Currajah

SPUNC has two positions open, for General Manager and a Publicity and Marketing Manager.

The GM works to determine the organisational direction of SPUNC and develop strategies to advance the small press sector in Australia. This position may include, but not be limited to, the monitoring of expectations of SPUNC members; representing SPUNC on a professional level; liaising and networking with other relevant organisations; managing the recruiting and involvement of interns and volunteers; soliciting advertising for the SPUNC Quarterly Catalogue; planning and coordinating SPUNC events in conjunction with the Publicity and Marketing Manager; developing sponsorship opportunities; ensuring strict adherence to budgets and timelines; and overseeing the work of the Publicity and Marketing Manager. The must attend regular meetings of the SPUNC board.

The P&M Manager, reporting to the GM, communicates directly with booksellers and SPUNC members ensuring a regular and reliable flow of information between these parties; actively seeks publicity opportunities for SPUNC and SPUNC members, including individual marketing and publicity programs; assists in the promotion of SPUNC and SPUNC events; ensures and maintains the effective operation of the SPUNC website online sales tool; and coordinates the production of a quarterly catalogue that features news related to the sector and promotes members.

Both positions are part-time, paid ($66K pro rata) twelve month contracts beginning in a month or so. Applications will need to be able to work from home in Melbourne. If you’re interested, email info@spunc.com.au for a position description.

Environmental Film Festival - July 18-20

A variety of films exploring the environmental issues of today. A fundraiser for
Green Left Weekly. $8 per film ($5 conc) or Festival pass $15 conc /$20 waged / $30
solidarity. All films held on the big screen in the hall at the Hobart Activist
Centre, 225 Murray St, Hobart. Ph: 6234 6397

Program:

Friday 18th July
7pm: The 11th Hour (2007, 95 mins)
Drought. Famine. Severe flooding. Hurricanes. Acid rain. The highest average
temperatures in history. In the history of the planet, humanity’s time on earth has
been short–but powerful. Human development has revolutionized industry, science,
nutrition and medicine. But it has also effected unprecedented changes in the
delicate balance that makes life on earth possible. Essential viewing, more
relentless than An Inconvenient Truth.

Saturday 19th July
5pm: The Lorax (bring the kids) (1972, 52 mins)
The classic Doctor Sues tale of a young boy meets a ruined industrialist in a
treeless wasteland and hears his tale of what has happened to him. His tragic story
is about how he began a thriving business with a useless fashion product derived
from the trees of a forest. As his business booms, the forest and its inhabitants
suffer as he wantonly clearcuts without regard to the warnings of a wise old
creature called the Lorax about the dire consequences of his greed.

5.55: Short film

6pm Dinner – Cheap Yummy Meal Provided

7pm: The Carbon Connection
Two communities affected by one new global market – the trade in carbon dioxide. In Scotland a town has been polluted by oil and chemical companies since the 1940s. In Brazil local people’s water and land is being swallowed up by destructive monoculture eucalyptus tree plantations. Both communities now share a new threat.
The Carbon Connection follows the story of two groups of people from each community who learned to use video cameras and made their own films about living with the impacts of the carbon market.

Sunday 20th July
4pm: A Hard Rain (2007, 77 mins)
Twice Academy Award nominee and five time AFI winner David Bradbury explores the `other side’ of the nuclear debate. Traversing five countries- China , France , UK ,
Japan and Australia , A Hard Rain exposes the hidden agendas behind the latest push
for Australia to go nuclear and presents a compelling argument against allowing this
to happen. With interviews from some of the world’s top scientists and
environmentalists, including Dr Rosalie Bertell ( Canada ), Dr Chris Busby (UK), Dr
Mark Diesendorf, Prof. Ian Lowe & Dr Gavin Mudd (Aust), A Hard Rain provides the
information you need to know to decide if Australia should head down the nuclear
path.

5.30pm: The One Tree Project (2004, 20 mins)
Is woodchipping a waste of a precious resource? See what can be created using just
one tree. An inspiring and fascinating documentary of the journey of a tree from
Tasmania ’s southern forests through the hands of many creative people.

6:30: Dinner – Cheap Yummy Meal Provided

7pm: Exxon Mobil Climate Change (2007, 65 mins)
This film shows the influence that the largest company in the world has on
governments, the media and citizens and what can be done about global warming. While
the Earth’s climate is pushed further out of balance by increasing use of fossil
fuels, ExxonMobil continues to assert undue influence around the world— making
record profits while ignoring climate science for which there has been overwhelming
consensus for over ten years.

