In partnership with the Australian Centre for Youth Literature (ACYL), based at the State Library, The Age will soon launch a list of 150 books published by 150 Victorian authors over the last 150 years. Readers from 10-18 years will be invited to enter a competition to select which book should be 'saved' in the event of a hypothetical catastrophe. Readers will be limited to 150 words in which to make their case for preservation.

Overland Celebrates 50 Years of Australian Bias
Stephen Murray-Smith founded Overland in 1954 under the dictum 'Temper Democratic, Bias Australian' and its current co-editor, Nathan Hollier, believes the journal is 'as relevant as ever.' Hollier is convinced that that there is still 'a real need for critical voices about our society', particularly 'voices that are knowledgeable about the history of Australian society and culture.' (The Age, 5 May 2004)

Hollier and co-editor, Katherine Wilson invited Barry Hill to launch the 50-year anniversary issue of Overland at the Melbourne Trades Hall ballroom on 31 March. Hill recalled that in the mid-1950s he had taken Overland 'with mother's milk and malt biscuits, in a spirit of domestic safety and optimism fed by my father's stamina as a left-wing humanist. Overland was a ballast at a time when we thought we might, in the long run, keep making things better.' ('The Mood We Are In', Overland no.174, 2004) Hill cited some aspects of Australian culture that he considers have not improved in the last 50 years, but he maintained a spirit of hope. He asserted that, ultimately, 'Buddhism is better than Marxism' and that 'In the long run it may prove more enduring as a moral foundation for global resistance on behalf of others than the secular humanism culturally bound to the West.'

Possum Magic Comes of Age
Mem Fox's now classic tale of Hush and Grandma Poss has celebrated its 21st birthday. Delightfully illustrated by Julie Vivas, Possum Magic has been in continuous publication since first appearing on 31 March 1983. (In the first year of publication it was reprinted ten times.)

Explaining the origins of the story, Fox recalls that she was undertaking a course in children's literature in 1978 and was required to write a children's story as part of her assessment. With some initial paintings by Vivas, Fox approached nine publishers over a period of five years, but was rejected by them all. Her tenth approach was to Omnibus Books in Adelaide. The story was accepted and went on to become Australia's best-selling picture book ever. Over one million copies were sold in its first ten years.

Omnibus organised events around the country to celebrate the book's milestone beginning with a picnic in Adelaide's Elder Park that attracted 6,000 people. During the afternoon, Fox read to the assembled crowd, and she and Vivas cut the Biggest Ever Lamington Cake.

New Staff Member at UQ
AustLit welcomes Bill Casey to the Content Development Team. Bill has a broad range of experience in a variety of libraries and has joined the University of Queensland team on a part-time basis.

New AustLit Records
During March and April 2004, the Content Development Team added:

• 5,267 new works
• 901 new agents (individuals and organisations)

In addition to these new records, over 7,000 existing work and agent records have been upgraded and enhanced.

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