BOORANGA NEWS
NEWSLETTER FOR BOORANGA WRITERS’ CENTRE OF
WAGGA WAGGA WRITERS WRITERS INC.
MARCH - APRIL 2011
EDITOR: DEREK MOTION
Writer-in-residence: Ali Cobby Eckermann
The first Booranga writer-in-residence for 2011 will be Indigenous poet Ali Cobby Eckermann. Ali Cobby Eckermann has studied
Visual Arts and Creative Writing at various institutions and has also been employed in the film industry. She has since become well
known for her poetry - Ali was a finalist in the 2005, 2006 and 2007 NT Literary Awards; in 2006 she won the NSW Writer’s Centre
‘Survival’ competition for Indigenous writers and was selected to participate in the Australian Society of Authors’ national mentorship program.
In 2007 Ali was granted two Poetry Mentorships, through NT Writers Centre and
Varuna, and has since gone on to publish her first poetry collection little bit longtime.
She is presently the Art Centre and Gallery Coordinator at Titjikala on the edge of the
Simpson Desert.
Ali will be joined by her partner Lionel Fogarty, also well known for his poetry and
activism. While here Ali and Lionel will be making a series of visits to the Riverina
Juvenile Detention Centre, where they will be working on writing with the young
boys. Their public program will also include a reading and a workshop however
(dates listed below), so don’t miss this opportunity to see or work with two of Australia’s leading poets.
Ali Cooby Eckermann & Lionel Fogarty - Reading, at the Wagga City Library,
5pm, Thursday 10th March
Monthly Writers’ Workshop (featuring guest writers-in-resdience) - at the
Booranga Writers’ Centre, 2pm, Saturday 12th March
Booranga Writers’ Centre (McKeown Drive) 2010 Office Hours:
Staff will be in every Monday (9am - 3.30pm), Tuesday (9 - 11.30am), Thursday (9 - 11.30am).
For enquiries (with a quick response) email us: [email protected]
Or alternatively email our director directly: [email protected]
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BOORANGA NEWS
MARCH - APRIL 2011
Bus Shelter Poems...
A special opportunity is now open for Wagga writers. Booranga and WWCC are
looking for poems to display in bus shelters. Please download the specific guidelines.
Entries close 14th March. Submissions should be sent directly to:
[email protected]
2011 Calendar of Booranga Events
February
26th: Monthly Writers’ Meeting, 2pm, Booranga Writers’
Centre, 2-5pm
March
1st - 13th: Writer-in-residence,
Ali Cobby Eckerman + Lionel
Fogarty
Reading - Thursday 10th March,
Wagga City Library, 5pm
Workshop - 12th March,
Booranga Writers’ Centre
April
Booranga Monthly Writers’
Workshop: Date to be confirmed
at March meeting
22nd - 25th - Ardlethan Poetry
Caper
May
19th - 24th: Writer-in-residence,
Holly Throsby
July
18th - 30th: Writer-in-residence,
Jim Haynes
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JULY - AUGUST 2007
BOORANGA
NEWS
EDITOR: DEREK MOTION
MARCH - APRIL 2011
Recent Booranga Events
fourW twenty-one launches
Last year ended with our regular book launch tour, and Booranga staff and
friends attended launches of fourW twenty-one in Wagga, Melbourne, and
Sydney. Once again all three launches where well attended and we were
treated to some interesting and varied readings from contributors. The
winner of the Booranga Prize for best prose was Kirk Marshall, and he
accepted his award in Melbourne (the winner for poetry, B.R. Dionysius,
comes from Queensland and unfortunately could not attend a launch).
One of the best aspects of the launches in 2010 was the three generous
and enthusiastic launch speeches. Excerpts of these appear below:
Also on in the Region...
Jennifer McKinnon (Wagga Launch): I moved to Wagga in 1991, to
what I assumed to be a sleepy (though large) country town that was the
service centre for a range of agricultural industries such as sheep and
wheat. I wasn’t an academic then, and didn’t have much contact with
people from the arts community, so I was able to continue with my citybased assumptions about what it means to live in a town like Wagga.
