Editorial

When Is a Dollar Only Five Cents?

Hands up everyone who thinks they’re getting a bargain when they pay $32.95 for a book rather than $33.

Somewhere back in the Dark Ages of marketing, some guru decided that people felt that five cents short of a dollar was really nine-five cents less, because they paid more attention to the amount in front of the decimal point than after. So rather than advertise a product for a dollar, the shops would put ninety-five cents on the price tag. Really daring entrepreneurs would put nine-nine cents on it to minimise their losses if the product sold in the tens of thousands.

It’s one thing to do that with a pair of socks, where five cents means five cents, but where things really get absurd is when you’re shopping for expensive products like plasma TVs or cars. Somewhere along the line, the gurus decided that cents were irrelevant on products like that, so the fiddle is applied to the dollar values. We see TVs for $4995 or $4999. Do people really believe they’re not spending $5000 dollars for that TV?

If you’ve browsed the IP Shop, you’ll see that we sell books and our digital products on the dollar. We don’t believe in insulting the intelligence of our customers. This makes things easier all around when I’m selling books on the road, not having to carry rolls of five-cent pieces. It also makes it easier to calculate GST or the amount owing when bookshops order titles in quantity. (Yes, we have an accounting package that can do this for us, but sometimes booksellers ring us up and want a quick answer, which would be a bit harder to manage when you have to calculate $29.95 x 36!)

I think it’s high time that publishers and other commercial enterprises simplified pricing by using whole numbers—calling a dollar a dollar rather than ninety-nine cents. Maybe then more of us would be able to figure out what we’re spending in our heads rather than with a calculator.

— DR

<title>IP eNews/<title>

Focus on IP Picks 08

Our 2008 competition was our most popular so far. We received entries from every State and Territory in Australia, with the exception of the Northern Territory.The percentage breakdown by State and Territory was:
New South Wales: 31.7%
Victoria: 30.5%
Queensland: 20.7%
Tasmania: 6%
Western Australia: 5%
ACT: 3.7%
South Australia: 2.4%

Growing in popularity was the First Book category, while the Poetry category continues to be the most competitive of all the categories, with a very high standard of entries.

The judges remarked on the higher standard of entries in the Creative Non-fiction category but felt that the overall quality of fiction entries was disappointing, despite the dramatic increase in overall number of submissions.

The results of the competition follow, with reviews by Lauren Daniels (LD), Brittany Patterson (BP), and David Reiter (DR)

Winner, Best Fiction, Over My Dead Body by Jim Brigginshaw, NSW

Jim Brigginshaw’s novel draws us effortlessly into the plot of an historical fiction novel. Set in the late 19th century coalfields of Ipswich, Queensland, the story opens:

Coal dust, breathed into the miners’ lungs in hellish conditions under the ground, make coughing and spitting part of their lives. They had no choice, it was the body’s way of clearing deadly congestion. But whenever they laid eyes on the mansion of the hill they spat not out of necessity but with malicious intent. The black gobs of mucus seemed an apt way of expressing what they thought of this lavish reminder of their own squalor and poverty.

In the shadow of this manor, a complexity of human lives converge. A multi-generational tale themed by ambition, struggle, endurance and love propel this narrative through the birth of the Brisbane region.

When he had the mansion built he copied the ancient castles of his native Wales. Towering stone walls topped by parapets and battlements, tall stained-glass windows, huge oak doors with studded brass hinges – there was nothing remotely like it anywhere in the infant colony of Queensland.

The manor of coal baron Gareth Jones looms over the miners, a grim symbol of ill-gotten opulence in an age when workers’ health and rights had not yet even been conceived. And yet, the reader is reminded: darkness begets darkness.

The site had been chosen carefully: Overlooking the Ipswich coalfield it was on a hill where the mansion could be seen, but with a green curtain of trees so that those who lived there wouldn’t have to look at the blackened poppetheads and ugly mine buildings. It was so suitable for his needs that Jones ignored the warning that he should not build such a large structure there. A labyrinth of his coal-producing tunnels radiated beneath the mansion and mining men predicted that sooner or later it would subside into the dark caverns from which came the black gold that made him rich.

