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The Australian Literature Resource
NEWS >  AUSTLIT NEWS – JUNE 2009
 
AUSTLIT NEWS – JUNE 2009

Welcome to the June 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

AustLit News

AustLit Anthology of Criticism Nears Completion
Linda Hale, compiler and co-editor with Dr Leigh Dale, of the soon-to-be released AustLit Anthology of Criticism, writes about the anthology’s raison d’être:

The purpose of the AustLit Anthology of Criticism is to give senior secondary school students and early undergraduates the opportunity to read and access criticism of some major Australian literary texts. We are aware that for many readers, this anthology represents their first opportunity read and assess critical articles written by experts in the field. For this reason, we selected particularly interesting, useful or authoritative pieces that would challenge but not frighten readers.

Although the anthology is author-centred, it was decided that, in general, only articles relating to specific works on the secondary school curriculum list would be included. As an example, Cloudstreet has been chosen for Tim Winton, True History of the Kelly Gang for Peter Carey and My Place for Sally Morgan. These texts are also frequently taught at tertiary levels and will be of use to early undergraduates.

In the case of poets, it was possible to introduce a wider scope in the critical response to their work but the playwrights/dramatists suffered the same fate as the novelists: our attention had to be limited, in most cases, to just one work – that which is most frequently read and studied. Nevertheless, the authors chosen represent a range of Australian creative work – prose, poetry and drama, past and present – and include poets such as Les Murray, Bruce Dawe and Judith Wright; dramatists David Williamson, Hannie Rayson and Louis Nowra; and novelists like David Malouf, Henry Handel Richardson and Marcus Clarke.

Each author profile begins with a short biography that is directly linked to the AustLit record for that author. The biography is followed by a précis of the author’s work and a description of the articles in the anthology. Finally, there is a short bibliography that includes biography, autobiography and critical articles and books, as well as reference materials. The bibliography is not designed to be totally inclusive, given space restrictions, but the choice of listed works is based on general availability and, again, the articles are linked back to AustLit.

The AustLit Anthology of Criticism is designed to be a resource for students and their teachers. In particular, it is hoped that teachers will use the anthology, not only in their formal teaching program, but also as part of building the research skills base for their students.

The editors of the AustLit Anthology of Criticism thank the authors of the articles who have generously given AustLit permission to republish their work. The editors also acknowledge the funding support of both AustLit and The University of Queensland.

The AustLit Anthology of Criticism will be launched at the Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference in Canberra in July 2009.

Who’s Teaching What, Where? – the Teaching Australian Literature (TAL) Survey
What is the current state of Australian literature education in our schools and universities? Is it in decline as some in the mainstream media suggest? Is it being pushed aside in the drive for vocationally-oriented learning? Have ‘postmodern’ approaches to teaching literature come at the expense of studying the national literary ‘heritage’? And how do we define ‘Australian literature’ today?

As a teacher of Australian literature, what do you think?

The Teaching Australian Literature (TAL) Survey is an Australian Teaching and Learning Council (ALTC) funded project researching the experiences of teachers and students of Australian literature. The project aims to find out how and where Australian literature is currently being taught, and what is needed to further support this study and get more people interested in Australian texts.

The survey directors, Philip Mead (UTAS), Kerry Kilner (UQ) and Alice Healy (UniSA), have produced a set of detailed questionnaires for tertiary teachers and co-ordinators working in Australia and overseas, and for secondary teachers in Australia. The questionnaires aim to gauge your perspectives on teaching Australian literary texts.

We’d like to thank all those who have already filled in these lengthy questionnaires. We’ve had a great response from Australian academics and secondary teachers. As hoped, the responses document a wide range of experiences in the Aust. lit. field, along with a great amount of contextual detail and we are looking forward to sharing these perspectives with the community in our project report, due at the end of August.

For those who haven’t yet completed one, the questionnaires will remain available through the TAL webpages via the following link: http://teaching.austlit.edu.au/ throughout July. If you are in any one of the target groups, please fill in and send us your questionnaire and encourage other teachers of Australian literature to share their experiences too. If you’re an overseas-based teacher of Australian texts, we’d particularly like to hear from you!

If you require a printed copy of the questionnaire, or have any other questions about the TAL Survey, please contact TAL project manager Anna Gray at anna.em.gray@gmail.com or email Alice Healy at alice.healy@unisa.edu.au.

New Issue of Black Words e-News
The May-June issue of Black Words e-news is now available. Black Words e-news regularly includes information on new books added to the Black Words Research Community and news on Black Words team members and activities around the country.

Around the Team
The AustLit contributors’ team is dispersed across Australia from Perth in the west to Sydney in the east and from Townsville in the north to Hobart in the south. Team members work on current and retrospective projects and contribute to the development and richness of AustLit’s specialist research communities. Team members often extend their Australian literature connection through private research, conference attendance, and critical and creative writing. Here’s a sample of recent work and activities undertaken by team members:

Terry O’Neill (Monash University), an associate editor for The Bibliography of Australian Literature and an AustLit researcher, writes: ‘Many who have read Joan Lindsay’s novel Picnic at Hanging Rock or seen the film version have tried to establish whether the mysterious disappearance of the school girls on St Valentine’s Day 1900 is based on an actual event – but in vain’.

Now, in an article titled ‘Joan Lindsay: A Time for Everything’, Terry brings to life a real incident that provides new insight into the novel’s background. Terry’s article is published in the May 2009 issue of the La Trobe Journal, an issue devoted to Melbourne writers, and is available online here.

Dr Roger Osborne (University of Queensland), is continuing work on the Aus-e-Lit Project. The project, a collaboration between AustLit and the University of Queensland’s eResearch Lab, is addressing the eResearch needs of Australian literature researchers. Roger reports:

Aus-e-Lit is progressing very well. A pilot federated search was completed in February and the new service has received good feedback. The project aims to produce richer results by targeting a wider collection of the National Library of Australia’s databases after that institution’s Single Business Model is released later in 2009. Feedback from demonstrations and conference papers will inform development over the next few months with an eye on the annual Association for the Study of Australian (ASAL) conference to be held in Canberra, 8-12 July 2009.

Roger will be attending the ASAL conference where a lunchtime introduction to the Collaborative Annotation Service is scheduled. During June, Roger will distribute invitations and provide more details about the format of the event. He will be available throughout the conference for discussion of future plans for the Federated Search, the Collaborative Annotation Service and the possibilities for constructing presentations, exhibitions, essays and literary pathways with LORE, Aus-e-Lit’s Compound Object authoring and publishing tool.