And then I attended the launch of fourW – it was edition no. 2 in 1991
– and suddenly I was awake to a whole other side of Wagga. My first
reaction was ‘what, Wagga has its own poetry book?’
What I eventually became aware of was a vibrant arts community, a
welcoming literary scene that offers support to poets, writers and artists of
many descriptions, and also offered an outlet for the publication of quality
work...
...I’m not a poet or a writer, except in the academic sense, but I believe that society benefits from the ability of the writer / poet/ artist to
reveal new meaning, to uncover what’s generally hidden in our everyday events or communications, or the meaning for us of extraordinary
one-off events. Great art, poetry and writing can tap into the collective unconscious in a way that the rest of us can only admire...
...I’d like to finish by saying how very proud I am of the association
between the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Charles
Sturt University, the Booranga Writers Centre, and in particular the
fourW project. May it continue to be a long and fruitful association,
and with that I pronounce the launch of fourW twenty-one – New
Writing.
* Jane Downing prepares the refreshments in Melbourne
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BOORANGA NEWS
MARCH - APRIL 2011
Nathan Curnow (Melbourne Launch): So this is fourW’s big 21st. And you can consider this the embarrassing, drunken
heartfelt speech that has to happen at every 21st party… David Gilbey you might have to step in to shut me down at some stage.
Cause I LOVE Four W. I LOVE you!!! No, really. I really really really LOVE you...
...I did a residency in Wagga a couple of years ago and stayed in the Booranga farmhouse up there, on the side of the hill and the
real joy of those two weeks was meeting the people of Wagga and its surrounding towns, and getting a sense of the creative community up there. It was a privilege. So it’s my honour to say a few words about the journal, its contributors and those who’ve made
this 21st edition what it is. And what it is, is just one expression, one example of this communities excitement and energy for writing, amid a gob smacking impressive calendar of readings, residencies and events.
Now from recent experience in putting something like this together, I gotta say it is a lot of hard work. There is always a lack or
resources, time, money but somehow people pull together despite the odds against them, and thank god they have done it
here. I like to think that the scratching inside the walls of the Booranga farmhouse but is some strange manifestation of the restlessness and passion that is required for the next issue of fourW to be born. Or if it is indeed the possums, perhaps the scratching is
them flipping through the current fourW enjoying the work, unable to put it down, day or night, at all hours, never ending…
But I am so impressed with this issue. It’s scope, it’s commitment to emerging as well as established writes, both local and overseas,
to the wide range of styles and subjects it showcases. It’s gonna be tough to cover it all and do it justice...
... So here’s to Booranga and to the restlessness and passion of all those involved and committed to fourW twenty-one. It’s also a
tribute to CSU and Arts NSW. fourW is a country cousin that comes to the big smoke each year without being overwhelmed,
it comes as a punk leader, driving the van of the vanguard, delivering a wide-sky cinema of established and rising stars that won’t
hide their fire.
Keri Glastonbury (Sydney Launch): In the contemporary networked landscape I wonder what the connotations of a ‘regional
writer’ are these days and if they are outdated? In his introduction to fourW twenty-one editor and WWWW stalwart David Gilbey
writes that the magazine’s brief is to represent ‘the region in national and international contexts’. I left Wagga in 1989 and moved
to Sydney to go to University, now 20 years later I’ve moved to another regional city: Newcastle and so have been thinking a lot
about ‘regional’ writing and writing communities. This also means that I got all of the references in Greg Bogaert’s story set in
Newcastle ‘Gary’, and I still see billy-carts on my street in Tighes Hill. A reminder that everything isn’t linear and pockets of time
stay intensely local.
The cliché idea of the regional writer is the assumption that they will focus on ‘local colour’, the quaint and picturesque. But perhaps we need to re-think these familiar national assumptions about location, literacy and lexicon. One story that jumped out at me
in this issue of fourW was Barrie Walsh’s ‘Grandiso Mortal Combatants Pestiferous OP-ED’, which seems to be an ‘asemic’ textual
assemblage. It is a local information overload...
