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NEWS >  AUSTLIT NEWS – SEPTEMBER 2009
 
AUSTLIT NEWS – SEPTEMBER 2009

Welcome to the September 2009 AustLit newsletter. As of 2009 we have moved to a quarterly publication schedule and some previous newsletter sections have ceased. You’ll now find the latest news about submissions, conferences, festivals and new publications by following the links on AustLit’s home page to ‘Upcoming Events’ and ‘Hot off the Presses’.

Note: Newsletter hyperlinks to AustLit records are fully available to AustLit subscribers only. Enquire here about guest access to AustLit.

Contents

Note: Newsletter hyperlinks to AustLit records are fully available to AustLit subscribers only. Enquire here about guest access to AustLit.

AustLit News

New Search Features Available on AustLit
Regular AustLit users might have noticed some new features on website in recent weeks – an experimental Federated Search and an enhanced Full-Text Search.

These new services have been developed by the Aus-e-Lit Project, a collaboration between AustLit and the University of Queensland eResearch Lab. The Project is funded by the National eResearch Architecture TaskForce (NeAT). Detailed information about the project can be found on the Aus-e-Lit Project Page.

Federated Search
The experimental Federated Search currently includes AustLit, AustLit full-text collections, the AusStage Theatre Database, Picture Australia, People Australia, Australasian Digital Theses, Books and Collectibles and Google Books. The Federated Search is found below the Quick Search on the AustLit Homepage. To activate, simply click on the box to the left of ‘Federated’. Results for your search will be delivered differently from the usual search results. The Federated Search results will appear down the left hand side of your browser window in clearly marked boxes for each database. More familiar results from AustLit will accompany the Federated Search results in separate columns. (To see an example, click here for the Federated Search results for a search on A. B. Paterson.)

The Federated Search is a beta version. Feedback from your experience will help the Aus-e-Lit team provide the most appropriate tools and interface for researchers, teachers and students of Australian literature. Future agreements with data providers will support even richer searches than this beta version, so any information about your research needs will also be useful. You can find out more about the Federated Search beta version by clicking here.

Full-Text Search
AustLit also provides several collections of full-text material, including fiction, poetry and criticism. These collections are included in the Federated Search, but they can also be searched or browsed via the Full-Text Search Page.

Please explore these new services to see how they can help you conduct your research. As with all new internet services you might encounter some problems. If that occurs, please let us know and the Aus-e-Lit team will rectify the problem as soon as possible.

To submit your comments and suggestions, or to find out more about the Aus-e-Lit Project, contact the Project Manager, Dr Roger Osborne: r.osborne@uq.edu.au.

News from the Teaching Australian Literature Survey

TAL logo


Anna Gray, project manager for the Teaching Australian Literature Survey, reports on the project’s current status:

Thanks to everyone who participated by filling out a questionnaire! Our report has now been finalised for submission to the Australian Learning & Teaching Council.

The questionnaire responses, covering Australian literature teaching and learning across a range of disciplinary fields, from tertiary level English, Australian Studies and History units, and from secondary school English teachers, have made very interesting reading for us to analyse over the last few weeks.

In the past two months, the Teaching Experience Database (TED) has also undergone a flurry of development. It is exciting to see the information on Australian literature teaching that we collected from tertiary websites over the last two years presented in an accessible, intuitive database for use as a teaching resource.

There's still some work to do, but we look forward to sharing the report and insights from the questionnaire analysis, as well as the TED, with the community in the coming weeks.


To read more about the survey, and to link to the Australian Teaching & Learning Council, visit the Teaching Australian Literature website.		 Australian Teaching and Learning Council logo

AustLit’s Growing Team
Several people have joined AustLit in recent months. We warmly welcome the following new team members:

Janine Dunleavy describes herself as a ‘mother and grandmother of Koorie and Irish Catholic descent’. Members of her family were removed from Armidale in New South Wales, during the protection era, and relocated to an urban Aboriginal camp on the banks of Breakfast Creek in Brisbane. Janine grew up in Brisbane ‘with a strong sense of Aboriginality and connection to the land and the river but not to an ancestral homeland ... Like many trans-generationally dispossessed people I know some but not the whole of our story’. Janine graduated from The University of Queensland in 2007 with a BA in Anthropology and has recently completed the requirements for her MA in Environment at Griffith University. Janine is part of AustLit’s Black Words team.

Sylvia Kelso is an adjunct lecturer at James Cook University. Her research interests focus on genre fiction, especially fantasy, horror and science fiction, women's writing and feminist practice and theory. Two of Sylvia’s novels have been shortlisted in the Aurealis Awards for Excellence in Australian Speculative Fiction.

Joanne Sawyers graduated from the Ipswich campus of The University of Queensland with a Bachelor of Contemporary Studies. She was a research assistant for Dr Toni Johnson-Woods and, through that association, became responsible for upgrading AustLit’s Carter Brown records. Joanne is now focusing on current indexing and says ‘I am most fortunate as I am an avid reader and perpetual student so I get to combine my two passions.’

Jacqui Stockdale enrolled at James Cook University in mid-2001 as a part-time mature-age student. She completed a BA (Hons), majoring in English Literature and History. Her honours thesis dealt with the depiction in contemporary Australian fiction of the relationship between the settler society and North Queensland. Jacqui hopes to extend this investigation when she commences PhD studies in 2010. Jacqui echoes Joanne’s sentiments on joining AustLit: ‘I am absolutely delighted to ... be a part of the AustLit team – to be able to pursue my interests in Australian literature and history and call it work seems a misnomer’.

Kay Walsh is renewing a long-standing acquaintance with the field of Australian literature. Originally a librarian at the National Library of Australia, Kay was a researcher on a number of literary projects in the 1980s and 1990s. She worked as a research assistant for Dorothy Green, as a bibliographer for the first edition of the Australian National Dictionary, as a research assistant for two editions of the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, and as co-editor with Joy Hooton of the two-volume Australian Autobiographical Narratives. In 2006, Kay contributed to AustLit’s Australian Book History and Print Culture research community. This year she will continue to add to that body of knowledge while also focusing on indexing poetry published in the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser.

New AustLit Records

From June to August 2009, the Content Development Team added:

In addition to these new records, over 12,500 existing work and agent records have been upgraded and enhanced.