Kerry Kilner, AustLit’s Executive Manager, notes: ‘The results of the development work undertaken for the Aus-e-Lit project will begin to be seen in AustLit very shortly with the release of the new full text search and display interface and the Federated search option coming on line within weeks. Watch this space!’

For those interested in the technical background of the LORE service, a paper written by our eResearch colleagues Jane Hunter and Anna Gerber is available here. The Aus-e-Lit Project has laid solid foundations for further development during the next eighteen months. Please contact Roger if you would like to comment on or participate in this exciting phase of the project: r.osborne@uq.edu.au

Elizabeth Hodgson at the University of Wollongong
Photo courtesy of Joan Keating		 Elizabeth Hodgson (University of Wollongong), a contributor to AustLit’s Black Words dataset, was one of those who gathered at the BlakWrite Symposium in Wollongong in mid-May 2009. The symposium, supporting creative and critical writing by Indigenous writers, brought together writers from across the country including Jared Thomas, Bruce Pascoe and Lorraine McGee-Sippel. Here Elizabeth provides a glimpse into the symposium’s highlights.

Anita Heiss gave the keynote address, titled ‘Black Writing: The New Australian Literature’. Anita outlined the progress of Aboriginal writing in Australia today, highlighting many aspects of which we can be proud – children’s writing, poetry, novels and translations. For instance, from 1999 to 2009, Black Words lists 74 novels, 92 children’s books and 1,813 indexed poems. Many communities are producing bi-lingual books, including titles in the Kinn/Belaa, Guruma, Worrorra and Ngunnawal languages. Internationally, said Heiss, there is a growing interest in and desire to engage with Aboriginal Australia. A quick AustLit search found that in the past ten years our works have been translated into Indonesian, French, Spanish, Dutch, Chinese, German and Japanese.

The symposium featured several writing panels. Lorraine McGee-Sippel and Elizabeth Hodgson talked on the theme ‘Write for Your Life’ and examined the issues raised by autobiographical writing where writers deal with the inevitable depression and public curiosity that comes from baring one’s soul. Barbara Nicholson and Bruce Pascoe’s ‘What’s Next: Future Directions’ sessions generated much discussion from the audience. Topics considered included ‘not losing sight of the history, of the dreaming’ and fostering a love of writing and literature among our young people.

For Elizabeth, the highlight of the symposium was a workshop with Anita Heiss on ‘Marketing and Branding’. Anita’s ideas ranged across self-promotion, publicity avenues (including ABC1’s Message Stick program), ‘finding a niche’ and using a life coach.

My overall impression was a feeling of a successful future for Indigenous writers and writing as long as the ideas voiced can be put into action. I would conclude that the two days were positive and we all departed with good feelings towards each other and that this writer very warmly farewelled a publisher, whom she had only met a couple of hours prior.

Farewells
AustLit has recently farewelled three team members – Melinda Jewell, Leila Ismail and Yvette Holt. Melinda was based at the University of New South Wales during the early part 2009 where she contributed to AustLit’s indexing of current periodicals. Leila has worked at both the University of Queensland and Deakin University. She provided wonderful input during the research and production phases of The Bibliography of Australian Literature and, in Melbourne, gleaned much new information on Australian children’s literature from the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.

Yvette, a foundation member of the Black Words team, has left AustLit to work with the Northern Territory’s Workplace English Literacy and Language program. Yvette says her new position will include training and assessment, detailing literary resources, advancing teaching practices and ‘generally working towards improving adult English and literacy/numeracy amongst some of the nation’s most disadvantaged groups’. In bidding AustLit farewell, Yvette made these parting comments: To Dr Anita Heiss and the team thank you, it has been an incredible journey! Collectively I feel as though we have refreshed Indigenous Australian writing and storytelling from ancient whisperings to an authoritative and contemporary voice on the Australian literature radar.’

To Melinda, Leila and Yvette, all the best in your new endeavours and our thanks for the important contributions you have made to AustLit.

Welcome
While sadly farewelling valued team members, AustLit is happy to welcome Jake Milroy to the Black Words team. Jake says: ‘I was born and raised in Perth, Western Australia, and my people are Palyku from the eastern Pilbara region of Western Australia ... I enjoy seeing and being part of developments that encourage the incorporation of our history into a national system of record.’ Read more of Jake’s story in the March-April issue of Black Words e-news. (And for the latest in Black Words news, see the May-June issue of e-news here.

New AustLit Records
During March, April and May 2009, the Content Development Team added:

In addition to these new records, almost 13,000 existing work and agent records have been upgraded and enhanced.

In the News

New Editor at the Monthly’s Helm Following Warhaft’s Departure
Twenty-three-year-old Ben Naparstek, an arts/law graduate of the University of Melbourne, is the new editor of the Monthly magazine. Naparstek is replacing Sally Warhaft who had edited the Monthly from 2006 until late April 2009. A dispute between Warhaft and the Monthly’s editorial board ended Warhaft’s tenure. Warhaft believed she had the right to commission articles for the magazine; the board chair, Robert Manne, begged to differ.

In an interesting sidelight to the clash of opinion, former federal treasurer, the Hon. Peter Costello, took some of the blame for Warhaft’s demise. Costello appeared on the ABC1 television program Q&A with Warhaft on 5 March 2009. (A full transcript and video download of the show is available on Q&A’s website.) In the course of that program, Costello and Warhaft shared their views on an essay written by the Prime Minister, the Hon. Kevin Rudd, and published by the Monthly in its February 2009 issue. According to Costello, it was after the on-air discussion that Warhaft suggested to the Monthly’s board that the magazine publish a reply, written by the former treasurer, to the prime minister’s views. The proposal was rejected. Mr Costello wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘it appears that I played an accidental part in her [Warhaft’s] downfall. Let me apologise.’ (13 May 2009)

The new editor began work at the Monthly in late May. Naparstek made it clear to the Australian’s Caroline Overington that ‘I’ll be commissioning the stories as editor’. He noted that publisher Morry Schwartz, board chair Robert Manne and board member (and interim editor) Chris Feik ‘will be a great resource. They’re an advisory board, and are there to bounce ideas off. I have enormous respect for each of them, so I will be considering their advice very seriously.’ (27 May 2009)

Naparstek has previously written for several Australian and international daily newspapers and the Australian Jewish News. He is co-editor, with Justin Clemens, of the forthcoming title The Jacqueline Rose Reader, to be published in 2010 by Duke University Press.