Sunday 13th July 2.00pm at Fullers Bookshop Hobart, 140 Collins Street:

The Hobart launch of Kristen Lang’s book of poetry and photography, Let
me Show you a Ripple.

“Startling for its honesty and its detail. Poems
and colour photographs on the beauty of small moments. Spend an
afternoon with the textures of bush (river surfaces, bark detail,
frost…) and of the human heart (love, loss, and rapture). Allow the
detail and the exquisite exchanges hidden in so many of our experiences
to take over, to unravel, to be breathed in and considered.

Peter Bishop:
“Kristen Lang is a young poet of astonishing intelligence and
outstanding lyrical warmth. …Let me show you a ripple –visually and
linguistically– is a purely beautiful achievement.”

Jill Jones:
“Kristen Lang writes the textures of landscapes and relationships … there is a
sense of deep connection between the body and the land. … Her work is
reflective yet humorous, immediate yet questing.”

Dr David McCooey:
“Lang’s poems and photographs show an assured and original talent”.

Alan Marshall Short Story Award Winners

This year the Alan Marshall Short Story Award received a record-breaking 627
entries, up by 24% from 2007. The awards ceremony held on 14 June 2008 was a huge
success with approximately 70 - 80 attendees, including 4 Nillumbik Shire Council
councillors. Entertainment was provided by local musicians, while delicious finger
food and drink was served. With the fire burning, a lovely ambience was created
while local actors Dennis Coard and Debra Lawrance read out the winning stories.

At the awards ceremony, this year’s judge, Cate Kennedy said about the quality of
writing: “I feel Alan Marshall would have been extremely pleased to read this
selection honouring his legacy to Australian short stories, because many of them
achieved the same things he did in his fiction. They explored both the frailties
and weaknesses of ordinary people, and the redemptive moments which make the heart sing or at least hope for something better. They examined unflinchingly mental
illness, the loss of innocence, and - very frequently in this selection - the
heartrending dilemmas wrenched from us by parenthood, relationship breakdown and death of those we love.”

The winners for 2008 are:

OPEN SECTION:
WINNER: ($2000) Pierz Newton-John: Northcote: This Old Man
2nd PRIZE: ($1000) Carol Middleton, Caulfield North: A Good Man and an Honest Woman

LOCAL WRITERS SECTION:
WINNER: ($1000) Karen Andrews, Eltham: The Appointment

YOUNG WRITERS SECTION:
WINNER: ($400) Isabella Mead, Ivanhoe: Christopher

Cr Warwick Leeson;
Isabella Mead (Youth section winner);
Pierz Newton-John (Open section winner); Karen Andrews (Local section winner);
Cate Kennedy (judge).

8 pm - 11.30 pm Friday 18th July
Irish Club, Carrington Street, Adelaide

Tickets on sale at Bass - $37.50 per person.

Official launch of Geoff Goodfellow & the Robot Sex Dolls Love is Cruel CD (with special featured guest, Julia Fry).

[Read this article in The Australian for more on Geoff].

[Robert Dessaix, The Age, June 14th, 2008]:

On the last page of virtually every book I’ve written - perhaps all of them - there is an attempt to say: there is beauty, if not always meaning, and, despite all the suffering, it is not doomed. In this, despite belonging to my era, and using its words and imagery, I like to think that I also thumb my nose at it in ways that have deep roots.

More …

[Kate Mosse, The Independent, Sunday 8th June 2008]:

For three days last week, London’s Southbank Centre turned Orange. On Monday, some 800 men and women readers packed the auditorium of the Queen Elizabeth Hall to hear the six authors shortlisted for the 2008 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction.

More…

SALON on Sunday May 25th at Glenfern, 417 Inkerman St, Balaclava, Melbourne.

The program is as follows:

1pm-3:30pm: Workshop with JAN OWEN (limited places so book asap)

4pm-5:30pm: Readings and discussion with Greg McLaren and Ian McBryde
(refreshments provided)

5:30pm: John Leonard Press will launch Jan Owen¹s new book:
(Poems 1980-2000)

Paul Kooperman
Administration Assistant
Australian Poetry Centre
PO Box 284
Balaclava 3183
V I C T O R I A
+61 3 9527 4063
admin@australianpoetrycentre.org.au

www.australianpoetrycentre.org.au

The Spinning Room, upstairs @ ET’s, 211 High Street, Prahran,
from 8.30pm on Tuesday 20th May 2008.