In the News

Macquarie PEN Anthology Launched

Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (cover)

Cover of Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (2009)
Used with permission of Allen & Unwin


On 30 July, Her Excellency Ms Quentin Bryce AC, Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia, launched the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature at Admiralty House, Sydney. In her launch speech, Ms Bryce spoke of her schoolgirl awakening to the writing of Joseph Furphy, Marcus Clarke and Rolf Boldrewood. She also revealed an adventurous spirit in her desire to read Henry Handel Richardson: ‘I used to climb through windows at my boarding school to read The Fortunes of Richard Mahony by neon light on the roof, three stories high’.

Ms Bryce expressed her belief that ‘we are witnessing a huge efflorescence of contemporary interest in writers and writing’ and that ‘from the consciousness of crisis, there is a national consensus that Australian writing matters’. Ms Bryce articulated the idea that the Anthology ‘maps the multiplicity of what it has meant to be Australian and declared, ‘it will be an invaluable resource for students and teachers,  as well as an absorbing and engaging monument to Australian achievement, identity and soul’.

The full text of Ms Bryce’s speech is available on the Governor-General’s website.

Macquarie PEN Anthology Admiralty House launch August 2009
Professor Nicholas Jose, Ms Alexis Wright and the Governor-General, Ms Quentin Bryce at the launch of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, Admiralty House

Photograph by William Yang
Used with permission


Following the launch, the State Library of New South Wales hosted a one-day symposium titled ‘Australian Literary Futures’. The symposium, presented in association with Macquarie University and Sydney PEN, discussed the significance of Australian literature for contemporary readers in educational settings, and for a range of audiences in Australia and around the world.

Speakers and panellists included several AustLit Advisory Board members: Professor Philip Mead, Professor Robert Dixon, Dr Liz McMahon and Professor Elizabeth Webby. (Professor Webby is one of the Anthology’s contributing editors.) AustLit’s content manager, Carol Hetherington, also took part. Carol presented a paper on ‘American Friends’ in which she shed light on W. W. Norton’s connection with Australian authors. (W. W. Norton and Company will publish the Anthology for the North American market in late 2009 under the title The Literature of Australia.)

The Anthology’s publication has, as expected, provoked a debate about definitions. What does ‘Australian’ mean? What is ‘literature’? And, specifically, what is ‘Australian literature’? There has also been discussion about the Anthology’s omissions and inclusions. Perhaps more than anyone, the volume’s general editor, Professor Nicholas Jose, is conscious of these issues. ‘There’s a certain wariness,’ he says, ‘when literature is framed as Australian that a limited, stereotypical version of Australia will be forced down readers’ throats. Yet if a new kind of canon emerges from what a great many informed readers appreciate and value, and remains provisional and open to change, that need not happen. The really taboo question is not what a comprehensive presentation of Australian literature may prescribe for us, but what it may reveal.’ (Australian, 27 July 2009)

Keneally Tackles Australia’s History

Allen & Unwin has published the first volume in a planned three-volume history of Australia by Thomas Keneally. With the over-arching title Australians, the history takes a people-oriented approach.



Cover (at right) of volume one, Australians: Origins to Eureka (2009)
Used with permission of Allen & Unwin 		Australians Origins to Eureka

Keneally says: ‘We have tried to create a book which not only registers the ideas and acts of past Australians, but also the feel of their clothing, the smell of their lamps, the sweat of their midnights, the icy water-buckets of their dawns, the ache of their neuroses, the excitement of their enthusiasms, their exaltation, their terror, their peculiar intimacies, of their sins and generosities. We hope to excite readers with the very humanity of our national tale.’

Historian Geoffrey Blainey offers one of the earliest reviews of Keneally’s initial volume. Blainey comments that ‘having won a great name as a novelist, Keneally’s ... decision to add history to his belt is brave and ambitious. Many segments of this book display the imaginative skills that a novelist more than a historian is likely to use in re-creating the past ... But perhaps Keneally has not fully realised – in due course he will – the difficulties and dilemmas that history can inflict on all of us who try to be historians.’ (Australian Literary Review, September 2009)

Nearly half of Keneally’s novels are works of historical fiction. In 1967 he won the Miles Franklin Award for Bring Larks and Heroes and in 1971 he published The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. While some of the novels explore Australian history, Keneally also ranges across fifteenth century France in Blood Red, Sister Rose, World War I Europe in Gossip from the Forest and the era of the gentleman explorer in A Victim of the Aurora. Keneally’s latest novel, The People’s Train, reveals the life of an early twentieth century Russian socialist who escapes a Siberian labour camp to make a home in Brisbane.

Meanjin announces Dorothy Porter Prize
Meanjin has established an annual poetry prize as a tribute to Dorothy Porter and the legacy of her work. The prize will be awarded to the best poem published in Meanjin in a calendar year and will be judged by Porter’s partner and novelist Andrea Goldsmith and poet Kristin Henry.

Meanjin’s poetry editor, Judith Beveridge said: ‘Although Dorothy lost her battle with cancer and is sadly missed, her poetry, lively presence and energy continue to inspire many people. Meanjin is proud to be able to run this prize in her memory.’

The Dorothy Porter Prize is co-sponsored by Porter’s literary agent Jenny Darling. Darling told Meanjin: ‘It was my privilege to work with Dorothy for 15 years. She was always enthusiastic, always optimistic and she would be proud to have this prize awarded in her honour.’

The inaugural award, with a cash prize of $1,000, will be announced in the December issue of Meanjin.

New Fiction Prize for Late Bloomers
Scribe Publishing and Copyright Agency Limited have combined to launch a new prize for writers over the age of 35. The CAL Scribe Fiction Prize is for ‘an unpublished manuscript by any Australian writer over 35, who may or may not have been published before’.

Fiction Acquisitions Editor at Scribe, Aviva Tuffield, said, ‘For a number of years it has concerned us that the Vogel Prize is only for writers under 35 because it seems that many novelists, especially women, only find the time and have acquired the life experience to write novels later in life.’ Tuffield continued: ‘It is a difficult time in the Australian fiction market right now, especially for debut authors ... and so we hope this prize will raise the profile of Australian fiction and find a wonderful new voice and/or novel’.