... We often think of the ‘regional’ as an intermediatry zone between the local and the national. But it can also refer to an area that
exceeds the national within an international framework, such as The Asia-Pacific region. It’s often an administrative or economic
economy-of-scale, not too small, not too large. Perhaps in places like Italy, regional differences still matter on another level though,
in that the national framework is a relatively recent one. This is true also of Australia, as Indigenous culture maintained different
borders and boundaries in their mapping of the country prior to colonisation...
...fourW is still closely connected to the local community, with all these vectors crossing into and out of it.
Congratulations to the editorial team on fourW twenty-one.
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JULY - AUGUST 2007
BOORANGA
NEWS
EDITOR: DEREK MOTION
MARCH - APRIL 2011
New Readings E-Book Store
Readings has teamed up with members of SPUNC, the Small Press Network, to make a number of great titles by independent Australian publishers available, many in ebook format for the first time.
If you have an e-reader (many device formats are catered for, and compatibility guides provided) it will be well worth bookmarking
this site. The Readings E-Book store is the only online venue currently providing Australian titles put out by small publishers, in the
e-book format.
http://ebooks.readings.com.au/
The Ardlethan Poetry Caper
This very successful poetry event will be taking place again in 2011. The actual program is yet to be confirmed, but it will take place
between April 22nd - 25th at the Palace Hotel, Ardlethan.
David Gilbey and I took part in the festival last year and we were both impressed with poets and performers that were brought into
the region from around the country. This year’s line up promises to be just as good, with poets like Chris Mansell, Susan Hawthorne
and Janet Jackson planning to participate.
The complete program for the Ardlethan Poetry Caper will be sent to Booranga members as soon as it is released.
The World’s Greatest Shave
Your Booranga Artistic Director, Derek Motion, (me), will be taking part in the World’s
Greatest Shave this March. I will be shaving my head to raise money for Leukemia research. As some of you may know my hair has not been shortened like this in over seven
years.
If any of you would like to support me in this you can access my public donation page
at:
http://my.leukaemiafoundation.org.au/derekmotion
Or, if you are interested in observing the removal of ‘the hair’, I will be filming, photographing, and uploading the experience. Details will be provided in the next newsletter.
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BOORANGA NEWS
MARCH - APRIL 2011
Community group seeking a Writer...
A case worker at the local Forrest Community Centre recently contacted me, looking for a writer who might be interested in volunteering some time.
There is a client at the Forrest Centre in his early 90s who has ‘a fantastic memory for detail’, and who is keen to tell his life story.
Apparently the man began writing himself, but had difficulty with the task and found himself unable to continue after a few pages.
I believe this may well be a very rewarding opportunity for one of our Booranga members, if you have time available, and are interested in hearing about our history.
If you would like to volunteer some time to this writing task, please send a message to me at Booranga - [email protected], and
I can put you in contact with the appropriate case worker at The Forrest Centre.
Next Booranga Monthly Writers’ Meeting
The writing year is now well and truly underway, and in light of this we’ll be kicking off our monthly writers’ meetings for 2011.
These meetings have proved popular over the last few years, and we’ve have a regular core of dedicated members turning up to most
meets, along with many first-timers, people who are interested in seeing what goes on.
Remember, the format is very simple. Just bring along something you’ve recently been working on. You will then have the opportunity (most take it) to share your work, and to receive some feedback. The environment is friendly but the feedback is always useful.
It might be a good idea b efore attending to make multiple copies of your work (though photocopying facilities will be available at
the centre) and if you are working on something long such as a novel, it is best to select a section you wish to share, something that
can be easily read aloud in the time available.
The first monthly meeting will be held Saturday 26th February, 2-5pm, at the Booranga Writers’ Centre. (Tea and coffee are
provided.)
* The next meeting will be held on Saturday March 12th, when visiting writers will be in attendance.