This quarter’s round of books from Otoliths is being released in two instalments. The first lot is listed below. The second instalment, which will follow in around two weeks’ time, will include books by William Allegrezza, Mark Cunningham & Bob Grumman, plus the print editions of issues eight & nine of the Otoliths e-zine.

The direct URLs are given below. The full range of books can be found at The Otoliths Storefront .

*The Travels*

Jordan Stempleman
60 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9804541-5-4
Otoliths 2008
$10.00 + p&h
URL:* http://www.lulu.com/content/1984840*

* *
A rewriting of *The Voyages & Travels of Sir John Mandeville, Knight*

*A book taken and returned and taken again ** from Sir John Mandeville; of darkened artifacts and incipient wonders; and of the sadness left from passing through actual and imaginative sights*

* *

*That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness*

*Elisa Gabbert & Kathleen Rooney*
*104 pages*
*Cover design by* Catherine Bourassa-Hébert**
*ISBN: *978-0-9804541-4-7
*Otoliths 2008*
$12.50 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/2210697

This collaboration between Elisa Gabbert and Kathleen Rooney is “Just more entertaining than poems are supposed to be. And I’m not using the word “entertaining” as some kind of sly putdown either. These poems have more human interaction going on in a couple of lines than many writers manage in a couple of books. The linguistic energy and, really, virtuosity, can be stunning. These are poems that know what people are like when they’re around people.” —*Mark Wallace*

* *

*Endgames*

Márton Koppány

76 pages, full color
ISBN: 978-0-9804541-3-0
Otoliths 2008
$24.95 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/2183260

“The extraordinary thing about Koppány’s work is the way he takes gaps in thought and elaborates on them. How he expands the unsaid. How he crafts a visual grammar by framing it in verbal settings. The way he’s able to create more surface area than is originally given. This is a book of billboard puzzles that reveal in the subtlest way. These are posters that disturb meaning. Koppány’s destination seems to want to disrupt logic by executing it perfectly askew. Perfectly.”

– *Nico Vassilakis*

“A completely infectious sense of humor which ridicules no one and degrades
nothing makes sense of the inescapable circuits in which his work moves.” –
*Karl Young*

* *

*This Poem/What Speaks?/A Day*

Tom Beckett

44 pages
Cover painting by Thomas Fink
ISBN: 978-0-9804541-7-8
Otoliths 2008
$10.00 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/2266888

“This is not a quest for epiphany: it is a rigorous *modus vivendi*. Tom Beckett’s is a poetry which, in accompanying us in our questionings — more than this, in *feeling* with us throughout our errancies — is as much phenomenological inquiry as it is intimate emotive play. It is at once the voice inside our heads and those voices outside, which we love, but cannot understand. From out this space of inquiry and intimacy, Beckett’s work emerges as that poetic praxis most necessary to us in our time. It is a consciousness seeking answers to itself.” — *Nicholas Manning*

An independent review into Arts NSW’s cultural grants program has
recommended closing smaller regional writers’ centres and devolving them to
local government or replacing them with an online service.

The statewide network of writers’ centres in NSW specialises in offering
programs that support participation in Australian literature.

Director of the South Coast Writers Centre, Ali Smith warns that “without
the support of a statewide network of regional writers centres, the unique
stories and ideas that come from regional New South Wales will struggle to
be heard.”

South Coast authors have reacted to this recommendation by offering their
support for the South Coast Writers Centre and regional writers’ centres
across NSW.

Kiama poet Chrissie Paice says “the South Coast Writers Centre is a meeting
place, it’s a networking place and it helps writers connect up and get
information and support - and feel appreciated. It’s a fantastic resource
for writers and people who are interested in Australian literature. Writers’
centres are essential - they are part of the bedrock of Australian culture.”

Vogel-shortlisted Wollongong writer Shady Cosgrove adds “writing is such an
isolating process, so it’s important to be part of a community. South Coast
Writers Centre has provided a platform for community participation for
everyone from hobbyist writers to professional writers, and this cross
section is vital, not only to Australian literature, but to Australian
culture”.

The South Coast Writers’ Centre offers online and face to face professional
development, networks and resources for writers and readers on the South
Coast of New South Wales from Wollongong to the Bega valley.