Along this journey, impressively drawn characters awaken and step from the past. From a waterfront inn to the deck of a schooner, chance encounters forge the course of these young lives.

Whenever she was on deck he saw to it he wasn’t far away. One dark night as Jane stood alone at the ship’s stern watching a watermelon slice of moon inching up from the horizon, Con stayed in the shadows, too nervous to let her see him.

Lovers marry and children are born, taking readers to the pastures of McCormack Farm in the wilderness outside Brisbane. A family grows, despite the harshness of the terrain.

Each morning Donkey would be difficult to catch, her usual protest at being required to provide bareback transport fort the children to the one-roomed bush school four miles away.

Marked by the events of the Great Flood of 1893 and the formation of the first miners’ unions, Over My Dead Body is an Australian epic; a literary feat exemplifying a writer’s craftsmanship and dedication to bringing history alive.

– LD

Jim Brigginshaw was born in Ipswich, Queensland in 1926 and now lives in the small town of Iluka, New South Wales.

He has 60 years of all facets of newspaper journalism, (reporter, sub-editor, chief sub-editor, editor) at nine major dailies in three States, including The Courier-Mail, Brisbane Telegraph, Sunday Mail, The Australian, The Queensland Times, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney Sun, The Northern Star, The West Australian. He was runner-up for a Walkey (journalist of the year) and was author of Our Crazy World, which is Australia’s longest-running newspaper column.

First Commended, Best Fiction: Becoming Ned by Gill Hardwick, WA

Set in the Australian bush,Becoming Nedfollows the lives of fourth generation Scottish squatters having to adapt to the suddenly uncertain world in the times of the Great Depression.

Becoming Ned is also a coming of age story, unique in its themes of Celtic otherworldliness and Aboriginal dreamtime magic, dealing with far more than the normal struggles involved in becoming a young man. Ned takes the reader on a journey of self-discovery as he finds he has a talent for hearing more that just the words that people have actually spoken.

The quiet of the bush did not just allow the small sounds, but keeping in touch, once you knew how.

A life wrought with family struggles and the struggles of an emerging nation faces Ned as he becomes a man. Despite his impatience to be told every family secret it isn't long before his childhood is gone. The family secrets soon become his to carry, along with the responsibility of looking after his own family and running a changing farm.

Over the next week they had their hands busy with calving, and even then it took another five days before the last cow dropped, and another week again for the calves to grow strong enough to walk on with the mob. In the meantime some of the main herd wandered off, getting away through the sheer distraction as men worked day and night trying to keep them together while managing their large scattered pastoral holdings through encroaching war and drought.

Layered with a diverse range of characters and themes Becoming Ned takes the reader on an intriguing journey, full of mystery, hardship, loss and new life.

– BP

Gil Hardwick is a mature-age Honours graduate of the University of Western Australia, majoring in Traditional and Contemporary Aboriginal Studies, Social Historiography, Ethnographic Film, Research Ethics and Fieldwork Methodology.

Following a period of cross-cultural dispute resolution at state government level, he shifted his research focus to the early colonial period with a special emphasis on the Celtic Diaspora, investigating why many Aboriginal activists today carry Scots and Irish surnames. He has several historical publications.

<title>IP eNews/<title>

Second Commended, Best Fiction, Home for Lost Books by Michael O’Sullivan, NSW

Crafting a quietly bubbling cauldron of magic realism in the novel Home for Lost Books, Michael O’Sullivan has peppered these pages with an immense love for stories. O’Sullivan’s passion is expressed exquisitely by the transformation of the novel’s protagonist, Lucy Gray, a retrenched librarian for whom a secret collection of books becomes a portal to a parallel universe.

[In the library basement] Beyond the compactus are caged areas full of discarded equipment and furniture. Why is it necessary to confine old chairs and desks? If left unencumbered will they gather and break out of their captivity? It’s very dark at this end of the basement, the fluorescent light struggling to illuminate the cemetery.