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JULY - AUGUST 2007
BOORANGA
NEWS
EDITOR: DEREK MOTION
MARCH - APRIL 2011
Book Review by David Gilbey
Petra White, the simplified world, John Leonard Press, 2010, ISBN 978 098 052
69 81
This is a very satisfying collection, right from the outset, where the significance of
the title is suggested in the opening poem ‘Woman and Dog’. The painterly simplicity is ominously deceptive: ‘Little flecks of ruby blood glittered the black / rubbery pads, as if the dog was inking out / all the sadness of the woman.’ Writing and
thinking metaphysically, Petra White invites the reader to notice, explore, speculate
in language that renders precisely the empirical world but binds us to other nuances
of memory, desire, understanding. It’s a jewelled second book: just 52 pages of
gleaming words with brilliant surfaces and subtly entrancing depths.
There’s a strong sense of the conflicting ambiguities of childhood, growing up,
family, as in ‘Older Sister’: ‘Deputy mother of her maybe rivals /….she crouches,
/ a monster, hardened and unhardened /… / eyes red with metamorphosis’. Actual
details of home life: washing and ironing ‘the nappy’s origami’, barely conceal
undertows of myth and legend and imagining. Many of the poems search for and
interrogate notions of familial identity: ‘Not being a mother, / I wonder where my
spirit will go.’ (‘The Poem’). Or playful, as in ‘Spring’ which seems to toy with
fashion catalogues: ‘When wearing the new cocoon skirts do not let your knees / hatch their ageing butterflies’. Each poem has its
feet and hands in particularlity but its mind in the multiple realities behind the merely observable.
Glancing at the Romantic poets, White invokes the tropes of Wordsworth and Coleridge: ‘Dialogues of the Soul and Body / seem
bureaucratically polite’ and [of Wordsworth’s famous Prelude scene], ‘To climb a mountain is to climb himself’. The radical inscaping of the sublime world is seen, ironically, as a tonic: ‘Nature’s anti-depressants’.
Some of these poems come from White’s time at Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers and in some poems, she’s the
poet as chronicler, interpreter, including the moving evocation of William Drummond of Hawthornden:
Poems: Amorous, Funeral, Divine,
requiting privity with every-kind verse:
public tears for the public prince, then
for your private love, the terribly young
sweet woman dead before the wedding…
There is a sense of mortality and temporality which both grounds and even suffocates our common humanity.
I particularly liked the sonnet ‘The Couple who Own the Lebanese Café ‘ which tells an immediate, vivid story of contemporary
urban, multicultural work and contextualises relationship in an almost ‘eternal’ literary consciousness of love as a kind of music in
the spheres:
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BOORANGA NEWS
MARCH - APRIL 2011
Each morning except Tuesday for twenty years he rises
at four to go to the market.
Each day they are there in their shop,
she, impossibly sexy in loud tight dresses,
casually turning the skewers,
with the regulars.
Behind the counter they dance around each other,
as if they are building and re-building up love
that washes away each night
as love must, falling under the tide, dissolving
in the heart of the farthest star, to be reborn
eEntirely through human effort,
the smallest gestures, the brightest capsicum.
‘Imagination’ aces religious faith: a child friend’s leg is amputated despite ‘a thousand prayers’: the ‘cancer … was stronger / than
faith’ but deep in oblivious childhood she was ‘imagining / how she’d learn to walk again’.
The final poem ‘New Year’s Eve’ continues White’s preoccupation with ambivalence: ‘the tear in the year….the hungry new year
/ furrowing in’. In many ways these are small poems with huge reach, a sense of energy, darkness, hope and scepticism, caught in
ambiguity as a prevailing image has it: ‘the sailboat steadfastly sailless’.
These are fine, meditative poems, beginning in crisp, visualisable actuality but taking the reader on a well-wrought verbal journey
through personal and literary parts of the world which are only ‘simplified’ in order for the amazing complexity to be revealed by
what the American poet Elizabeth Jennings called ‘the severity of metaphor’. Yes, there’s something almost religious about these –
or at least contemplative, hearkening ….It’s the kind of poetry you’ll go back to again and again.
