AustLit at IFLA
A paper on AustLit's successful implementation of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) data model was delivered at the 68th International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) Council and General Conference by Chris Taylor from the University of Queensland Library in late August. The paper was written by Marie-Louise Ayres in collaboration with Kent Fitch, Kerry Kilner and Annette Scarvell, the four members of the development team behind the establishment of AustLit. The paper about the implementation of the model regarded by many as the best structure for library catalogue records in the digital age, was warmly received and has contributed to the ongoing discussion in the international library community about the model and its application in management of large amounts of bibliographic data.

Baillieu Library Talk
On 16 October William Dolley, an AustLit team member at Deakin University, gave a presentation in the Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne. The presentation was made at the invitation of the Victorian Information Organisers (VINOS) section of the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA). The stimulus for the talk reflects the growing professional interest of the library world in both the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) model and its potential to influence cataloguing procedures, and the first application of the FRBR model in Australia. Mr Dolley discussed Deakin University's role in AustLit through its Australian Multicultural Writers subset and outlined the Gateway's overall structure and selection policy, its architecture, retrieval capabilities, research potential and the range of services available. Questions posed centred on the development, application and searching of the Thesaurus and the use of Enrichment terms in subject indexing.

A Bibliography of Australian Multicultural Writers
Wenche Ommundsen advises that she has about 1 000 copies of A Bibliography of Australian Multicultural Writers (1992) which will be pulped if she does not disperse them soon. These copies are available to anyone interested in Australian multicultural writers and writing. If you would like to obtain a copy, please contact William Dolley at Deakin University by phone (03 5227 8235) or email (wildol@deakin.edu.au).

As we mentioned in our last newsletter, 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.

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

• Terry O'Neill has an MA in Germanic Studies from the University of Melbourne. He was for many years an Assistant Registrar at that University and during his tenure he compiled Australian Children's Books to 1980: A Select Bibliography of the Collection Held in the National Library of Australia. In 1981 he was awarded an ARGC grant to travel to Europe to undertake further research on Martin Boyd as he had discovered a previously unknown novel, Dearest Idol, by Boyd, published under the pseudonym Walter Beckett. Terry transferred to the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University in 1993, where he has co-compiled List of Australian Writers 1788-1992 and The Bibliography of Australian Literature: A-E. At present he is working on volume 2 of that Bibliography (authors F-K), in addition to being a member of the AustLit team.

and

• Chris Wood has a Bachelor of Arts (majoring in History and Ancient History) and a Master of Arts in Librarianship, both from Monash University. His MA thesis focussed on the children's book trade in pre-Victorian England and America. Chris has worked at Angus & Robertson/Bookworld with antiquarian bookseller Kenneth Hince and as a rare books librarian. He continues this interest by working one day a week in the Rare Books Collection at Monash. In 1998, Chris joined the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash as a bibliographer to work on the Bibliography of Australian Literature Project and was a co-compiler for the first volume of that project, The Bibliography of Australian Literature: A-E (2001). Like Terry, Chris is currently working on volume 2 and is a contributing member of the AustLit team.

In coming newsletters we will be introducing you to our contributors from the other partner institutions: Flinders University of South Australia, University of Western Australia, Deakin University and the University of Sydney. Canberra members of the team from the University of Canberra and the University of New South Wales at ADFA were introduced in the July/August newsletter and those working from the University of Queensland were introduced in the September/October newsletter.

Senior Content Manager on Maternity Leave
Annette Scarvell, AustLit's Senior Content Manager, will take leave from UNSW@AFDA from late November until September 2003. Annette is happily expecting the birth of her first child over Christmas. Annette was a founding co-Content Manager with Kerry Kilner in 2001 and has been Senior Content Manager during 2002. Along with Marie-Louise Ayres, Kent Fitch and Kerry Kilner, Annette was responsible for much of the groundbreaking development work involved in launching the AustLit Gateway. We wish her well in this new phase in her life.

During the period of Annette's leave, the UNSW@ADFA Library and the AustLit team welcome Edgar Crook, from the National Library of Australia (NLA). Edgar already has a well-established relationship with AustLit through his work with the Pandora Archive service, where he has had particular responsibility for digital archiving of Australian electronic resources. In addition to his work at the National Library, Edgar has had extensive experience with the ACT Library and Information Service. With his excellent mix of librarianship, management and creative writing skills and experience, we are confident that Edgar will contribute significantly to the work of AustLit in 2003.

As a result of feedback from our subscribers AustLit has added some new attributes to the Advanced Search menu. These new attributes are:

• Subject work author
• Subject work forms
• Subject work genres
• Subject work subjects
• Subject work types
• Subject work year

The new fields assist in the identification of attributes embedded within a work. For example, it is now possible to construct a search to identify:

works published in the last 10 years (Year (first known)) that are about crime (Subject work genre) novels (Subject work form) of the 19th century (Subject work year)

.
This search produces a results set of 31 works (reviews and criticisms) that discuss works meeting the specified parameters.