The winner of the CAL Scribe Fiction Prize will be awarded a book contract with Scribe and a prize of $12,000. The inaugural winner will be announced in March 2010. See Scribe’s website for further details.

Australian Classics Re-Issued
Twelve Australian works of fiction and poetry have been re-released by Sydney University Press under the series title Australian Classics Library. Each book in the series, co-edited by Emeritus Professor Bruce Bennett and Professor Robert Dixon, includes a new scholarly introduction and incorporates bibliographic material drawn from the resources of AustLit.

The earliest original publication date of books in the series is William Lane’s The Workingman’s Paradise: An Australian Labour Novel (1892); the latest is Gerald Murnane’s Inland (1988). The series also includes well known titles such as C. J. Dennis’s The Moods of Ginger Mick and A. B. Paterson’s The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses.


Cover (at right) of The Workingman’s Paradise (2009)
Used with permission of Sydney University Press		 The Workingman's Paradise

Sydney University Press’s Susan Murray-Smith says the Classics Library is particularly designed to make Australian literature more widely available for the secondary school and undergraduate university classroom. ‘By revitalising these classic texts, we are not only preserving Australian literary history, we are also able to bring them to a whole new generation of young Australian readers.’ (Media release, July 2009)

Publication of the series was supported by the Copyright Agency Limited’s Cultural Fund.

French Award for Arts Minister
The Australian Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts, the Honourable Peter Garrett, has been made an Officer in the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. To be eligible for the award, individuals must have ‘significantly contributed to the enrichment of the French cultural inheritance’.

Accepting the award in Paris, Mr Garrett noted that ‘France’s cherished goals of liberty, egalitarianism and fraternity have their reflection in many of the efforts that artists undertake contributing to fairness, collaboration and access to the arts for all. The Ordre des Arts et des Lettres is an invitation to continue to serve the arts for the benefit not only of my own country but for people in the wider world and I accept with gratitude this great honour as a musician and now as a politician who is the Minister responsible for the Arts and Culture and who serves in the Australian Parliament strongly asserting the value of the creative endeavours of artists.’

Other Australians to receive an Ordre des Arts et des Lettres include arts commentator and television presenter Andrea Stretton, film critic David Stratton and singer Kylie Minogue.

Cover Tales
Justine Larbalestier’s new novel Liar is due for publication in the United States and Australia in October. But while the cover of Allen & Unwin’s Australian edition has met with the author’s approval, the US version, to be published by Bloomsbury, has caused some disquiet. Liar’s narrator is an African-American girl; the original US cover design featured a white-skinned female.

After debate about the book’s cover erupted on US blogs in July, Bloomsbury made the decision to change the cover image to a curly haired, dark-skinned girl. Larbalestier is pleased with the change. ‘I thought the best I could hope for was a new paperback cover for Liar. That it is being re-jacketed for the hardcover is the best news I’ve had in ages,’ she told Publishers Weekly. Larbalestier says the problem is longstanding. ‘Whitewashing of covers, ghettoizing of books by people of color, and low expectations (reflected in the lack of marketing push behind the majority of those books) are not new things.’ ( Publishers Weekly, 6 August 2009)

Allen & Unwin’s cover does not depict the book’s main character but instead offers a text-based re-arrangement of the letters of the word ‘liar’. According to Larbalestier, it is just what she wanted: ‘something spare, iconic, cool and dark ... it captures the book perfectly’. (Age, 15 August 2009)

All the World’s a Stage
British stage and screen actor Eileen Atkins is adapting Helen Garner’s The Spare Room for a West End production within the next twelve months. Atkins contacted Garner for permission to adapt the book and plans to star in the stage version with her friend Vanessa Redgrave.

Atkins told Garner that the play would need to be set in England and that the two female actors would be somewhat older than in the book. Garner was happy to give her consent. ‘Everything she does is marvellous; she can really act. I’m happy to hand it over. As far as I am concerned, she could do it on the moon if she wanted to.’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 12 August 2009)

Meanwhile, Andrew Bovell’s When the Rain Stops Falling has completed its season at London’s Almeida Theatre and will head to the United States in early 2010. Bovell’s multi-award winning play will be staged in an off-Broadway production at The Lincoln Center Theater, New York.

Also seen in 2009 by overseas audiences is David Milroy’s Windmill Baby. The story of MayMay returning to the Kimberley home of her youth was performed in London as part of the inaugural Origins – Festival of First Nations season. The festival celebrated the Indigenous cultures of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States.

New Institute to Promote Digital Literature
The Queensland Writers Centre Management Committee announced the launch of the Australian Institute for the Future of the Book during the 2009 Melbourne Writers Festival. The institute, also known as if:book Australia, will be based in Brisbane and is only the third centre of excellence of its kind for digital literature. (Institutes also operate in New York and London.)

Kate Eltham, CEO of the Queensland Writers Centre, said ‘reports of the book's demise have been greatly exaggerated ... People are reading more now, in many different ways, than they ever have before. And we want to take advantage of that. if:book Australia is about supporting our authors and publishers to access the new ways of reading that are growing by the day.’

In 2010 if:book Australia will deliver a national seminar series to inform writers about opportunities to create and publish digital content. As Ms Eltham pointed out, ‘the benefit of digital media is that an author in rural Western Australia or a small press in Adelaide can pursue many of the same digital strategies as authors and publishers based in Sydney and Melbourne.’ (Media release, 28 August 2009)

To keep up to date with developments at the Institute for the Future of the Book, see the Queensland Writers Centre website.

ASAL Conference Presents Papers and Awards
The Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) held its 2009 conference at the Australian National University in early July. The conference, themed ‘Common Readers and Cultural Critics’, included over 80 papers, annual and keynote lectures, books launches and poetry readings. The Barry Andrews Annual Address was delivered by Amanda Lohrey, Professor Leigh Dale presented the Dorothy Green Lecture and Professors Philip Mead and Ken Gelder gave keynote lectures.

