‘Austlit behind the Wall’ Symposium – Friday, 30 September 2011

Associate Professor Nicole Moore is convening a one-day symposium in the School of HASS on 30 September 2011.

The German Democratic Republic was a closely surveyed literary marketplace, where writing, reading and publishing were put in the service of the socialist state. Books were considered the blocks with which a new, truly socialist German state could be built and their publication was closely scrutinised by the Ministry of Culture, which ruled a stratified network of publishers, allocated paper and hard currency, and, most importantly, subjected each new title to a rigorous approval process.

From 1950, some of Australia’s most important writers were published in this unique setting: Frank Hardy, Marcus Clarke, Katherine Susannah Prichard, Xavier Herbert, Dorothy Hewett, Walter Kaufmann, Thomas Keneally, Patrick White and many others. Some of them forged close connections with their East German publishers. Hardy and Hewett visited the GDR several times; Kaufmann lived there. Often, their work appeared in high print runs and saw several reprints. Stretching to 1990, when a translated collection of Judith Wright’s poetry became the last Australian title released by an East German publisher, the forty years of Australian titles published in the GDR form an alternative canon, a shadowy literary archive that rewrites Australia’s postwar cultural history from behind the iron curtain.

For further information, contact Shirley Ramsay:
Email: s.ramsay@adfa.edu.au Tel: 6268 8845 – by Friday 16 September

That Deadman Dance Wins Commonwealth Regional Writers’ Prize

Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance is the winner of the Best Book category in the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, South East Asia and Pacific Region.

Scott’s novel focuses on first contact between Western Australia’s Noongar people and early European settlers. After initial harmony, conflicts arise. Scott told the Australian newspaper he was interested in that moment of possibility ‘before we had the sorry narrative. The dominant yarn we have now is the resistance one. I think that is a bit of a dead end, for all of us … In Noongar language, in the stories, you get the colonial experience but … the protagonists are very confident and generous. The non-polemical nature of those early relationships … interests me.’ (3 March 2011)

Scott will be one of the speakers at the National Library of Australia’s True Stories: Writing History conference, 2-3 April 2011. For further information on the regional divisions of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, see the Commonwealth Foundation website. The overall winners for 2011 will be announced during the Sydney Writers’ Festival on 21 May.

Australian Writer Wins Commonwealth Writers’ Prize

Glenda Guest is the winner of the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. The judges praised Guest’s Siddon Rock for its ‘rich cast of odd characters and blending of the everyday with fantasy … The novel, they concluded, deftly delves into the hauntings and disjunctions of settler Australia, and in its fable-like quality captures the laconic mannerisms of the Australian outback.’ (Commonwealth Foundation media release, 12 April 2010)

The judge’s selected British-Indian writer Rana Dasgupta’s Solo as the winner in the Best Book category.

Siddon Rock is on order for the Academy Library collection and will be available for loan shortly.

Never Underestimate Your Library and Its Librarians!

What’s your mental image of a librarian? Do you think of ‘bespectacled mild-mannered characters with their index cards and carbon paper and obsolete black-and-green computer screens’?

Maybe it’s time to think again. Ben Myers, a lecturer at Charles Sturt University’s School of Theology in Sydney, has come up with ‘Twelve Theses on Libraries and Librarians’. One of his theses states: librarians are ‘the most progressive and visionary figures in the whole university: like bloodhounds, always hot on the trail of the future. Their demure appearance is a cunning disguise which allows them to perpetrate their radicalism all the more effectively. It is a camouflage net thrown over an armoured vehicle.’

To read Myers’ eleven other theses, visit his blog spot. And next time you wander into the Academy Library, be prepared – thesis #5 begins ‘in all the world there is nothing more dangerous than a library’. Don’t say you haven’t been warned!

Classic Works on the Web

The University of Adelaide is adding to its collection of free online books via its publishing imprint, eBooks@Adelaide. The imprint is uploading classic works of literature, philosophy, science, history, and exploration and travel.

Titles include literary classics from Australia, Britain, Greece, Russia and the US. Among the Australian titles are Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life, Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery under Arms and Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of the Hansom Cab.

There are also scientific texts from Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Humboldt and Darwin, and philosophical treatises beginning with Confucius and Lao Tzu, moving through to Plato and Aristotle, continuing with Machiavelli, Montaigne and Bacon and stretching on to Nietzsche at the cusp of the twentieth century.

Go to http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/ to search by author, title and subject. Most texts are available as single files in html format or can be downloaded as zip files.