Books Alive Revives Grug
From the late 1970s to the early 1990s Ted Prior’s Grug series captured the hearts and imaginations of many Australian children. In 2009, the Books Alive campaign has convinced Prior to bring Grug out of retirement and set him on the path to a new adventure. When the campaign runs during September, readers who purchase any of the titles listed in 50 Books You Can’t Put Down will receive the new Grug story or a book of specially commissioned short stories. The stories are written by leading authors including Anita Heiss, Toni Jordan, Thomas Keneally and Peter Temple.

Books Alive has selected 26 fiction, 14 non-fiction and 10 children’s titles for the 2009 version of 50 Books You Can’t Put Down. As in previous years, the booklet will be available free at bookstores and selected public venues around Australia. Books Alive, funded by the Australian Government, has been in operation since 2001. ‘The campaign has directly resulted in the sale of an extra 1.4 million books, valued at over $12 million.’ (Media release, March 2009)

The Slap Destined for the Small Screen
Production company Matchbox Pictures has won the bidding process for a screen version of Christos Tsiolkas’s award-winning novel The Slap. Matchbox producer Tony Ayres says he hopes the television version will be filmed in eight episodes to match the novel’s eight chapters, each one revealing the perspective of a different character.

Ayres enthused: ‘The Slap is about intimate human relationships and television is such a fantastic medium for that ... People are talking about television in the way they used to talk about movies and books, it’s what seems to be the cultural capital of our age.’ (Age, 28 May 2009)

Matchbox has recently produced the multi-award winning film The Home Song Stories, based on Ayres’s own life, and the telemovie Saved. Its current projects include a feature film version of David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life and a thirteen-part adaptation of Nadia Wheatley and Donna Rawlins’s 1987 picture book My Place. The latter will be screened in 2010 on the ABC’s newly announced children’s channel.

Details of Matchbox’s completed and current projects are available on the Matchbox Pictures website.

Monkey Baa Announces Inaugural Patrons

Monkey Baa Theatre for Young People has appointed its first company patrons – Jackie French, Susanne Gervay and Morris Gleitzman. Each of the writers has previously had a book adapted for the stage by Monkey Baa and they will now support the theatre company’s creation of new Australian works for young people.

Monkey Baa began in 1997 with the aim of producing ‘high quality theatre programs for young people, their families, teachers and communities throughout Australia and internationally’. Many of their productions have been adapted from Australian children’s fiction and young adult novels. The productions include the Helpmann award-winning Hitler’s Daughter (adapted from Jackie French’s children’s book of the same name), ‘Worry Warts’ (an adaptation of Morris Gleitzman’s popular story) and ‘I Am Jack’ (a stage version of Susanne Gervay’s young adult novel).		 Monkey Baa Patrons Susanne Gervay, Morris Gleitzman and Jackie French
Photo courtesy of Terry Moore
Used with permission

Tim McGarry, one of Monkey Baa’s founders along with Eva Di Cesare and Sandra Eldridge, expects the patron program will help the company reach more young people in cities and towns, including remote areas, across Australia. (In 2008, over 39,000 children attended one of Monkey Baa’s productions.) ‘For a long time,’ says McGarry, ‘we had been discussing our need to acknowledge the people who have been valuable in the company’s work and who are also great champions for what we do. The bulk of our work is the adaptation of Australian literature for the stage and we felt it was therefore most appropriate that these people should be Australian authors. And, because Monkey Baa operates under an unusual triumvirate model, we decided to reflect this model by choosing three patrons.’

The new patrons are enthusiastic about the youth theatre company and its effect on the lives of Australian children. French believes that Monkey Baa’s productions take children beyond the everyday. The shows reveal how ‘ideas and characters can be translated from one art form into another, keeping the essence of the book but refining it’. Gleitzman also recognises the power of theatre. In his travels around Australia since Monkey Baa’s production of ‘Worry Warts’, Gleitzman says, ‘I’m still meeting kids in far-flung areas for whom it was the theatrical experience of their lives. In many cases, it was the only theatrical experience of their lives. It won’t be too many years before NIDA, VCA and the film schools are being wowed by passionate country kids whose first experience of drama was a Monkey Baa production.’ (Monkey Baa media release, 16 May 2009)

Monkey Baa is currently touring the country with ‘Thursday’s Child’, an adaptation of Sonya Hartnett’s young adult novel Thursday’s Child. For more information about Monkey Baa, and for a touring schedule, visit the company’s website.

It’s Not the Panacea, but It Is a Seed Sown’
With these words, the Books in Homes program aims to make a difference in the lives of young children growing up in disadvantaged circumstances in Australia. These children, many living in remote and isolated communities, often lack ready access to books. The Books in Homes scheme provides each participating child with nine books per year to take home and keep. The books are chosen from a preview pack of 48 books distributed via schools with each school retaining the preview pack for its own library.

Selected books are grouped into four age brackets and include picture books, non-fiction titles, popular series books and Indigenous stories. The book pack for Term II, 2009, for instance, includes Pete the Sheep and Loongie the Greedy Crocodile for young children; You and Me: Our Place and Lucy Goosey for beginning readers; The Muddle-Headed Wombat and Selby Spacedog for independent readers; and The Lampo Circus and Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence for older readers. Twenty-five percent of all selections are books by Indigenous writers.

The Books in Homes ambassador for Term II is the co-ordinator of AustLit’s Black Words dataset, Dr Anita Heiss. Dr Heiss (pictured at right) offers the following message to children in her introduction to the Term II book list: ‘Hello to all you deadly book lovers ... I love writing books, and more importantly, I love reading them, and you know why? When I lie in bed or at the beach I read books that take me travelling to different countries and different times in history. I get to learn about different cultures and people, and sometimes I can visit different galaxies. Books are like friends, and I never get lonely if I have a book with me.’ (Term II catalogue) Anita Heiss pictured on the cover of the Books in Homes Term II 2009 catalogue
Photo courtesy of Anita Heiss

To find out more about Books in Homes and the 200-plus participating schools in New South Wales, the ACT, Queensland, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia, visit the program’s website

Books Cast in Bronze Celebrate Writers and Landscape

Sculptor Peter Latona has recently designed an artwork for one of Canberra’s suburban shopping centres. The sculpture will find its home in the suburb of Garran where the streets are named after Australian writers such as Mary Gilmore, Mary Gaunt, Charles Harpur and Will Ogilvie.