On the opening night of the conference several ASAL awards were announced. The ALS Gold Medal went to Christos Tsiolkas for The Slap and Noel Rowe posthumously won the Walter McRae Russell Award (for the best work of Australian literary criticism in the previous two years) for his collection Ethical Investigations: Essays on Australian Literature and Poetics, edited by Bernadette Brennan. The A.D. Hope prize (for the best postgraduate paper) was awarded to Scott Brewer for ‘“A Peculiar Aesthetic”: Julia Leigh’s The Hunter and Sublime Loss’. Brewer’s paper is published in the JASAL Special Edition, 2009 and can be read online here.

The ASAL AGM elected Dr Paul Genoni of Curtin University of Technology as the association’s next president and also created two new roles: Larissa McLean-Davies will take on responsibility for establishing and encouraging links with the secondary sector and Katherine Bode will maintain and develop ASAL’s website.

And in Other News:

The Story Continues

Parallel Importation of Books Investigation Concluded
The Productivity Commission has completed its investigation into the parallel importation of books. The commission released its report on 14 July 2009 and made three recommendations, the first of which states: ‘The Government should repeal Australia’s Parallel Import Restrictions (PIRs) for books. The repeal should take effect three years after the date that it is announced.’ The two other recommendations deal with writing and publishing subsidies and with Australian Bureau of Statistics surveys of the book industry and market.

In a media statement accompanying the report’s release, the Deputy Chair of the Productivity Commission, Mike Woods said: ‘having considered the industry’s feedback on the draft, and undertaken further analysis, the Commission found the case for repealing the restrictions compelling. Coupled with improved subsidy arrangements to address the relevant cultural aspects of Australian literature, the reforms would benefit the community overall.’

Two weeks after the Productivity Commission’s deliberations were announced, the Australian Labor Party held its national conference. The conference debated the issue of parallel imports and passed the following resolution: ‘Labor believes that the government should give priority to encouraging Australians to keep on buying Australian books and to maximising the economic, cultural and creative viability of Australian literature and Australian book industries’. The conference established a working group to investigate the issue further. The working group will deliver its report prior to a final decision being made by Cabinet.

The Australian Society of Authors (ASA) responded to these developments, saying: ‘The ASA rejects completely the illogical and unfounded research promoted by the Productivity Commission in its recent report on the parallel importation of books, and looks forward to the determinations of the Working Group’. (Media statement, 31 July 2009)

Former New South Wales premier and Dymocks board member, Bob Carr, welcomed the Productivity Commission’s recommendations saying it was ‘a win for Australian literacy, as downward pressure on book prices brings more books into homes and puts them within reach of youngsters’. (Australian, 15 July 2009)

The full report of the Productivity Commission is available on the commission’s website.

Say It Again

Hugh Mackay, positing the idea that a novelist may come closer to the ‘ideal of truth telling’ than a social researcher:

[Because fiction] springs directly from my own imagination, fed by my own experience, I’m free to tell it exactly as it occurs to me…

For me, the writing of fiction opens up an entirely different pathway to the truth from the well-worn grooves of social analysis. Fiction allows me to work from the inside out; social analysis obliges me to work from the outside in.

(‘Truth in Fiction’, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 July 2009)

Michael Cathcart, on the Australian tradition of Lemurian novels:

I suspect that most readers will be startled to learn that such a literature exists in Australia. While the conflicts of the American frontier were mythologised, the frontier conflicts in Australia were so completely forgotten that my generation of urban Australians grew up playing ‘cowboys and Indians’, not ‘squatters and Aborigines’...

The Lemurian novels were part of a wider body of popular literature that tried to dramatise the battle for the waterholes, both as a form of shoot-em-up entertainment and as a way of reflecting on the moral implications of the bloodshed.

(Edited extract, published in the Sydney Morning Herald, from The Water Dreamers (2009))

Alana Valentine, on being a contemporary Australian playwright:

I want, simply, to put my hand up for the work of theatre that captivates us with a reality we can see, but perhaps have not looked at, in our immediate present...

I continue to open up the laptop because I absolutely believe that there still are voices that have not been heard and wonders of understanding that can still sew the heart of every audience member into a place in the present...

It was Alex Buzo ... who told me that playwrights can be prophets, if we let them... Contemporary writers can make that stage a place where community can be built, healed, challenged and changed, shaken with horror and numbed with beauty.

(From ‘Captivated by Reality’, the 2009 Alex Buzo Memorial Lecture. To listen to a podcast of the full lecture, follow the links from the Alex Buzo Company website.)

Recent Literary Awards and Shortlists

Victoria and Queensland Choose Winners
In early September, both Victoria and Queensland announced the winners of their respective Premier’s Literary Awards. The Queensland awards were first offered in 1999; the Victorian awards began in 1985 to mark the centenary of the births of Vance Palmer and Nettie Palmer.

This year, Chloe Hooper won the non-fiction prize in both state awards. Hooper’s The Tall Man provides an in-depth analysis of life on Queensland’s Palm Island, crystallised in the 2004 death, while in police custody, of Cameron Doomadgee.

Hooper’s book is the only title common to both the Victorian and Queensland winners’ lists. Victoria’s fiction prize went to Christos Tsiolkas for The Slap while Queensland chose Richard Flanagan’s Wanting. Robert Adamson won Victoria’s C. J. Dennis Prize for Poetry for The Golden Bird; Emma Jones won the Arts Queensland Judith Wright Calanthe Award for her poetry collection The Striped World.

Each state’s Premier’s Awards offers unique categories. For the past five years, Victoria has awarded the Grollo Ruzzene Foundation Prize for Writing about Italians in Australia. This prize is designed ‘to promote books in all literary categories which explore the relationship between Italy and Australia. It aims to promote increased understanding of the two cultures and their histories.’ This year the prize was awarded to Lisa Clifford for Death in the Mountains: The True Story of a Tuscan Murder. Clifford, the daughter of June Dally-Watkins, now lives in Italy and enjoys the anonymity of her life there. ‘If you've got a famous mother, especially if they are famous for something unusual like etiquette, you are always going to wear it,’ she says. ‘People crack jokes and think no one else has ever said it before. Like, “Did you grow up walking around with a book on your head?” ... It's very freeing to live in Italy. I can be myself and there are no expectations.’ (Sun-Herald, 12 October 2008)

In Queensland, it proved ‘third time lucky’ for Birri-Gubba woman and solicitor Nicole Watson. Watson was shortlisted for the Arts Queensland David Unaipon Award in 2005 and 2007. This year, she has won the award for her manuscript ‘The Boundary’. The judges commented that Watson’s story brings the reader ‘a dynamic contemporary canvas that stretches from the courtrooms of native title hearings, black politics, mysterious murders and personal relationships, to inherent cultural beliefs, knowledge and transmission, with the spiritual world of the Dreaming and traditional law ever present’. They expressed the belief that the book will ‘appeal to a wide audience’ and will bring ‘a new genre into the existing body of Indigenous literature’. Watson’s 2005 and 2007 shortlisted titles remain unpublished, but with this win for the 2009 award she is guaranteed publication with University of Queensland Press.