Petra White is a former Booranga writer-in-residence. She lives in Melbourne and the simplified world is her second collection. She
co-edits the online journal The So Long Bulletin.
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JULY - AUGUST 2007
BOORANGA
NEWS
EDITOR: DEREK MOTION
MARCH - APRIL 2011
PUBLISHING, COMPETITIONS and OPPORTUNITIES
General Submissions
2011 Rolf Boldrewood Literary Awards
Remember to keep in mind those literary journals that are
open for submissions all year. A good place to start researching the major Australian ones is here:
Prose: Open for fiction, article or essay entries (including
family history) with an Australian theme. Maximum 3000
words.
http://www.litmags.com.au
Poetry: Open for any form of poetry on an Australian theme.
(Booranga receives copies of the NSW based journals Southerly and HEAT, and these are available to borrow for Booranga Members)
First Prize: Limited edition bust of Rolf Boldrewood + $500
Second Prize: $250
Third Prize: $150
Entry fee: $10
Details + entry forms: www.mrl.nsw.gov.au
Also, don’t forget that fourW is open for submissions all year
round, but the cut off for each annual edition is June 30th.
Closes: 16th September 2011
The 2011 NSW Writer’s Fellowship.
2011 Banjo Paterson Writing Awards
Valued at $20,000, the NSW Writer’s Fellowship has been
awarded annually since 1982. The Fellowship is intended to
assist the writing of new literary work, with the Fellowship
funds supplementing the successful applicant’s income during
work on the nominated project. The Fellowship is open to
applications from novelists, poets, scriptwriters, playwrights
or other writers of fiction or literary non-fiction who are living
in NSW.
Categories for short stories, poetry, bush poetry and children’s
work.
Entry Fee: $10 per adult entry or $5 per child
Full details and entry forms can be accessed at:
http://www.wordsoutwest.com.au/userfiles/file/BPWA2011-EntryForm-web.pdf
Guidelines and application forms for the 2011 Fellowship are
available from the Arts NSW website: http://www.arts.nsw.
gov.au/index.php/funding-and-support/for-individuals/fellowships-scholarships-awards/the-nsw-writers-fellowship/
Closes: 15th April
Closing date: 5pm, Monday 21 March 2011.
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BOORANGA NEWS
MARCH - APRIL 2011
PUBLISHING, COMPETITIONS and OPPORTUNITIES
Eastwood Hills FAW Annual Literary Competition
Poetry
Bus Shelter Poetry
Short Story – Max 3,000 words 1st $200, 2nd $100
Free Verse Poetry – Max 80 lines per poem 1st $150, 2nd $50
Traditional Poetry – Max 80 lines per poem 1st $150, 2nd $50
Memoir – Max 1,500 words 1st $150, 2nd $50
Pauline Walsh Award for Short Short Story – Max 800 words 1st
$100, 2nd $50
Don’t miss this great new project featuring poems inspired by
Wagga - details on page 2 of this newsletter.
Obtain entry forms from the website:
http://hillsfaw.webs.com or (02) 9869 2715
Closes: 31 May 2011
Submission details: http://www.wagga.nsw.gov.au
Closing date: 14th March
Cordite Poetry Review
Poetry in Film Festival
Submissions are now open for the next issue, ‘Electronica’. Submit poetry, features, audio or review. All works published works
are paid for.
The Poetry in Film Festival (PIFF) is a Melbourne based film
festival hosted in 2011 for the second time.
The aim of the poem submission is to select a poem, which will
be interpreted into 4-7 minute short films by filmmakers from
around the world. The films will be screened at the PIFF2011
Awards Night to be held at the Palace Cinema Como, South
Yarra, Melbourne. Date TBC.
Details: http://www.cordite.org.au
Closes: 30th April
To be eligible for the competition the poem has to be:
Boree Log Award for Bush Verse
- an original work
A competition for traditional rhyming bush verse, 80 lines maximum. 1st prize of $100 and trophy.