Alternatively, you could search for:

works by women (Gender) written in the 1970s (Year (first known)) that discuss dramas (Subject work form) about sexual politics (Subject work subject)

.
This search yields five records that include reference to The Touch of Silk and/or Don's Party : A Play, both of which include the subject Sexual politics.

These additional attributes further enhance the quality and depth of searching that can be undertaken via AustLit.

Australia Council's Annual Grants
The Australia Council for the Arts Literature Board's Major Annual Grants were announced on 29 October. This year, 81 writers have been successful in receiving grants from a record total of 543 applicants. Chair of the Literature Board, Peter Goldsworthy, stated that this year's grants totaled $1,937,500. Three eminent writers were each awarded two-year $80,000 grants. The recipients are:

• Helen Hodgman, who is planning a non-fiction work on Parkinson's disease from which she has suffered for 20 years
• Matthew Condon who intends to write a fictional re-creation of Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett's journey to Hiroshima to explore the effects of the dropping of the atomic bomb

and
• Anthony Lawrence who is developing a book-length poem about missing persons, inspired by the disappearance of two of his friends in 1979
.

The intended projects of the successful applicants range from fiction (37 projects), poetry (18) and performance (7) through to non-fiction (13) and works specifically for children and young adults (10). Included among the applications were 30 projects in Languages Other Than English (LOTE). Of these, nearly a third were for work in Chinese. Three Chinese Australian applicants were successful in being awarded grants. A complete listing of all successful applicants for New Work and Fellowships can be viewed by following the links from the Australia Council's website.

Fox in Canberra
Mem Fox, writer of over 20 children's books, visited Canberra in late October to deliver the inaugural Walter McVitty Universal Children's Lecture at the National Museum of Australia. Fox spoke about the joy and terror of being a children's writer. Fox will return to Canberra in December as the featured writer of the Friends of the National Library of Australia Celebrations of Australian Book Culture for 2002. Fox's first, and best known, work is Possum Magic which has been translated into several languages and is held by more educational libraries in Australia than any other book.

Gemmell Unmasked
London-based Nikki Gemmell has recently been 'outed' by two British newspapers as the anonymous author of the 'sex novel', The Bride Stripped Bare. In the book, the unnamed heroine embarks on a series of sexual encounters after learning of her husband's infidelity. Gemmell has made it clear that the work is not based on personal experience, but was developed from the things women 'think but never talk about'. Although the novel has not yet reached the printers, the rights to its publication have been secured by Fourth Estate who bid 100 000 pounds sterling ($A280 000) at the recent Frankfurt Book Fair. Gemmell's three previous novels have explored ideas of women's identity through sexual relationships with locations ranging from Antarctica to the outback and London to Morocco.

International Awards
Australians have featured in recently announced awards and nomination lists for several international prizes.

• Sonya Hartnett has won this year's Guardian Children's Book Prize for her young adult novel Thursday's Child. The story is about a family surviving amidst poverty and hardship in an Australian country town during the 1930s economic depression. Claire Armitstead, literary editor of The Guardian, described Thursday's Child as 'a highly original and deeply moving novel, immensely skilful in its portrayal of a child's view of tough adult realities.'
• Peter Porter has won the 2002 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection with his recently published selected work Max is Missing.
• Tim Winton was a finalist for two major awards announced during October. Winton's Dirt Music was nominated in the Fiction section in this year's Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize and was one of six shortlisted works for the Booker Prize. The winner of the Fiction award in the Kiriyama Prize was Indian-Canadian writer Rohinton Mistry for Family Matters. (The non-fiction award was won by Padaung-Burmese writer Pascal Khoo Thwe for From the Land of Green Ghosts). The Booker Prize also went to a Canadian writer. Yann Martel won with his second novel, Life of Pi.

and

• Five Australians are included in the 'long list' for the 2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. They are:
  • Robert Dessaix for Corfu : A Novel
  • Richard Flanagan for Gould's Book of Fish : A Novel in Twelve Fish
  • Elizabeth Jolley for An Innocent Gentleman
  • Mardi McConnochie for Coldwater
  
  and
  
  • Tim Winton for Dirt Music

Victorian Premier's Literary Award Shortlist
The shortlist for the 2002 Victorian Premier's Literary Award was announced on 23 October. The Award is offered in seven categories for Fiction, Non-Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Young Adult Fiction, Essay and, for the first time, Screenwriting. In each category, except Young Adult Fiction, male writers outnumber female writers among the nominees.

The nominated works for the Louis Esson Prize for Drama explore some dark aspects of human life.