For a full list of awards, go to the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards website and the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards website.

CBCA Awards Announced
The Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) has announced its 2009 Book of the Year Awards. Previous CBCA winners Bob Graham and Shaun Tan took out the Early Childhood and Older Readers Awards respectively. Graham’s How to Heal a Broken Wing tells the story of a small boy who rescues an injured pigeon and cares for it until it is well enough to be released back into the city. Tan’s Tales from Outer Suburbia is an intriguing collection of stories: buffaloes, dugongs and reindeer appear in urban neighbourhoods, while brothers and grandparents, armed with maps and clues, explore the outer edges of suburbia.

In the Younger Readers category, Glenda Millard and Stephen Michael King won the award with Perry Angel’s Suitcase, a tale of place and belonging. The Picture Book of the Year was awarded to Kylie Dunstan for Collecting Colour and Lincoln Hall won the Eve Pownall Award for Information Books with Alive in the Death Zone, a children’s adaptation of his 2008 autobiography Dead Lucky: Life after Death on Mount Everest .

The CBCA again ran its Junior Judges project in which children voted for their own winners. The young judges chose an entirely different winners’ list from that selected by their more senior counterparts although some of the official winners did appear on the junior list as ‘Honour’ Books. The Junior Judges selected the following titles: James Moloney’s Kill the Possum (Older Readers), Morris Gleitzman’s Then (Younger Readers), Margaret Wild and Julie Vivas’s Puffling (Early Childhood), Aaron Blabey’s Sunday Chutney (Picture Book) and Ursula Dubosarsky and Tohby Riddle’s The Word Spy (Information Book).

Thornton Win for ‘Original and Compelling Narrative’
Warwick Thornton is the winner of the $25,000 RAKA Award for 2009. The award, administered by the Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne, is for an Indigenous creative artist. It is presented annually in a rotating five year cycle for creative prose, drama, the visual arts, scriptwriting and poetry. This year, Thornton’s script for the film Samson and Delilah earned the judges’ praise.

The judges highlighted Thornton’s ‘brilliant use of cyclical time to create a highly original and compelling narrative that provides a “voice” to children at the centre of ongoing struggles in the Northern Territory. Great dramatic tension between the two main characters and an innovative mix of dialogue and other forms of communication create a powerful intimacy punctuated by moments of violence and conflict.’ The judges felt Thornton had created ‘one of the most important scripts to be produced in Australian film history’.

Other winners of this year’s Australian Centre Literary Awards are:

Full details of all the awards can be found in the awards section of the Australian Centre’s website.

Indigenous Writers Take Top Awards at the AWGIES
Warwick Thornton followed up his success in the RAKA Award by taking out the major prize at the 2009 Australian Writers’ Guild Awards (AWGIES). Thornton’s Samson and Delilah script won the awards for Feature Film Original and the overall Major Award. Other Indigenous writers won awards for episode one of First Australians (Best Documentary) and The Circuit: Series 2 (Best Television Mini-Series).

Thornton, who left school at fourteen barely able to write, told the Sydney Morning Herald’s Garry Maddox: ‘It’s just been a beautiful year for indigenous writers and directors ... It’s the growth of blackfella filmmakers. Like anybody in the industry, we’re not geniuses straight away. We need to learn the craft. We need to learn how to direct and to write. My first script was horrific, I’d never show it to anybody. For me, it’s taken this long to learn the craft, to learn how to write, and to find out what audiences want.’ (29 August 2009)

Other 2009 winners include Andrew Bovell’s When the Rain Stops Falling (Stage Award) and Finegan Kruckemeyer’s ‘The Tragical Life of Cheeseboy’ (Children’s Award). A full list of winners is available on the Australian Writers’ Guild website.

PEN Prize for David Marr
Journalist and author David Marr is the winner of the 2009 PEN Keneally Award. The award, offered biennially, is supported by Thomas Keneally and Random House Australia. It is given ‘in reflection of Keneally’s own contribution to freedom of expression in Australia, and of International PEN’s charter of access to literature and fellowship between writers’.

Bonny Cassidy, PEN’s Sydney president, presented the award to Marr. She commented that the ‘escalating interest’ of Australians ‘in the potential of the written word and language as vehicles of democracy, community and power is due in no small part to the work of David Marr’.

Marr’s writing includes the multi-award winning Patrick White: A Life (1991), Dark Victory (2004), and The Henson Case (2008). The latter was shortlisted for the Alfred Deakin Prize for an Essay Advancing Public Debate in the 2009 Victorian Premier’s Awards.

Marr’s PEN Keneally Award acceptance speech is available on the Sydney PEN website.

Book Industry Chooses The Slap
The Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) were presented in late June at an event hosted by crime writer Tara Moss. Twenty awards were announced on the night. They include:

The ABIAs are selected through an online voting process bringing together some 150 publishers and booksellers. For a full list of 2009 winners, see the Book Industry’s website.

Davitt Honours Go to Swaziland-Born Writer
The 2009 Sisters in Crime Davitt Award for the Best Adult Crime Novel by an Australian woman was won by Malla Nunn. Nunn was born in Swaziland and moved to Western Australia with her parents in the 1970s. Her novel A Beautiful Place to Die is set in South Africa and deals with an investigation into the murder of an Afrikaner police officer. Speaking by phone from the United States, Nunn told those gathered for the awards ceremony: ‘The Davitt is an honour that means a great deal to me because it comes from my peers: a group of women who like murder, mayhem, sleaze and a great yarn as much as I do’. (Sisters in Crime media release, 21 August 2009)

Also honoured at the Davitt Awards were Catherine Jinks for Genius Squad (Young Adult section), Katherine Howell for The Darkest Hour (Readers’ Choice) and Chloe Hooper for The Tall Man (True Crime).