After ten minutes I’d seen enough and turned to leave. At that moment I saw a door in the middle of the wall. I couldn’t remember seeing a door down here.

Upon finding door, she makes a point of returning and investigating the contents of this secret vault, despite her termination.

Picking up the lantern I carefully stepped into the sea of books. It was like being on the crest of a wave, threatening and exhilarating at the same time.

Home for Lost Books begins with both a redundancy and a gateway—an end and a beginning—as it waves a wand over the mind of the reader.

Last days are poignant, don’t you agree? Leaving a workplace, a spouse, children, a place where you’ve been happy, they’re all the same. Emptiness steps in and lessens you a little. Or a lot. That night I even thought about the last days of Pompeii, and the Minoan civilisation, obliterated without warning by unpredictable forces. I suppose we all think everything will last forever, but it doesn’t.

Lucy, despite feeling a bit lost herself at the start, finds the golden cord that will lead her through a labyrinth of buried treasure and politics as she sprouts from a meeker character into ‘Miss Courageous Gray’.

– LD

Michael O’Sullivan lives in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales with his wife and three children. 

Before becoming a full-time writer he followed various occupations, including fencing contractor, carpenter and builder, university tutor, librarian and archivist, and as a curator with the Private Records collection at the Australian War Memorial.

IP has published his previous novels, Secret Writing and Easter at Tobruk.

Winner, Best Creative Non-Fiction, Put the Billy On by Ann Jones, QLD

Set within the backdrop of the Australian countryside, Put the Billy On follows the speaker as she, her parents and her sister conclude an arduous trek towards to a sheep station near Gregory Downs in 1936.

No more driving, no more swirling bulldust, no more flat, grassy plains of the savannah country. We had arrived.

This journey, undertaken to escape a recent loss, leads the family to a new home full of new friends and new experiences.

Through the memories of her childhood the speaker chronicles the infinite adventures to be had in her new home. She describes the shock and fear she felt the first time she met the Aboriginal helpers to the sense of belonging the moment she truly felt that they had become her friends.

That night, Delma and Jacob made a fire and cooked the goanna in the coals. Marie and I joined our indigenous friends once more to share the harvest of the day, and became at one with them as we sat around the campfire feasting from the honeypots, taken from the nests of Sugarbag, sucking the juice of the Conkerberries we had saved in our hats and savouring the white meat from the tail of the goanna.

Put the Billy On gives the reader insight into what it was like to grow up in Australia in the 1930s and 40s. The story is mixed with undertones of both humour and fading innocence while also peppered with historical events, such at the lead up to World War II. These historical events are artfully compared to the tensions that exist in the speakers own life.

I no longer minded if I had to keep quiet while the adults sat huddled around the screeching, squawking wireless eavesdropping into the affairs of the outside world, the War in Europe, hostilities in the Pacific and no sign of peace. In my world, with Aunt Lil’s departure and Mum home and in charge, hostilities ceased, war on the home front ended and peace was declared.

With one final move to come the speaker deals once again with the fear and excitement of the unknown. It is time to reminisce on the friends, the experiences and the once in a lifetime gifts given to them by the people indigenous to that region.

– BP

Ann Jones was four years old when she moved from Sydney with her family to Almora, a sheep and cattle property in the Gulf country where the family lived for most of World War II.  There she encountered the Indigenous people and their culture and these experiences inspired her to write Put the Billy on, to document a way of life that has long since gone.

Apart from raising a family, Ann’s main focus in life has been education which began with correspondence lessons fitting in with mustering time or when the Big Wet prevented the arrival of the mail. She became a teacher by default, ‘to escape the expected female career as a shorthand-typist,’ but discovered a lifelong vocation.  She has taught in Queensland and in Papua New Guinea, tutored in Speech Remediation at James Cook University and lectured in Practical Studies at the Australian Catholic University in Brisbane.

Ann is a member of U3A and now enjoys living on Bribie Island. She has had two of her stories published in Behind the Faces, which showcases women’s writing in the Queensland Society of Women Writers.