• In Choirbook, Daniel Keene offers three short pieces that investigate the themes of alienation and violence in modern urban life.
• Holy Day by Andrew Bovell invites a deeper understanding of the experience of Aboriginal children who were removed from their families.
• Insouciance by Barry Dickins examines the struggle for survival of a father and son whose wife/mother is emotionally and practically 'absent', although physically 'present', due to the taking of too many prescription drugs.

Holy Day and Insouciance are both published by Currency Press. Choirbook is not yet published.

A full list of all nominated works can be seen on the website for the Awards hosted by the State Library of Victoria. The winners will be announced on 11 November at The Victorian Arts Centre.

Summer Reading
As Christmas approaches, the summer reading choices are hitting the bookshop shelves. Publishers offer novels that can be comfortably digested at the beach or on the verandah or while keeping one ear on the cricket score. 'Genre' fiction comes into its own with murder, intrigue, past eras, distant lands and tangled relationships featuring prominently. Some candidates for 2002-2003 holiday reading include:

• Eye of the Abyss. Marshall Browne departs from his Inpsector Anders series to take his readers back to Third Reich Germany and the tribulations of a banker who accepts the Nazi Party as a client.
• Lunch with the Stationmaster. Derek Hansen also ventures to World War II Europe with a tale of Hungarian brothers who love the same girl. Concluding in Australia, the story travels through a landscape of crime, fear and violence.
• Shadows in the Grass. Each of Beverley Harper's seven novels has been set in Africa although Shadows in the Grass reaches further back historically, to the time of the Zulu Wars. A Scottish aristocrat is falsely accused of a crime and flees his homeland to forge a new life in the region of Natal and Zululand.
• An Angel in Australia. Adopting 1940s Sydney as his setting Thomas Keneally conjures a world combining American soldiers, Roman Catholicism, murder and the fear of Japanese invasion.
• Skins. With her winning entry in the 2001 Australian / Vogel National Literary Award, Sarah Hay re-creates the environment of Middle Island, Western Australia in 1835. Hay charts the survival of a brother and sister following a shipwreck and reveals a world of violence, abuse, deprivation and cruelty.
• Puberty Blues. For those who need a nostalgia hit, Picador has re-issued the 1979 novel by Gabrielle Carey and Kathy Lette. Carey and Lette startled the nation with their evocation of 1972 Sydney beach culture and the sex- and drug-laden lifestyle of 'surfie chicks'.

And for those who feel inspired by the holidays to start their own writing, there is
• The Writer's Guide : A Companion to Writing for Pleasure or Publication by Irina Dunn. This comprehensive guide has been revised and updated from its original 1999 publication.

Patricia Carlon
Reclusive crime writer, Patricia Carlon died in Sydney on 29 July. Favouring psychodrama rather than 'police procedurals' Carlon found a disinterest in her thrillers among Australian publishers. However, between 1961 and 1970, 14 of her novels were published in England. Becoming profoundly deaf in early adolescence, Carlon completed her education, but in adulthood lived a relatively quiet and confined life. This confinement was often reflected in the main characters in her novels - the invalid woman in The Whispering Wall who is paralysed by a stroke and bedridden; the young girl in Hush, It's a Game, trapped alone in her family's Sydney kitchen having witnessed a murder; or the blind residents of a southern New South Wales guest house in Danger in the Dark. Even those novels which did not have 'imprisoned' characters often employed restrictive settings such as isolated farms or small country towns.

In recent years, Carlon's work has been re-discovered by Australian publishers. South Australian publisher, Wakefield Press, published The Whispering Wall (1992) and The Souvenir (1993) and Melbourne publisher, Text Publishing has this year re-issued Crime of Silence and The Unquiet Night. The American crime publisher, Soho Press has also released seven of Carlon's novels since 1996.

R. A. Simpson
Melbourne poet, R. A. Simpson died on 2 October. Simpson published 11 collections of poetry between 1960 and 1999 and a further selection of his poems, accompanied by his drawings, will appear in 2003. Trained as an artist under the tutelage of George Bell, Simpson taught art in various secondary schools and other educational institutions in Melbourne. He was the poetry editor at The Bulletin for 2 years from 1963-1965 and held the same position with The Age newspaper from 1969-1998.

Writing of Simpson in an obituary in The Age, 10 October 2002, Chris Wallace-Crabbe noted that Simpson 'was a poet who put the Australian suburbs on the map. Verse had long been under the thumb of the landed gentry and Sydney quasi-bohemians, but he stuck resolutely, quietly, diurnally to the way most of us live.' Among Simpson's later works, Wallace-Crabbe regarded Words for a Journey : Poems 1970-1985 and Dancing Table : Poems and Drawings 1986-1991 as Simpson's finest.

In 1992, Simpson was awarded the Fellowship of Australian Writers (FAW) Christopher Brennan Award, an award presented to a poet 'who has written work of a sustained quality and distinction'. Simpson's other major prize was The Age Book of the Year Award, Dinny O'Hearn Poetry Prize in 1999 for The Impossible, and Other Poems.

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