Sisters in Crime spokesperson, Dr Sue Turnbull, observed that the 2009 contenders in the adult fiction category displayed a ‘wonderful range ... from the light and frothy to the very dark and grim. We travelled round the world and back in time. Some left us discussing whether or not the book came into our concept of crime and mystery, always a thorny question.’

The Davitt Awards are named in honour of Yorkshire-born Australian immigrant Ellen Davitt, a public speaker, writer, educator and artist who wrote Australia’s first mystery novel, Force and Fraud: A Tale of the Bush in 1865.

Text Prize for Shy Tale
The Text Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Writing has been awarded to Leanne Hall for ‘This Is Shyness’. Hall’s novel ‘follows Wolfboy and Wildgirl through one night in Shyness, a city where the sun never rises’.

Hall explains that she developed the idea for her main characters while researching the Swedish botanist Linnaeus. ‘I came across a curious chart. Linnaeus had categorised humans in a top-to-bottom hierarchy ... but what was most fascinating was his inclusion of mythical beings on the bottom rungs – including the mysterious wolfboys and wildgirls’. (Media release, 24 August 2009)

Hall receives a publishing contract with Text and a $10,000 advance against royalties as her prize. She is the second winner of the annual award. Last year’s winner was Richard Newsome whose mystery novel The Billionaire’s Curse was published by Text in August 2009.

US Award for Bob Graham
Bob Graham’s How to Heal a Broken Wing is the winner of the 2009 Charlotte Zolotow Award in the United States. The award is given annually to the author of ‘the best picture book text published in the United States in the preceding year’ and is named in honour of the children’s book editor and author Charlotte Zolotow.

Graham has had previous successes in the Zolotow award. He was highly commended in 2006 and 2008 with, respectively, Oscar’s Half Birthday and The Trouble with Dogs! How to Heal a Broken Wing was also shortlisted for this year’s Kate Greenaway Medal.

Fantasy Convention Holds Winning Prospects for Australian
Margo Lanagan and Shaun Tan are each nominated for a World Fantasy Award this year. Lanagan’s Tender Morsels is shortlisted in the Novel category while Tan’s Tales from Outer Suburbia is shortlisted in the Collection category. Tan is also nominated for best artist.

Tan won the artist award in 2007 and Lanagan was nominated that year for Red Spikes in the Collection category. They will find out the results of this year’s awards during the World Fantasy Convention in San Jose, California in late October.

Other Recent Winners and Shortlisted Works:

Marion Lennox – His Island Bride (Short Sweet category)

Trish Morey – The Italian Boss’s Mistress of Revenge (Short Sexy category), and Honorary Life Membership Award
and
Anne Gracie – The Stolen Princess (Long Romance category), and Lynn Wilding Meritorious Service Award

Odd Spot

Taking Books to the Streets
Sydney woman Sarah Garnett began working as a volunteer following the death of a friend. While serving meals to the homeless and disadvantaged, she noticed a man reading under the streetlights. Her conversation with the man led her bring him a few books and, from this beginning, the Footpath Library evolved.

The Footpath Library now operates in Sydney and Melbourne, offering books to people on the streets and in hostels. Peter FitzSimons has taken on the role of patron for the free library. For more information, see the Benjamin Andrew Footpath Library website.

This Month’s Spotlight

Web 2.0 Technologies Offer New Wave of Poetry Possibilities
In the June 2009 AustLit newsletter, Tully Barnett (Flinders University) reported on writers and the world of Twitter. This month, Tully delves into podcasting and poetry.

The poetry publishing industry is said to be in crisis. Many publishers’ websites instruct writers not to send poetry, because, they cry, collections of poetry do not sell. Within this climate, other avenues for the celebration and dissemination of poetry arise to fill the void.

The internet has impacted on poetry in numerous ways, most notably in the creation of communities of published and unpublished poets who use the internet to share and critique poetry, and in the creation of online journals such as Cordite that provide opportunities to read contemporary works as well as opportunities for publication.

But it is through the realm of audio poetry recordings that the internet is currently changing the practices of readers and writers of poetry, and creating new communities and new markets for the poetic form.

Podcasting is the practice of recording audio material and providing it online for an audience. Originally the term was created as a portmanteau of the words iPods and broadcasting, but a portable media player is not required as podcasts can be stored and played on a computer or burned to CD. The podcasting phenomenon took off in 2004, firmly identifying it as technology of Web 2.0 (which is more about dynamic content, active user content, and social networking), though groups had experimented with transmitting digital audio recordings before that.

Podcasting allows anyone to become a ‘broadcaster’ by using a computer to record music or audio commentary, or any sound, and post it on the internet. Podcasting uses audio recording software that is freely available on the internet, although it is obviously reliant on having access to a computer with a microphone and the internet.

Podcasts are recorded audio files, usually in the mp3 format, that have been uploaded for anybody to listen to. Most people use Apple’s iTunes program to find, listen to, and subscribe to podcasts, but there are numerous programs for this purpose. Listeners can subscribe to a regular podcast so that new programs in a series are automatically downloaded to their computers.

Where podcasting might have begun as a fringe activity, it is now embraced across a variety of media, institutions and interests. Traditional broadcasters are creating podcasts to further their market share. For example, you can download Radio National’s Book Show with Ramona Koval from the website at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/.

Organisations that have access to repositories of audio recordings of poetry are looking to new media as a means of disseminating objects that have been stored in libraries for decades. The Internet Archive provides access to readings of poets, both by the authors themselves and read by others (see http://www.archive.org/details/audio_poetry). The Academy of American Poets provides a ‘Listening Booth’ where users can listen to (but not download) poets such as Allen Ginsberg reading ‘A Supermarket in California’ or Dylan Thomas reading ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’ (apparently the Academy of American Poets is not restricted, despite its name, to American poets). The site provides ‘Further Reading’ for each audio poem in the form of a list of text-only poems that are thematically linked. The readings are largely taken from recordings of readings given at the Guggenheim Museum in the 1960s and 1970s, though there are other sources as well.

