Author Archive

Indepenwah? or, An Open Love Letter to Julia Gillard

I shook hands with Julia Gillard yesterday morning, and then wound up on the telly about it. She made a rousing speech, praising the values of hard work and education, and I came away feeling really inspired by it all. Like me, Julia was raised in a working class family in Adelaide, where she became inspired [ READ MORE ]

Voiceworks 81, Birthmark

Tom Cho launched Voiceworks in Melbourne last night, and apparently he said ‘Whitney Houston once sang: “I believe the children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way.”’ It gives me hope to know that Voiceworks is facilitating the expression of the sort of people who understand and value this. Tom [ READ MORE ]

Why Pulling Prizes Is Okay Sometimes

Over at Virugle there is a mostly-one-way discussion being had about how terrible Australian Book Review is for deciding not to award the inaugural Young Calibre Non-fiction Prize – an essay prize that matches their esteemed Calibre Prize, but for writers under 21. Unfortunately, apart from a questionable call for transparency, I don’t get a [ READ MORE ]

Boating! I Mean, Agenting!

In my last post about Nic Low’s manuscript I described ‘Tailings’ as ‘a beautiful duck, wearing a tiara … bobbing up and down on [the sea of mediocrity] … that results from the seemingly indiscriminate publication of some 12 000+ books per year in Australia’. I now realise that’s a bit harsh: Australia has a proud [ READ MORE ]

‘Tailings’, by Nic Low

Something else I’ve been doing lately, while not being a high-flying literary judge, is reading Nic Low’s novel manuscript, ‘Tailings’. Because I’m a youth-literature crusader and everything. Nic is not exactly ‘a youth’, but whatever. I’m familiar with some of Nic’s other arts work, so I was delighted when he asked me to read and [ READ MORE ]

Hearsay Literary Annual

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been co-judging, along with Stefan Laszczuk, a short-story prize run by the editors of Adelaide University’s student magazine, On Dit. Of course I put my hand up, because now I am a fusty old ex-Voiceworks editor, desperate to get my hands on the raw content of young, emerging Australian [ READ MORE ]

My Idea of Will Self’s “My Idea of Fun”

I struggled with My Idea of Fun for a while, and nearly gave up on it when I got sent a more interesting manuscript to read1. I even got to the point where I had written a short note about where the book had gotten up to, and the reason I was abandoning it, so [ READ MORE ]

Why Getting Pole-axed Is Okay Sometimes

For some reason lately, every time I got out for some hair of the dog, I wind up getting drunk, and partying like it’s September 10 2001. I often go out alone, looking for interesting randoms. When this happens, and we strike up a conversation, I lose myself in the moment and I don’t want [ READ MORE ]

Hey There, Blimpy Boy!

Sam Cooney republished an article he wrote for Bookseller+Publisher about, well, the relationship between booksellers and publishers – and how this relationship is changing as publishers embark on direct-sales ventures, which, I guess, have the potential to undermine the traditional business models of booksellers. On the surface it seems like a superfluous debate, when compared [ READ MORE ]

Liberalism

Here is a Bertrand Russell quote that constitutes my favourite aphorism: The essence of the liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment. I don’t know [ READ MORE ]

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