At a time when magazines (at least of the print variety) seem to be dropping like the proverbial (see below), it was pleasing to hear of a new quarterly publication, Wet Ink, based in Adelaide. Fittingly, Dominique Wilson, the editor, is growing used to a certain inundation. ‘We were totally flooded with submissions,’ she was quoted in the press; ‘choosing who to put in was really, really hard.’

All things Crikey and wonderful

Last year, The Reader (the thinking woman’s Reader’s Digest), by then part of the Crikey empire, went online. On January 18 Crikey announced that, having decided that ‘the message we’re sending out is overly complicated’, it has opted to amalgamate the two, ‘while retaining the somewhat different content styles of each one’. The Reader will ‘metamorphose into the new Crikey website’, which will be ‘a portal for all things Crikey’. Meanwhile, ‘Advances’ was sorry to learn of the imminent closure of Eureka Street in print form. Tom Cranitch, CEO of Jesuit Publications, told The Age that only two more hard-copy issues will appear, after which Eureka Street (founded in 1991 and notably edited by Morag Fraser until 2003) will ‘move online’.

Vale Michael Thwaites (1915–2005)

It’s a fair bet that even the most devoted royalist would be hard-pressed to name the first Australian who won the Queen’s Medal for Poetry. There have been three since then, all luminaries of Australian poetry – Judith Wright, Les Murray and Peter Porter, in that order – but the first was Michael Thwaites, who died last November, aged ninety. A few years previous, W.H. Auden was favoured by the monarch’s judges (we don’t suppose that George V himself was a passionate reader of ‘Lullaby’ or ‘This Lunar Beauty’; and John Masefield, poet laureate at the time, wrote the happy letter to Thwaites). ‘Advances’ doesn’t know what Auden wore when he received his King’s Medal (stained morning dress and carpet slippers perhaps), but we imagine that Thwaites wore military uniform when he fronted up at Buckingham Palace in 1940: he was a member of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve throughout World War II. Thwaites, born in Brisbane, had won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford where he won the Newdigate Prize in 1938 (the same year he published his first collection, Milton Blind). After the war, he had one of the more idiosyncratic careers of any Australian poet. He served for two decades with ASIO and was deputy head of the parliamentary library in Canberra in the 1970s. The former experience doubtless came in handy when he wrote his book on Vladimir Petrov, Truth Will Out (1980).

ABR event on February 12

Our first event for 2006 will take place on February 12, when Peter Rose and Craig Sherborne will be in conversation about the challenges of writing family memoirs and of writing across an unusual number of genres: between them, memoir, poetry, fiction, drama and journalism. Craig Sherborne’s recent memoir, Hoi Polloi, was one of the most acclaimed books of 2005. Writing in our summer issue, Peter Porter described it as ‘an instant classic’. This event is the first in our series of 2006 ABR/Flinders University events, an important feature of our new partnership. It will take place in the intimate, air-conditioned comfort of the Radford Auditorium at the Art Gallery of South Australia: 2 p.m., Sunday, February 12. ABR subscribers and Flinders University staff and students are entitled to a single free ticket; the cost to others is $10 (or $5 for concession holders). To book, call ABR on (03) 9429 6700 or e-mail Lorraine Harding: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. These events fill up quickly, so we advise you to book soon.

Special ABR offer to charities

Just as, each year, we offer a number of free ABR subscriptions to state schools, we would now like to do the same for those charities that offer library services to their members or clients (and that have not hitherto subscribed to ABR). We therefore invite our subscribers to nominate a charity of their choice or to advise it to contact us directly to make the necessary arrangements. At this stage, we can offer ten one-year subscriptions. Charities and the armies of volunteers that assist them play a unique role in helping Australians in necessitous circumstances: anything that helps their cause is fine with us.

Nurture nature

It’s the season for the Watermark Literary Fellowship applications. This fellowship, valued at more than $5000, is awarded biennially to an emerging writer focusing on ‘nature, natural history or sense of place’. The 2004 Fellow was Carolyn Leach-Paholski, whose first novel, The Grasshopper Shoe, was published last year. The 2006 recipient will be entitled to twelve weeks’ accommodation and a mentorship with Eric Rolls. Closing date for applications has been extended until March 31. For more information, go to www.watermarkliterarysociety.asn.au.