Similarly, the Poetry Archive, a UK-based organisation, provides access to great poets reading their works. While largely a repository for English and American poets, the Poetry Archive does have a few Australian poets to listen to, primarily through the River Road Press poetry CD series outlined below. Judith Beveridge can be found at the Poetry Archive reading four of her poems: ‘The Saffron Picker’, ‘The Domesticity of Giraffes’, ‘The Lake’, and ‘Man Washing on a Railway Platform Outside of Delhi’. (Go to http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=11209 to hear these poems.)

In March, the AustLit newsletter reported on Poetica’s Podcast Series of Australian Poetry (see ‘Podcasting Poets’ in the News section of the newsletter). Funded by the Australia Council for the Arts, and presented by poet Mike Ladd, A Pod of Poets places online eleven, 40-minute podcasts of Australian poets reading a selection of their poems. The audio downloads are supported by transcripts, interviews, and visual material, such as photographs, in an attempt to provide a rounded poetry experience for general interest and educational purposes. The podcasts combine the poets reading their works with the poets talking about their lives and their development as poets.

Jordie Albiston reads ‘Loving at the Ending of the World’, ‘Miscellany’, ‘Whale Song’, and ‘Letter Home (Mary Talbot)’ and talks about her early love of language in childhood, and time spent studying music, before returning ‘home’ to poetry in her late twenties.

Another poet in the series is the pre-eminent Les Murray. Murray reads a selection of his works including the in-progress poem ‘Too Much Career’, and takes the interviewers on a tour of his property. Murray’s other readings include ‘Laconics: Forty Acres’, ‘Poetry and Religion,’ in which he argues that ‘Religions are poems’, and ‘The Body in Physics’.

A Pod of Poets is available at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/poetica/features/pod/

The Australian Poetry Centre has recently begun producing a monthly podcast in conjunction with RRR radio station, based in Melbourne, to ‘promote poets, poetry and poetry-related activity’. The inaugural podcast, in August 2009, is twenty-three minutes long, contains mini-segments discussing items such as the Café Poets initiative, and features Tim Ferguson reading a poem from Blue Dog , the poetry journal of the Australian Poetry Centre. Ferguson reads ‘The Journey of the Beatles Fans’ by Max Ryan. The podcast is available at http://rrrfm.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=510901#

In addition to podcasts, poetry publishers are thinking about other ways of reaching their market. River Road Press has produced a series of audio CDs of poets reading their works. Some CDs in the series are collected by author, with a single poet reading his or her work; participants include Judith Beveridge, Michael Sharkey and Stephen Edgar. Other CDs comprise multiple poets reading their work, usually based around a theme, such as Volume 12 of the series Scissors, Fire, Paper, Water. The CDs are available from a small selection of bookstores or through online purchase. According to River Road Press, the audio recordings will soon be available for download for a fee from iTunes and Amazon. This will enable people to purchase individual poems, or tracks, rather than the whole CD.

Meanwhile, opportunities exist for using video as well as audio. Wordshed is a collaboration between The Red Room Company, Heat Magazine , and the University of Western Sydney to produce short segments on Australian literature for Access 31, the community television station. Rather than being forgotten after airing, however, Wordshed segments have been re-edited and uploaded to YouTube and iTunes where they can be viewed or downloaded as vodcasts (video broadcasts). The segments cover the general field of Australian literature with interviews of writers such as Sonya Hartnett, Luke Davies and Merlinda Bobis.

New technologies allow for new experimentation with old forms of literature. Whether they will provide avenues for deriving revenue from poetry, as in the experiment of River Road Press, remains to be seen. For now, it is a good sign that the Australia Council for the Arts is funding projects to put poets reading their poetry online. Let’s hope there is more of it in the near future.

Time and Tide

Ken Clift (1916-2009)
Ken Clift once ‘lent’ his identity and passport to a friend, Tom Baker, who was in legal trouble. The friend ‘disappeared’ to New Zealand, but died during World War II. The wreckage of Baker/Clift’s plane was not found until 1983. When ‘the other’ Ken Clift was discovered, the Australian owner of the name finally explained the unusual circumstances. At the time of his actual death, Clift was writing a book about ‘the entanglement of his actions’, to be titled ‘Double Identity’. (Sydney Morning Herald, 11 August 2009)

Clift was awarded a Distinguished Conduct Medal for his heroism as one of the Rats of Tobruk and wrote several books about World War II. He also worked as a historical advisor on a number of war-related films. In 2003, Clift’s play ‘Sister Street’ was performed in Sydney to coincide with ANZAC Day. The play dramatised Clift’s wartime experiences (and those of fellow members of Sydney’s Bondi Surf Club) in Egypt amid ‘the beach, the battlefields and the brothels’. Clift said his play dealt with the ‘underlying emotions of war’. He hoped it would be of value to today's youth: ‘I want them to know I'm glad I was there. But I don't want it to happen again.’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 26-27 April 2003)

Clift proudly launched his website to coincide with ANZAC Day 2009. He died three months later at the age of ninety-three.

Geoffrey Bingham (1919-2009)
Geoffrey Bingham was another Sydney-born World War II veteran who reached his nineties. Unlike Clift, who served in the Middle East and Papua New Guinea, Bingham’s war service was in Malaya and Singapore. He earned a Military Medal for his courage and leadership during the Fall of Singapore and was a prisoner-of-war in Changi and Kranji. Like Clift, Bingham wrote about the war. His stories began appearing in the Bulletin in the 1940s and some of these were later gathered in Laughing Gunner and Selected War Stories (1982).

Bingham published nearly twenty volumes of short stories and poetry, many appearing under his own Troubadour and New Creation Publications imprints. He twice won the Australian Christian Book of the Year Award – once for Tall Grow the Tallow-Woods in 1992 and again for Laughing Gunner and Selected War Stories in 1993. Bingham was an Anglican priest. In addition to his stories, poems and novels, he wrote hymns, bible commentaries and theological works. His total output numbered over 200 books.