First Commended, Best Creative Non-Fiction, The Importance of Being Cool by Olwyn Conrau, VIC

Olwyn Conrau literally throws readers into the deep end of a post-modern raucous jungle: the Australian, twenty-something social scene. Booze, chemicals and speed of all sorts hammer audience and characters through the surprising voice of an intelligent and tenacious young woman:

I wanted to scream at him but instead I shut my eyes, held my breath and wished for the car to stop…. I looked up to see a high barbed wire fence waving at me. He turned the steering wheel, violently forcing the car into an abrupt halt. I could smell the stench of smoke curling from the wheels of the car. I swallowed hard and tried to persuade the adrenalin from exploding through my body.

A montage of familiar ground unravels before us as we enter this not-so-alien world where a synthesis of the post-modern Australian woman’s independence and simultaneous vulnerability are explored under the flicker of club lights.

I stood smack bang in the middle of the budding crowd as it jostled about. Hot seating bodies moving to the rhythm. The band was pretty tight with the guitar screaming and the drums thumping violently. I stood like an idiot and swayed momentarily like a tree but my trunk started to weaken and wobble and I knew there was little left to hold me up.

The dynamics of friendships, family, work and serious play are all underscored by acceleration. Within this gloves-off narrative, a sparingly honest portrayal is ventured; culminating in a cutting awareness of the bruises that life at this velocity will leave.

A few Fridays ago, I had found him leaning against the bonnet of this car with a joint in one hand and a stubbie in the other. I thought he looked pretty cool in his suede vest and blue and orange paisley shirt. He looked okay enough to eat…. But he turned out to be a bit of a dud. Mattress dancing wasn’t his forté even if he thought it was. We hooked up last Saturday at Hosies and by the end of the night, both pissed as farts, we rushed back to his place and dove under the bed covers. Cold hands grabbed bits of spiked flesh. His mechanical efforts were totally uninspiring. I laid back counting. …seventy-six…seventy-seven…legs eleven…. Wham! Seventy-eight seconds. One minute and eighteen seconds.

– LD

Olwyn Conrau has worked as a copywriter, media consultant and journalist for almost 20 years with several articles, short stories and poems appearing in The Australian, Herald Sun, Melbourne Times and Tarralla Literary Magazine, to name a few. She did her cadetship at BRW Publications and has a BA in Literary Studies from Deakin University.

Her novel, The Importance of Being Cool, was inspired by an earlier life where she lived in St Kilda as a student, part time go-go dancer and a visitor to its many nocturnal establishments.

Second Commended, Best Creative Non-Fiction, Grave Concerns by Laine Wilson, NSW

Laine Wilson has boldly fashioned an iconic Australian voice. She musters the strength to gaze directly at life and loss to behold the wisdom in its cyclical nature. Her perspective blooms from a rare kind of honesty, observation and humour.

I now feel so vulnerable, so exposed, so at risk.

I guess death does that. Surgery does that too, and yes, so does divorce…. They are all circumstances, which, even as sole visitors, can leave us fragile and defenseless…. Yet this past year or so, these miserable visitors have combined forces to form a veritable surprise party of unwelcome guests.

Astride this literary trajectory and through the unusual technique of speaking directly to her deceased mother—a technique impressively sustained from start to finish—Wilson uncovers the insistence of life, determination and grace within her family, despite the thorny path that tears at each surviving member.

Is this true, Mum? We wondered what you would have known of love, sex, betrayal, exhaustion and the daily battle with depression. Yes, what would you have known, Mum? Your husband, our father, was a strict and sometimes tyrannical man. Your mother disappeared when you were thirteen, presumed dead.  You lost a child to the combination of ignorance and medical neglect; you worked long hours; were let down and betrayed by business people, friends and family. Of course you would have understood more than we gave you credit for. But still we played our games, keeping you on a need to know basis.  It was for your own protection, we kidded ourselves! Occasionally your children were selfish fools!

Conditioned by experience to examine, unabashed, the collective themes of suffering and death, Wilson treads willingly and quite lyrically where many hesitate. The reward is Aussie gold.