Latona’s sculpture celebrates the contribution of books and writers to the ideals of knowledge and wisdom by representing these writers and their landscape writing. Climbing Latona’s 2.6 metre ‘tower of books’, and perching atop it, are three inquisitive possums, forming another link to the landscape.		 1:10 design maquette of the proposed sculpture
Design maquette of the proposed sculpture
Photo courtesy of Peter Latona

The sculpture’s granite base morphs into book shapes that then evolve into a stack of bronze books. Close examination of the finished artwork will reveal engraved titles on the bronze books. The tower of books threatens to topple, but somehow, says Latona, ‘still manages to hold up the open pages of the best of society’s mental and cultural achievements’. (Design proposal for ACT Government)

Latona has previously created busts of Anne Edgeworth and Judith Wright. For images of these works and other Latona sculptures, see the artist’s website. To discover all the Garran streets that honour writers, follow the links on the ACT Planning and Land Authority’s webpages for Garran.

A Suburb Called ‘Neilson’?
Not to be outdone by Canberra’s literary street-naming, Melbourne-based writer and teacher Michael McGirr is proposing that his city’s newest suburb be named after poet John Shaw Neilson. McGirr reminded Jason Steger at the Age that Neilson lived within the boundaries of the new suburb (along the banks of the Maribyrnong River) when he worked for Victoria’s Country Roads Board. ‘There are masses of streets named after English writers,’ said McGirr, ‘but not many Australians. It’s an indication of how important writers were in the 19th century when the suburbs were rolled out ... It would be a great statement and acknowledgement of a great human being and fantastic poet’ for the new suburb to be called Neilson. (Age, 25 April 2009)

McGirr has written to Victorian Premier John Brumby to put the case for the suburb of ‘Neilson’. Picador will publish McGirr’s new book, the Lost Art of Sleep, in July 2009.

Book Buying from Vending Machines – a ‘Novel Idea’
Novel Vending Australasia launched its first book vending machine in Australia with an event at Sydney’s Overseas Passenger Terminal, Circular Quay, on 1 April 2009. ‘Book vending machines are a very novel concept, pardon the pun,’ said Novel Vending Australasia director Robyn Gipters. ‘We are very excited by this as these vending machines will make books even more accessible to consumers.’ (Media release, 23 March 2009)

The Australian mini-bookshops are based on a concept developed several years ago in the UK by Novel Idea Vending. Besides providing consumers with access to books 24 hours a day, the vending machines offer audio grabs of author interviews and information on new releases. Gipters told Bookseller and Publisher’s Weekly Book Newsletter that 200 vending machines would be rolled out in Australia and New Zealand in the next three to five years. The plan is to locate the machines in venues such as hospitals, airports, hotels and universities.

Press On Publishing Seeking Subscription Support
Michael Wilding is backing a publishing initiative based on the centuries-old subscription model. Press On Publishing, based in Adelaide, is drawing together novelists, publishers and booksellers to ‘intervene actively in the publication and promotion of new fiction in Australia’. The first three titles from the Press are novels by Wilding, Peter Corris and Phillip Edmonds, and subscribers will be able to purchase them at a discounted rate.

Ross Fitzgerald commended Press On Publishing in the Australian edition of the Spectator in early May. Fitzgerald, recognising the difficulties of scale for writers in a small market, harked back to Vance Palmer’s comment that ‘writing a book in Australia is like throwing a rock into vast, soundless mud.’ Fitzgerald believes the current economic climate may suit small enterprises because larger publishers ‘are huge, debt-laden and, like most big business right now, resorting to cutting staff and cancelling contracts. There is a lot of “product” looking for a publisher.’ In Fitzgerald’s view: ‘A subscription-based press might be just the sort of endeavour to resonate in 2010. At the very least, it deserves a red-hot go and support from fiction writers throughout the nation.’ (‘A Ripple in the Vast, Soundless Mud’ Spectator, 6 May 2009)

More information regarding Press On Publishing’s plans, and details of subscription rates, is available on the Press’s website.

Film Clips Promote New Fiction

Cover of Leah Giarratano’s Black Ice
Photo courtesy of Random House Australia
Used with permission

Random House Australia, in conjunction with Dymocks and Australian Bookseller + Publisher, is running an innovative competition to promote new fiction. Filmmakers are being asked to create a 90-second ‘book trailer’ to publicise three new novels – The True Story of Butterfish by Nick Earls, Black Ice by Leah Giarratano and State of Emergency by Sam Fisher (a pseudonym for thriller-writer Michael White).

Brett Osmond, Marketing and Publicity Director at Random House, says: ‘We are encouraging budding film makers to apply their skills to create short film pieces to promote books and reading especially to reach those people who are already tapped into the video medium’.

The competition winners, to be judged by an expert panel including director Bruce Beresford and film critic Margaret Pomeranz, will receive cash prizes to the value of $14,000. One of the prizes will be a People’s Choice Award; voting for that award begins on the Book Video Awards website on 1 July 2009.

The shortlisted book trailers will be compiled onto a DVD and distributed with Bookseller + Publisher’s July 2009 issue. The trailers will also play nationally in Dymocks stores and be promoted via Facebook, YouTube and film school websites. Competition winners will be announced on 7 August. For further information on the competition and to view the trailers as they are uploaded, see the Book Video Awards Australia 2009 website.

In Other News

The Story Continues

Productivity Commission Granted an Extension
The Productivity Commission is yet to finalise its investigation into ‘Copyright Restrictions on the Parallel Importation of Books’. (See previous AustLit newsletter items in the August/September 2008, December 2008/January 2009 and March 2009 issues.)

The Commission was due to present its final report to the Minister for Competition Policy and Consumer Affairs, the Hon. Chris Bowen, by 13 May 2009, but the minister has granted an extension until 30 June. The Commission requested the extension because more than half of the 550 submissions were received after the release of the Discussion Draft on 20 March.

The Discussion Draft includes a recommendation that Parallel Import Restrictions on books ‘should apply for 12 months from the date of first publication of a book in Australia’ and that ‘thereafter, parallel importation should be freely permitted’. The Draft also recommends that ‘new arrangements should be reviewed five years after implementation’.

The full text of the Discussion Draft is available on the Productivity Commission website.

Australia 2020 Summit
The final report of the Australia 2020 Summit is now available. The Prime Minister, the Hon. Kevin Rudd, convened the summit in April 2008, ‘to help shape a long term strategy for the nation’s future’. The published report provides a record of the two-day gathering together with recommendations from the ten focus areas.

Each of the ten groups produced individual reports. The ‘Towards a Creative Australia’ group distilled their discussions into a list of ‘Top Ideas’. The list includes suggestions for embedding creativity in education by including arts subjects in the national curriculum, placing practitioners in schools through residencies and establishing a national mentoring program funded by philanthropic funds and tax incentives. In a bid to locate creativity more centrally in government, the Creative Australia group suggested creating a Prime Minister’s Prize for the Creative Australian of the Year and establishing a Ministry for Creative Economy and Arts. The group also recommended digitising the collections of major national institutions by 2020.

The full report of the Creative Australia group and those of the other nine groups are available on the Australia 2020 Summit website.

Say It Again

Thomas Keneally in conversation with British interviewer Michael Parkinson:
‘Without books, I would have suicided by now,’ said Keneally. A startled Parkinson responded: ‘Well, thank goodness for books, then’.
(Rosemary Sorensen, ‘Overflow’, Weekend Australian, 16-17 May 2009)

Jason Steger on the value of literary prizes:
‘Three years ago Helen Garner and Christos Tsiolkas won $60,000 and $40,000 respectively in the first Melbourne Prize for Literature. It’s ... evidence that prizemoney buys writers time to write. Since winning, Garner and Tsiolkas ... have produced acclaimed novels, The Spare Room and The Slap respectively. Which goes to show that the more prizes there are the better.’
(‘The Write Stuff!’, Age, 16 May 2009)

Marieke Hardy on literature in new media:
‘It’s too easy to dismiss texting and the internet and iPhones as the death of literature and fine writing as we know it ... We’re too quick to judge. We’re too quick to dismiss fine writing simply for how it is dressed ... I hope we are ready for new experiences with words, wherever they are born, however they come to us, and whenever they choose to make themselves known to our isolated reader’s world.’
(Extract, published in the Sydney Morning Herald, 19 May 2009, from Hardy’s 2009 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards address)

Recent Literary Awards and Shortlists

Commonwealth Prize for Tsiolkas
The overall winner of the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book is Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap. Tsiolkas had previously won the 2009 regional award for South East Asia and the Pacific; he was shortlisted for the overall award with writers from South Africa, Canada and the UK. The regional winners gathered in Auckland during that city’s Writers and Readers Festival where they gave readings, took part in question-and-answer sessions and visited schools and prisons in the area before the award announcement.

The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize encourages new fiction from writers in Commonwealth countries and ensures that ‘works of merit reach a wider audience outside their country of origin’. It’s a purpose that Tsiolkas fully embraces. On winning the award, he said:

It strikes me that the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize has a more rigorous and purposeful commitment to representing the breadth of writing in English than any other comparable prize. Last night, before the judging of the award, the screen at the auditorium listed all the regional winners and I was so proud to be in that rich wonderful company.

The best part of the prize has come from meeting these fellow writers and to have begun a conversation across borders. Having come to know and respect the rigour of the judging process this last week, I am humbled to have received this award. It feels remarkable to have been selected by peers who are truly representative of the reach, diversity and complexity of the Commonwealth. I feel profoundly grateful.

The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize chair, Justice Nicholas Hasluck, described The Slap as a ‘controversial and daring novel’ using ‘the iconic scene of a suburban Australian barbecue to examine identities and personal relationships in a multicultural society’. (Media release, 16 May 2009)

The winner of the best first book prize was Pakistan’s Mohammed Hanif for A Case of Exploding Mangoes. For more details of the 2009 regional and overall winners, see the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize website.

People Choose Their Own Winner in NSW Awards
This year, the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards celebrates its 30th anniversary. To mark the occasion the awards instituted a new prize – a popularly voted People’s Choice Award. The New South Wales Premier, the Hon. Nathan Rees, announced the award, saying: ‘I know only too well the unique pleasure that can be gained from a much-loved book and I hope this prize will encourage others to read the books on the shortlist and cast a vote’. (As well as being premier, Mr Rees is the New South Wales Minister for the Arts. He also holds an honours degree in English Literature from the University of Sydney.)

Mr Rees invited the public to choose their favourite book from among the six contenders for the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction – Helen Garner’s The Spare Room, Joan London’s The Good Parents, Kate Grenville’s The Lieutenant, Steve Toltz’s A Fraction of the Whole, Julia Leigh’s Disquiet and Tim Winton’s Breath. While London’s novel was the judges’ choice for the fiction prize, the public picked Toltz as the inaugural winner of the People Choice Award.

From a shortlist of sixty-two authors and translators, other winners for 2009 include:

The Special Award for 2009 was presented to Katharine Brisbane ‘for services to Australian literature and theatre’. The judges recognised Brisbane’s extended commitment to the arts, particularly her achievements in the publication of Australian plays through Currency Press.

For the complete list of winners, see the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards website.

Status of Women Prize to Novelist Who Writes Like a Dutch Painter
The $35,000 Barbara Jefferis Award for ‘the best novel written by an Australian author that depicts women and girls in a positive way or otherwise empowers the status of women and girls in society’ has been awarded to Helen Garner for The Spare Room. Judges of the 2009 award described Garner as being ‘like a Dutch interior painter’ in her use of the ‘small domestic scene’. The judges observed that Garner portrayed ‘two women in one house over three suffocating weeks to illuminate the deep and sustaining nature of friendship between women ... The lean, spare prose avoids any hint of sentimentality, while moments of joy and humour shared by the two women are evoked with economy and precision.’

The judges for the 2009 award were surprised that, while looking for a positive and empowering depiction of women, many of the female protagonists across the sixty-one entries:

appeared to have a poor self-image and little purpose in life, seeing themselves reflected primarily through their relationships with men. Characters frequently suffered illness, family and marital unhappiness, and abandonment. While some were oppressed by bullying and abuse, others lacked work and financial independence.