Vladimir Kabo (1925-2009)
Vladimir Kabo grew up in Moscow and fought with the Red Army during World War II. After the war, while a student at Moscow State University, Kabo was charged with political crimes and spent several years in Gulag labour camps. Following his release, he returned to university and began a study of Aboriginal artefacts that had been taken to Russia in 1903 by Alexander Yashchenko. From this initial work, Kabo developed a career as an eminent ethnographer and anthropologist particularly in the fields of Aboriginal art and stone tools. He migrated to Australia in 1990. Among his many publications is the memoir The Road to Australia (1995) in which Kabo documents his early life and his efforts to migrate.

Frank Devine (1931-2009)
Frank Devine worked as a newspaper journalist and editor across Australia and internationally. In the 1990s he also served on the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts. As Christopher Pearson tells it, Devine was ‘at first regarded as something of a surprise appointment to the Literature Board because he had no tertiary qualifications in English. However, he commanded the respect of his peers and thousands of readers because, unlike most journalists and many academics and professional writers, what he wrote was invariably interesting ... It didn't matter whether Frank was writing short newspaper articles about contemporary politics or one of his reflective, freewheeling longer pieces for Quadrant. There was always a delicacy and playfulness to his prose. He understood cadence and how to make a sentence sing.’ (Australian, 11 July 2009)

Devine’s death, and his writing talents, did not go unnoticed by the Times in London. In the newspaper’s obituary (27 July 2009), Devine’s flair as a columnist later in his career was noted. ‘Freed of managerial cares, he was able to give freer rein to his rich imagination, ability to present an argument and a particular skill in sparkling debate. Above all, he wrote with a splendid feeling for words, making best use of the richness of the English language in a country where newspaper writing is too often short on elegance and precision.’

A personal reflection on Devine, written by fellow Quadrant contributor Peter Coleman, is available on Quadrant’s website.

John Harber Phillips (1933-2009)
John Harber Phillips, a former chief justice of Victoria’s Supreme Court, is also remembered as a writer of plays and poetry. Gerry Carman, in his obituary of Phillips, notes several plays written between 1985 and 2005. Carman also mentions Phillips’s retirement dinner. On that occasion, ‘Lord Wordsworth of Alfoxden’ (a persona of humorist Campbell McComas) adapted John Shaw Neilson’s poem, ‘Surely God was a Lover’ to praise Phillips with a rendering titled ‘Surely God Was a Lover (Lawyer)’. ‘Lord Wordsworth’ said: ‘Thus was farewelled John Harber Phillips, outstanding advocate and Australian Catholic, of callused hands and exquisite refinement of spirit, navvy, savvy, playwright and artiste; a judge with a difference who made a difference’. (Quoted in the Age, 15 August 2009)

Lord Wordsworth’s choice of a Neilson poem was not random. In 1988 Allen & Unwin published Poet of the Colours: The Life of John Shaw Neilson, a biography written by Phillips giving expression to another of the chief justice’s passions.

Terry Sturm (1941-2009)
The Arts Council of New Zealand describes Terry Sturm as ‘a leading critic and scholar of Australasian writing, especially New Zealand popular fiction’. (Media release, 29 May 2009) Sturm was born in New Zealand and undertook his early tertiary studies there. He continued his education in the United Kingdom at Cambridge University and the University of Leeds, before becoming a lecturer in English Literature at The University of Sydney (1967-1980). He then returned to New Zealand to take a professorial chair at The University of Auckland.

While in Sydney, Sturm wrote the section on drama and theatre for The Oxford History of Australian Literature (1981) and developed a course on the Australian and New Zealand short story. He later edited Christopher Brennan (1984), a selection of Brennan’s poetry, and introduced a course on Australian literature at The University of Auckland.

Over the course of his career, Sturm wrote or edited over a dozen books. As Harriet Veitch writes in her obituary, he is remembered as a scholar whose research was ‘scrupulous, but presented without fuss or clutter’. (Sydney Morning Herald, 24 June 2009)

Brian Ridley (1942-2009)
Brian Ridley’s funeral in the New South Wales town of Bungendore drew together poets from across the country. Mark O’Connor, in his obituary for the Canberra Times (16 July 2009), notes the attendance of Geoffrey Lehmann, Les Murray, Russell Erwin, Alan Gould and Geoff Page, among others. Ridley was a poet himself, but he was also a committed patron of Australian literature and writers. With his wife, Suzanne Ridley, he was closely involved with the Poetry Society of Australia in the late 1960s and he served on the committee of the Australian Society of Authors.

From the early 1970s onwards, Ridley and his wife were at the heart of the Canberra literary scene. Their circle of friends included Eric Rolls, Dorothy Green, Judith Wright, A. D. Hope, Clem Christesen, Patrick White and Dal Stivens.

Ridley worked in various Australian government departments including Treasury and Prime Minister and Cabinet. He also worked at the Australian War Memorial where, as a speechwriter, he drafted the funeral oration for the re-internment, in Australia, of the remains of the Unknown Soldier. This Remembrance Day speech was delivered on 11 November 1993 by then Prime Minister Paul Keating. The speech begins:

We do not know this Australian's name and we never will.

We do not know his rank or his battalion. We do not know where he was born, nor precisely how and when he died. We do not know where in Australia he had made his home or when he left it for the battlefields of Europe. We do not know his age or his circumstances – whether he was from the city or the bush; what occupation he left to become a soldier; what religion, if he had a religion; if he was married or single. We do not know who loved him or whom he loved. If he had children we do not know who they are. His family is lost to us as he was lost to them. We will never know who this Australian was.

The full speech is available as a transcript and an audio download on the Australian War Memorial’s website.

Suzanne Peterson (1944-2009)
Suzanne Peterson’s literary achievements occurred early in her adult life. She published the first of her two novels, Harry’s Child, in 1964 at the age of nineteen; her second novel, Crying in the Garden, appeared in 1974 following a decade’s overseas travel. (The novels are published under Peterson’s maiden name, Suzanne Holly Jones.)

During the 1970s, Peterson trained as a primary school teacher and went on to become a teacher, lecturer and author in the fields of mathematics and science. A fellow lecturer at Deakin University, Dr Christina Hill, recalls Peterson’s ‘love of films, serious art and literature’ as central to Peterson’s personality, as were her ‘deeply held social conscience and acute political insight’. (Age, 16 June 2009)

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