I have since considered that Death is very rude to not book ahead, to not let people know of his appointments in advance. If God could but train the Grim Reaper to email or to send a text message at least, it might make it easier on families in chaos.

– LD

Laine Wilson was born and raised in Toowoomba, Queensland. She studied Arts/Languages at The University of Queensland. 

Laine spent many years as a business-woman in Queensland. More recently in Sydney, she owned and operated a service industry business with her husband, for which she wrote industry publications, training manuals and marketing material.

Following a bout with breast cancer, Laine now lives in Coffs Harbour, New South Wales.

Winner, IP Picks Best Poetry: The Possibility of Flight by Leanne Hills, VIC

Hills takes on the big issues in this challenging and innovative collection. In “flat earth theory” she zooms in on a nameless person lost in reverie as the Earth heads toward apocalypse:

Except one.

Who’d been looking
the other way
hands in whistling pockets
shoe doodling the dust.
Mind alert to a dream.
Where the Earth is flat.

And gravity has no pull.

She conjures up parallel realities with ease, as in “Mythos” where her speaker anticipates the coming of a human—and less philosophical—age:

When I was a Myth, I lay prostrate before a circling crowd and let them connect their drips to me, till, blood brothers, we presented Poesis to a shackled world, our new dialogue with Being creating man himself.

Hills intersperses a rhetoric of art with science, creating dazzling insights. In “libretto”, following a stanza invoking fools and kings from the mind of Shakespeare, she considers what genetics might add to the debate:

must we anagram | title letters | initials of the
forgotten bled |apply our DNA & there it is |
a transparent helix | words rank with design |
melding of lifted fable & the medium that fits :||

– DR

Lea Hills’ work has been published and translated both locally and overseas. A contemporary ballet, Les Portes du Monde, for which she wrote the libretto, in French, was performed in Switzerland in April 2007. She has been a prizewinner in the FAW and Greater Dandenong National Poetry Awards, among others, and is editor and co-initiator of the poetry section of Moving Galleries, a poetry/art project currently displayed on Melbourne’s trains.

Upcoming publications include The Sign of a Warrior, a novel for younger readers, to be released internationally in 2008, and a young adult novel, A Book for None and All.

Lea lives in the hills outside Melbourne, with her husband and two young sons.

Highly Commended, IP Picks Best Poetry, Inside Story by Lee Knowles, VIC

With accomplished narratives, Lee Knowles creates speakers caught in a crosscurrent of time and allegory, as in “Picture Maker”:

She never could be
the woman they’d expected.   Her mind
unrolled a cave wall restless with drawings,
her destination.   Untangling herself
from their arms, she gave the bowl
to another, stepped through the fire
and ran from them all
for her life.

In moments of reflection, her speakers absorb and capture the essence of foreign settings, such as the Rome in “Siesta”:

The sound
of bells comes through all absences
as we take in this city, feel its blood
beat, with the shutters half closed,
the broom fallen on the terrace floor
and a white butterfly going all the way down.

Knowles is just as capable of focusing on the familiar, with a sensitivity that brings characters from the past tangibly into the present, as in “Back Yard”:

Tennis balls thud
against a giant billboard.
There’s room for circling
bushes in a thousand cartwheels.
Room too for John in his own world
planting higher-than-Jack beans,
always with bags to give away.

– DR

Lee Knowles began producing poetry while living in Western Australia.   Her interest in poetry had developed alongside an early involvement with speech and drama studies.  She remains highly concerned with the sound of poetry.

For some years Lee worked for the W.A. Education Department as a salaried writer for children.

At one time she lived aboard a yacht off Fremantle. This experience combined with sailing to neighbouring islands informed some of her work as did also a trip aboard a fishing vessel to the Wallabi Group of the Abrolhos Islands, the scene of the Batavia shipwreck.

A prospecting expedition to the Goldfields also proved inspiring as did a residency at the BR Whiting Library in Rome in 1999.

First Commended, Best Poetry,Towards a Grammar of Being by Julie Waugh

Waugh likens our society to a dystopian 1984-ish future in the first poem in her collection “Go West”, portraying that the politics of fear and human dependence on technology is dividing our world.

I hope the angels remember how to weep
as we, unsatisfied with our little lives
distanced by digital virtualities
polarised by fears of a third invasion
have forgotten

Not only does Waugh confront the ‘bigger picture’ like the war on terror, but also focuses inward on the concept of ‘self’ and achieving ‘self absolution’, in her poems “After Reading Mozart to da Ponte Words and Music by David Malouf” and “Green and Blue”.

the ancient source of all religions that give believers
the death-defying conviction that they alone have absolution

until the planets, which can be exasperatingly mathematical
have aligned to deliver that most delicious scream, precisely
to herald what will, what ocean, what ascendant cloud
circles, perhaps not meant for us lesser catalysts of intention

(After Reading Mozart to da Ponte Words and Music by David Malouf)

it’s comforting
to locate
where a body
might be
in relation
to a world

a poet
some say
should come
from
somewhere

(Green and Blue)

In her poem “Consummations”, Waugh uses powerful metaphors to paint a vivid picture of the ‘everyday’.

like the way a child, satisfied and sticky
will fall asleep exactly where they are

and those tough intersections
where belief succumbs to instinct
unforgiving, confronting, like a riot in the city
or a teabag bleeding in the sink

– DR

Julie Waugh lives in Sydney and has beeen published in Poetrix, Decanto (UK), The Mozzie, Above Ground Testing, e'ratio, nth position, Southern Ocean Review, Stylus Poetry Journal and others. She has an MA in creative writing from UNSW.

She works as a nurse and is returning to freelance editing. She is also relocating to Northern Ireland for a while to spend time with her son, who has settled there, and her new grandson. It will be a good opportunity for her to write a lot more poetry.

Second Commended, Best Poetry, Spoken Not Heard by Nicola Scholes, QLD

Scholes portrays uses a quirky and original imagery to portray a little girl making a dollhouse with her mother, in the first poem of her collection, “Dollhouse”.

What’s all this about Dad said
there were little white hats in a row
draining
on the bathroom sink.
my dolls always had the luxury
of mint-infused beverages

Scholes delves into the real reason the late Steve Irwin is idolized to the extent that he is by Australians in her poem “Steve Irwin”

We thought to ourselves:
‘If I can’t,
it’s still good that he can,
especially when he is
just an average Aussie bloke
with a little empire,
television, films, a successful zoo,
dressed in khaki,
it could be me or you.’

In part II, she cleverly plays on the words ‘crocodile’ and ‘stingray’ to portray parallels.

Over the crocodile’s head, the stingray pandemic,
Beneath crocodile laughter, stingray fear,
For the crocodile media, the stingray academic,
For the crocodile hunter, Germaine Greer.

In her poem “Stingray”, Scholes relates Steve Irwin’s death by a stingray puncture to the relationship between two lovers.

you are no more aware of your venomous barbs
than you are of my punctured heart

you cruise through the clear waters
graceful, peaceful, blameless

It is your nature.

She depicts Uncle Sam as being Australia’s ‘puppeteer’ and the invasion of digitalism in our society in her poem “Green Eggs and Spam”.

You will love it! Once you bite
A megabit, a megabyte!

When you unzip / you will enjoy,
Fairies, pixels / plastic toy,

I do not WANT green eggs and SPAM,
Leave me!  Leave me!  Uncle Sam

– DR

Nicola Scholes was born in England, Her poems have appeared in several Australian magazines, and she regularly reads her poems at Brisbane's spoken word event SpeedPoets.  In 2007, she won the open mic competition at the Queensland Poetry Festival event “Love Poetry Hate Racism.” 

Nicola has a BA in English from The University of Queensland, a Graduate Diploma in Library and Information Studies from QUT, and an MA in Children’s Literature from Deakin University.  Her writing and illustrating for children have appeared in Cherububble Magazine.

She is presently researching a PhD on the poetry of Allen Ginsberg at The University of Queensland.

Best First Book Results in the Right-hand Column!