In this generally bleak context, ‘positive’ did not necessarily mean happy, successful or even lovable. However, the best books – including the six on the shortlist – feature strongly defined women and girls who drive the narrative and, at least to some extent, their own fates; characters who are individual, realistic, interesting, sometimes courageous, and who remain with the reader after the book is finished.
(Judges’ Report, 5 March 2009)

The other shortlisted titles for the 2009 Barbara Jefferis Award were:

Best Second Novel Prize for Julia Leigh
Julia Leigh’s Disquiet is the winner of the Encore Award for a second novel. The award is offered bi-ennially by The Society of Authors (UK). The judges for the 2009 award described Disquiet as ‘a spare, elliptical novel in which a woman returns with her children to her childhood home in rural France. A sense of mystery pervades the book as the baleful atmosphere of the decaying château is invaded by its New World visitors. A brilliantly distilled, disturbing glimpse into an abyss.’ (Encore shortlist announcement)

Writing for BookBrunch, a UK book industry news service, Nicholas Clee related a minor hiccough at the award ceremony on 19 May: Leigh (currently visiting France) ‘crossed the Channel by Eurostar to be at the ceremony... She received her award from past winner Ali Smith, who described the Encore as "one of the wisest prizes, with the longest vision". Unfortunately, Smith was not holding an envelope, and Leigh commented, "Thank you for the invisible prize." But the mistake was soon rectified.’ (BookBrunch, 20 May 2009)

National Award for Blainey’s Biography
The National Biography Award for 2009 has been awarded to Ann Blainey for I Am Melba. The award encourages ‘the highest standards of writing biography and autobiography’ and promotes ‘public interest in those genres’.

In selecting Blainey’s biography for the 2009 award, the judges said, ‘I Am Melba is a superb example of the subtlety of the biographer’s craft. Dame Nellie Melba is a complex and in many ways elusive figure. Ann Blainey has had to peel away layers of the cult of celebrity to rediscover a woman of contrasts ... This biography is focussed squarely on its subject and not the writer’s journey in search of the subject. The result is compelling and invigorating.’ (Judges report)

Classical Music and Renaissance Art Attract Prizes
Jacqueline Kent’s life of classical pianist Hephzibah Menuhin is the winner of the 2009 Nita B. Kibble Literary Award. The award judges commented that, in An Exacting Heart: The Story of Hephzibah Menuhin, Kent had ‘skilfully painted Hephzibah on the canvas of her time, but in very different social contexts as she travels between Australia, North America and Europe. In her nuanced and vital portrayal, Kent has revealed how a young woman of the world came to be a loving wife and mother, and why she moved on.’ (Media release, 29 April 2009) Mr David Deverall, Managing Director of Perpetual Limited, a co-trustee of the award, commented: ‘This is the second time Ms Kent has won the Kibble award, the first time being in 2002, so it really is an outstanding achievement.’ (Media release, 3 June 2009) Kent’s first win was for A Certain Style: Beatrice Davis, A Literary Life.

The Dobbie Award was presented to Claire Thomas for her novel Fugitive Blue, the story of a Melbourne art conservator’s unravelling of the provenance of a Venetian Renaissance painting. The judges praised the structure, originality, poise and imagery of Thomas’s novel.

The Kibble and Dobbie awards have been offered since 1994 to female writers who have published fiction or nonfiction classified as ‘life writing’. The awards recognise the legacy Nita B. Kibble, the first female librarian at the State Library of New South Wales and her niece, Nita Dobbie, also a librarian.

Blogging Croggon Wins Critic’s Prize
Alison Croggon is the 2009 Pascall Prize ‘Critic of the Year’. Croggon’s win, announced during the Sydney Writers’ Festival, carries prize money of $15,000. The prize honours Geraldine Pascall (1944-1983) and is awarded annually to a critic or reviewer working regularly in the Australian print or broadcasting media. This year’s judges acknowledged Croggon’s use of an online medium – the Theatre Notes blog – and praised her ‘curation of a public conversation’. (Reported in the Age, 23 May 2009)

Croggon announced the win via her blog: ‘I was flabbergasted (but delighted) a couple of weeks ago when a nice man phoned me, told me to sit down and informed me that I’d won the Pascall Prize for excellence in arts journalism, the only award for arts criticism in Australia. The prize is named in honour of the flamboyant journalist Geraldine Pascall, who died tragically young in 1983, when I was half way through my cadetship on the Melbourne Herald and the thought of being a crrritic [sic] hadn’t entered my head. I wish I had met her. To say I am honoured doesn’t really cover it.’ (Blog entry for 23 May 2009)

Songwriters Honoured for ‘Extraordinary Contribution’
Ruby Hunter thought someone was having a joke when she was telephoned with the news that she and Archie Roach were the winners of the 2008 Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award. She had recently been the subject of a hoax call requesting her credit card details, so she asked her manager to check the truth of the win. ‘Then I had to reassure Archie and say: “No, it’s really true.”’ (Age, 28 March 2009)

Hunter and Roach are the joint winners of the arts award in the individual category. (Prizes are also awarded to arts groups and facilitators.) The award citation states that the two songwriters ‘have made an extraordinary contribution to Australian music. Their music is loved by many and, through it, they have eloquently voiced ideas of Aboriginal identity, country, beliefs and spirit.’ (2008 Individual Citation) The award, founded in 1984, aims to ‘enhance the status of the performing arts in Australia and pay tribute to outstanding achievement in drama, comedy, dance, music, opera, circus and puppetry’.

Part of Hunter and Roach’s life journey is told in the musical ‘Ruby’s Story’, for which they wrote the lyrics and composed the music. More information on their music and life together is available on Archie Roach’s website.

Men Make the Miles Franklin Shortlist
The five books shortlisted for the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award are, coincidentally, all written by male authors. Single word book titles (excluding the definite article) are also a common denominator. The shortlist is:

Stephen Romei, editor of the Australian Literary Review, decided to play a numbers game with the 2009 longlist and the resultant shortlist. ‘It may be gauche to reduce the nation’s most prestigious literary award to a mathematical equation,’ wrote Romei, ‘but what the heck. The 10-book long list had the following components: 40 per cent were debut novels, 30 per cent were by women, 20 per cent were by writers under 40. The corresponding percentages on the five-book short list are 0, 0 and 0.’

Miles Franklin judge Morag Fraser told Romei that the judges left their shortlist meeting without realising what they had done. ‘[It was] chance we selected five books written by men,’ said Fraser. ‘Only over the [New South Wales] State Library sandwiches did it dawn on us, dear heaven, no women! But there was no going back. No revising for gender balance.’ Fraser was clear that no conclusions should be drawn from the selection of an all-male shortlist: ‘Next year it may be five women writers. Or not.’ Romei’s coda?: ‘My money is firmly on the second outcome.’ (Australian Literary Review, May 2009)

Apart from the commonality of male authors and short book titles, Fraser noted another shared feature among this year’s shortlisted works. She told the Sydney Morning Herald’s Susan Wyndham that all the books examine ‘extreme behaviour’. (17 April 2009)

Of those shortlisted for the $42,000 prize, Winton has won the Miles Franklin on three previous occasions and Bail once. The award winner will be announced in Sydney on 18 June.

Asialink Residences Take Writers to Seven Countries
Asialink is offering eight literature residencies for 2009:

The Asialink Literature Residency Program has been operating since 1997. The program offers writers from a range of genres the opportunity to live and work in the Asian region while engaging with communities to share skills, ideas and networks. Applications for the 2010 residencies close on 4 September. For more information, see the Asialink Arts Residency website.

Joint Winners for 2009 Calibre Prize
The Calibre Prize, an initiative of the Australian Book Review (ABR) and Copyright Agency Limited’s Cultural Fund, has again been awarded to joint winners. In 2008, Rachel Robertson and Mark Tredinnick shared the prize; this year the winners are Kevin Brophy and Jane Goodall.

Brophy’s essay, ‘What’re Yer Lookin’ at Yer Fuckin’ Dog?: Violence and Fear in Zizek’s Post-Political Neighbourhood’ is a reflection on the occurrence and impact of ongoing, random violence in a suburban streetscape. In ‘Footprints’, Jane Goodall directs her attention to ‘the connection between the earth and the human foot’.

On learning of his success in the Calibre Prize, Brophy told ABR: ‘I have been drawn to the essay form over and over again during my writing life ... I love the essay as a form because it has room for story, thought, research, personal elements and even poetry. It can offer every kind of writing, modulating and criss-crossing throughout.’ (ABR media release, 17 March 2009)

Brophy and Goodall share the $10,000 prize money for 2009 and both essays have been published in ABR’s April issue.

Bloom Wins Patrick White Award
Nicki Bloom is the winner of the 2008 Patrick White Playwrights’ Award for her play ‘Bloodwood’. ‘Bloodwood’ draws on William Lane’s failed utopian venture in 1890s Paraguay and ‘imagines a world that exists simultaneously in the past and the future’. (Sydney Morning Herald, 25 May 2009)

The Patrick White Playwright’s Award honours the contribution of Patrick White to Australian theatre. It celebrates the importance of the playwright in theatre culture and ‘fosters the development of uniquely Australian theatrical voices’. (Sydney Theatre Company website) The 2008 award was announced at the Sydney Theatre Company’s headquarters by the company’s co-artistic director, Andrew Upton, during the 2009 Sydney Writers’ Festival.

Bloom told the Sydney Morning Herald’s arts editor, Clare Morgan, that White had been a guiding light in her writing and that his novel The Solid Mandala had changed her life. ‘He looms so large in my imagination,’ Bloom said. (Sydney Morning Herald, 25 May 2009)

Bloom’s debut work, ‘Tender’ is also a prize-winning play; it will have its first international production in New York next month at the Public Theater’s Summer Play Festival.

Man Booker International Prize Announced
Despite being a clear favourite with bookmakers, Peter Carey is not the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize. Carey was one of 14 writers named as a ‘contender’ for this year’s award. The winner, announced on 27 May, is Canadian short story writer Alice Munro. The Man Booker International Prize is awarded once every two years to ‘a living author for a body of work that has contributed to an achievement in fiction on the world stage’. The winner receives £60,000 in prize money.

ASAL Shortlists
The winner of the 2009 McRae Russell Award, for the ‘best book of literary scholarship on an Australian subject published in the preceding two calendar years’ will be announced during the 2009 conference of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL). The shortlist for the award is:

Other Recent Winners and Shortlisted Writers & Works:

Odd Spot

When Writers Aren’t Writing They…
Lead wildlife safaris in Africa. At least, that’s what Tony Park is doing in his spare time. Park is the author of adventure novels set in various Africa locations. In September this year, he will lead a 13-day tour of South Africa incorporating travel to Johannesburg, Kruger National Park (the setting for Park’s The Silent Predator) and Capetown. Park promises that those accompanying him on safari will ‘get an insight into how an author sets the plot, finds the locations and creates the characters of a successful novel’.

Full details of Park’s safari are available on The African Safari Company website. More information on Park and his writing can be found on his official website, including news of his next novel, Ivory, due to be published in August 2009.

This Month’s Spotlight

Writers on Twitter – ‘Domain of the Inane’ or Genuine Communication Tool?
In this month’s spotlight, Tully Barnett , AustLit team member at Flinders University, delves into Twitter – the new Web 2.0 application servicing the needs of compulsive information sharers. Tully unravels the mysteries of tweeting and sets Twitter in its international context. She canvasses Twitter take-up among Australian writers and provides sample tweets from Twitter-posters and their followers:

Twitter has received a bit of media coverage lately. US President Barack Obama has a Twitter account, as does Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. Twitter is a micro-blogging and social networking platform that allows its users to post messages, or replies to other people’s messages, in 140 characters or less. Twitter offers a new and supposedly quick and easy way for people to keep in touch and to reach out to new audiences. It offers a new means of communication between friends, between companies and their customers, and between authors and their readers.

Software architect Jack Dorsey established Twitter in 2006. Unlike Facebook and MySpace, Twitter only allows for short status updates and replies (though people can post as many times as they like, so longer messages can be split up into the requisite 140 characters). Twitter doesn’t have all the extraneous applications of Facebook – there are no requests to take the annoying and potentially addictive quizzes to find out ‘What Simpsons character are you?’ It doesn’t have music or pictures, though users link to them in their tweets.

In the early days of Twitter, British actor and comedian Stephen Fry emerged as a leader in the new technology, commanding huge numbers of followers. Today, according to twitterholic.com, American actor Ashton Kutcher has the most followers on Twitter at 1,709,876 (of course, this number changes by the hour). Other popular Twitterers are The Ellen Show, Britney Spears, CNN Breaking News and Barack Obama.

Twitter has been acknowledged for its ability to play a part in emergencies and current events. The 2008 Mumbai hostage crisis was ‘twittered’, giving real-time updates. Also in 2008, a US photography student, arrested in Cairo for taking photographs of an anti-government demonstration, twittered his arrest from his mobile phone en route to the police station. This enabled his friends to notify the US embassy and negotiate his release.

Primarily, however, Twitter is a domain of the inane. Users might tweet what they ate for lunch or what they thought of the new Star Trek movie. They let us know what they’re listening to, or wearing, or doing on the weekend; they say good morning or goodnight. While Twitter has been called an ‘information stream’, it is hard to see a personal record of eating, listening and sleeping habits as valuable information.

But Twitter does provide opportunities for the field of books and literature. TwitterLit posts the first lines of books twice per day. BookTwo ‘reads’ a book over Twitter a line at a time. (It is currently tweeting James Joyce’s Ulysses.) Small Places claims to be the first literary novel written over Twitter; there are 600 tweets of it so far, but readers have to scroll through multiple pages to reach the first line or read it in reverse order.

While there are some interesting literary experiments being conducted using Twitter, international authors (including Neil Gaiman and Meg Cabot) tend to use Twitter to connect with current and potential readers. They promote their speaking engagements or post information about their daily lives. For these authors, Twitter is a marketing tool aimed at increasing their popularity. In Australia, the story is similar. Few Australian authors seem to use Twitter, and the number is even fewer among highly successful writers.

John Birmingham (see http://twitter.com/JohnBirmingham), author of He Died with a Falafel in his Hand and Weapons of Choice, is probably the most prolific Australian author using Twitter. Birmingham was already a Web 2.0 aficionado before Twitter emerged. He keeps a blog at his website and writes a regular column for the Brisbane Times where he steadily replies to readers who comment on his writing. Birmingham was therefore well positioned to take advantage of Twitter. He currently has 1,075 followers and he follows 999 people. Some of Birmingham’s recent tweets, as he approaches the deadline for his new novel, read:

Leigh Redhead (see http://twitter.com/leighredhead), author of the Simone Kirsch private eye series, has 59 followers on Twitter. She posts about Viagra spam, living in Hanoi, and the weather. But she also writes:

James Bradley (see http://twitter.com/hesperornis), author of Wrack, and The Resurrectionist, wrote his first post on 3 March 2009:

He later wrote:

But Bradley, who has 24 followers on Twitter, also uses the networking platform to discuss Australian literary culture (such as Joan London winning the New South Wales Premier’s Christina Stead Award for Fiction) and to post links to his updated blog entries.

Melbourne poet Brentley Frazer (see http://twitter.com/brentleyfrazer) has 23 followers. He posts lines from his poetry as tweets:

Perhaps predictably, Australian genre writers have taken to Twitter with enthusiasm. This is an extension from their uptake of other elements of Web 2.0 such as the use of LiveJournal as a supportive writers’ environment and social networking site.

Justine Larbalestier (see http://twitter.com/JustineLavaworm), a writer of genre fiction for adults and young adults, splits her time between New York and Sydney. She has 956 Twitter followers. Her recent tweets include:

Max Barry (see http://twitter.com/MaxBarry), author of Jennifer Government, has 228 followers and has serialised part of his new novel, Machine Man, using a second Twitter account (see http://twitter.com/MachineMan). The serialisation has so far attracted 52 followers.

Barry’s first serialised post reads:

This post was followed by:

And on 14 May, Max Barry posted

In reply to a post from a reader, Barry comments more explicitly on his plans for his new book:

Barry has taken advantage of Twitter hype to experiment with new ways of delivering literature to a modern media-savvy audience. Genre authors such as Jonathan Strahan, Simon Haynes, Lyn Battersby, Gary Kemble, and Kim Falconer also use Twitter as does new author David Sornig. Small, independent publishers such as Interactive Press (see http://twitter.com/IP_Australia) and Aurealis Xpress (see http://twitter.com/aurealisxpress), and larger companies such as Random House Australia (see http://twitter.com/randomuser) and Harper Collins Australia (see http://twitter.com/HarperBooksAus), are also reaching into potential markets with Twitter.

It is impossible to tell whether Twitter is a flash in the pan or a new means of communication here to stay. Some Australian authors are experimenting in genuine and innovative ways with the technology, but for most, it is little more than a new, hip marketing tool they hope will boost sales or attract the attention of the media.

Time and Tide

Kilmeny Niland (1950-2009)
‘It’s rare to find such a mix of a balanced, warm, intelligent, creative and talented person,’ said Tom Champion of his mother, Kilmeny Niland. (Mosman & Lower North Shore Daily, 19 March 2009) Niland, known widely for her children’s book illustrations, has died in Sydney from non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Niland’s career as an illustrator stretches back to the early 1970s when she and her twin sister, Deborah Niland, illustrated Elizabeth Wilton’s Riverview Kids. The sisters went on to create the pictures for dozens of children’s books, both in tandem and separately.

Kilmeny Niland illustrated books for some of Australia’s most talented and respected children’s writers including Mem Fox, Hazel Edwards, Jean Chapman and Ruth Park (Niland’s mother). She also produced her own books. Some of her recent titles are Two Tough Teddies (2007), published by Little Hare, Fat Pat (2008), published by ABC Books and An Aussie Day before Christmas (2008), published by Scholastic. Children’s book reviewer Judith Ridge, on learning of Niland’s death, recalled the arrival last year of her review copy of Fat Pat: ‘I remember reading Fat Pat aloud to my colleagues ... to their great delight – so it wasn’t just kids who appreciated Kilmeny’s funny and compassionate books’. (Misrule blog, 28 February 2009)

Niland’s art reached beyond the pages of books. Her art has been shown in group and solo exhibitions and her portrait of Ruth Park was purchased by the National Portrait Gallery. A memorial exhibition of her work was held during April at Sydney’s Julian Ashton Art School, where Niland and her sister studied. Something of the breadth of Niland’s output and techniques, together with her illustrated haiku, can be viewed on her website at http://www.kilmenyniland.com/index.html.

Two new books bearing Niland’s illustrations will be published in the months ahead: her son Tom Champion’s second children’s book will be published early in 2010 and a one-volume edition of Ruth Park’s two Callie stories, Callie: Callie’s Castle and Callie’s Family, will be available in August 2009.

Other Recent Deaths:

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