- based on the theme ‘Communication’
- not longer than 15 lines
Obtain entry forms from the website:
http://hillsfaw.webs.com or (02) 9869 2715
Closes: 31 May 2011
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JULY - AUGUST 2007
BOORANGA
NEWS
EDITOR: DEREK MOTION
MARCH - APRIL 2011
PUBLISHING, COMPETITIONS and OPPORTUNITIES
No entry fee
All entries must be accompanied by the offical entry form and
entry fee. Forms can be accessed online at:
All submissions including contact details need to be sent to:
[email protected]
http://www.pcwc.org.au/web_images/2011%20peter%20
Entry deadline is 10 March 2010
cowan%20600%20short%20story%20competition.pdf
(Once submitted, entries may not be withdrawn from the festival. If your poem has been selected you will be notified via
email.)
Closing Date: 20 May 2011
Prose
Screen and Theatre
Call for submissions - [untitled]
Submissions of short fiction between 300-5000 words sought
for issue four of this bi-annual anthology. [untitled] is produced
by Busybird Publishing & Design, which promotes and gives
exposure to the work of emerging writers.
Australia Council Theatre Grants
Grants include: New Work (supports one-off projects that result
in the creation of new contemporary theatre work.
For more information visit: www.untitledonline.com.au
Details at: www.australiacouncil.gov.au/grants/grants/
new_work__theatre2); also,
Theatre: Fellowships (provides individual artists with financial
support to undertake a two-year program of creative work and/
or professional development.
The 2011 Peter Cowan Short Story Competition
Maximum 600 words per story
Details at: www.australiacouncil.gov.au/grants/grants/
fellowships_-_theatre)
Prizes: First $200; Second $100; Third $50
Certificates: Highly Commended four; Commended four
Entry Fee: $5 per story; Three stories for $12; Five stories for
$20
Theme: Open
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BOORANGA WRITERS’ CENTRE
APPLICATION FOR 2011 MEMBERSHIP
Wagga Wagga Writers Writers Inc (trading as the Booranga Writers’ Centre) was formed in 1987 to assist and promote local
authors and their work. The group holds regular readings at local venues, conducts writing workshops, offers fellowships at
Booranga, the Riverina Writers’ Centre at Charles Sturt University, and published an annual anthology, fourW, under the imprint of fourW press, and is active in promoting writing and writers throughout the Riverina.
Membership period: 1st January to 31st
December 2011
MEMBERSHIP ENTITLES YOU TO...
- Copy of fourW twenty-one Anthology
- Regular newsletter (bi-monthly) & e-list mailouts
Group membership (including one copy of fourW)
- 10% discount at Book City, Wagga
$55.00
- 10% Discount at Angus & Robertson Bookworld,
Single membership (including one copy of fourW)
Wagga
$36.00
- Member discounts to readings, performances & workSingle membership (not including anthology)
shops
$25.00
- Invitations to writing events & get-togethers
Concessional membership (one copy of fourW)
- Access to a network of writers, book enthusiasts &
$26.00
Concessional membership (not including anthology) other writers’ centres for information & friendship
- Use of Booranga Writers’ Centre library (featuring
$15.00
Student membership (under 21 years) not including current editions of journals such as HEAT and Southerly, as well as the newsletters of other writers’ centres).
anthology
$11.00
Please fill out and send application form to:
Wagga Wagga Writers Writers Inc. Booranga Writers’ Centre,
Charles Sturt University, Locked Bag 588, Wagga Wagga NSW 2678, Phone/Fax (02) 69332688
Name:
Address:
Telephone:
Email:
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Enclosed is: $............. cheque/money order FOR:
(please indicate membership type required)
undeliverable return to:
POSTAGE PAID AUSTRALIA
Booranga Writers’ Centre
Locked Bag 588
Wagga Wagga, NSW, 2678
POSTAGE PAID
AUSTRALIA
WWWW & the Booranga Writers’ Centre are supported by: