Which reminds me that, for those of you who didn’t get it, Caroline Lurie’s neo-pronoun ‘hir’ in last month’s ABR was not a stubbornly repeated literal but a neat and Ideologically Sound move to circumvent the relatively clumsy ‘his or her’ (Query: why is this never written as ‘her or his?’) as well as the only slightly less clumsy ‘his/her’, which doesn’t solve the precedence problem and is, moreover, felt by some to be oppressively trendoid. As far as I know, ‘hir’ is Lurie’s own invention and I should like to award her fifty ABR Brownie points on the strength of it. Like most effective feminist neologisms, it is a playful correction of one of the many not-at-all-playful inequities inherent in the language.

Conferences: The Association for the Study of Australian Literature’s annual conference will be held this year in Townsville from July 7–11. Details: The Convenors, ASAL 86, Dept. of English, James Cook University, Townsville, Qld. 4811 or phone (077) 81 4451. Come and watch ASAL’s terpsichorean giants battle it out in this year’s competition for the Frank Moorhouse Perpetual Trophy for Ballroom Dancing.

The Second National Folklore Conference, presented by the Australian Folk Trust, will be held from October 17-19 in Lindfield, NSW. Details: Mrs. Colleen Watson (Conference Secretary), 22 Lady St., Mt Colah, NSW 2079 or phone (02) 476 2704.

The Exeter Australian Landscapes Conference will be held in, naturally, Exeter from March 26-31, 1987. Details: contact David English, Footscray Foundation for Research in Australian Arts, PO Box 64, Footscray, Vic. 3011; or alternatively, watch this space.

Awards: the third Northern Territory Literary Competition organisers invite entries for the Arafura Short Story Awards and the Red Earth Poetry Awards. Closing date August 4. Details: Tony Scanlon, Darwin Institute of Technology, P.O: Box 40146, Casuarina, N.T. 5792 or phone (089) 20 4211.

My diary – as distinct from ‘journal’; I mean the daily ‘appointments’ (and disappointments) one that accompanies me everywhere like a familiar attendant (or, indeed, an attendant familiar – one’s diary is after all a sort of witch’s cat, helping one through the day in a detached sort of way, reminding one with calm irony from time to time of one’s limitations, and just recognisable as an extension of one’s own personality that has somehow slipped the chain and gone off to lead a life of its own) – my diary is a sloppy affair, full of crossed-out multi-coloured notes, lists and names, loose mysterious bits of paper, and barely legible reminders festooned with question and exclamation marks, scrawled diagonally across the pages in moments of enlightenment or recall while standing up in the tram. A beautiful object, in short, it is not; nor is it an orderly one. It is full of contradictions, gaps, now-mysterious messages that mean nothing to me. I note that, on the March 18 page, I have written ‘Flowers for H!’. But which H? None of the H’s have birthdays on March 18, or near it. I see I haven’t crossed it out, so maybe I forgot to get the flowers for H. Have any of the H’s been cool to me of late? Could this be the reason? Would I want to give flowers to the sort of person who gets miffed if one inadvertently forgets hir un-birthday? A frustrating document, my diary, and – like most other unreliable narrators – often more of a hindrance than a help.

So it is fortunate that I have two other invaluable Books of Days, both beautiful, both orderly: the Australian Library Promotion Council’s Bookmark 86, and McPhee Gribble/Penguin’s An Australian Literary Calendar. Bookmark is an annually produced diary and directory which proclaims itself ‘For readers and writers, libraries and librarians, publishers and booksellers.’ They left out editors, for whom it is indispensable. It has a year planner and a three-day-to-a-page diary section giving useful information about holidays and such, and livened up by notes of notable literary births, deaths, utterances, and events. So one can glean at a glance that on Tuesday, April 8 1986 (for example), it was the twenty-eighth anniversary of the death of Ethel Turner; it was the eighty-third anniversary of the day that Angus and Robertson bought ‘Waltzing Matilda’ from Banjo Paterson; and the reason the editors of Island Magazine weren’t answering their phone was that it was Bank Holiday in Tasmania. Bookmark also contains extensive and detailed information on libraries, literary awards, writing courses, professional literary organisations, journals, and the like. My own copy of Bookmark 86 falls open these days at the precious and now grubbily dog-eared page headed ‘Symbols for Correcting Proofs.’.

By now, halfway through An Australian Literary Calendar’s (and everybody else’s) year, Brendan Hennessy’s mysteriously illuminating portrait photographs of Australian writers have become for me firmly identified with the months over which they preside. David Malouf as April, immaculately dressed and urbanely interrogative as he looks up to catch the camera catching him pen in hand (kneeling on the grass and writing on a notepad balanced on one knee) and set against a serene and deserted background (lake, swans), has as I write just given way to Thea Astley as May in socks, sunglasses, and solar topee, at her amused ease on a scabby park bench. By the time the issue appears she will in turn be about to yield her place on the wall to June and Patrick White in scarf, beret, and overcoat, rugged and wintery.

Some of the portraits are deeply endearing. The ones of Olga Masters (July) and Elizabeth Jolley (November) make you wish you’d had them for aunties or godmothers when you were growing up. (Or, indeed, still). In the March photograph, Helen Garner’s dog gazes up at her adoringly and you can see why, although Garner’s own wistful expression suggests she wishes someone would tell her why. Frank Moorhouse (December) stands in a tropical-looking garden, rubbing his chin, and looking as if he’s about to solve a problem for you by suggesting something you never would’ve thought of yourself.

The calendar contains useful information for writers and other literary persons. It marks the dates when grants applications and entries for major literary prizes are due; it marks events like Writers’ Week. It also gives the birthdays of the writers whose photographs appear; this calendar and Bookmark 86 between them reveal the interesting fact that Olga Masters, Patrick White, and Dorothy Green are all astrological twins. Triplets. Whatever.

Under each photograph is a quotation of something the writer has said about writing, something you can think about for a whole month (light years away from those icky little ‘thoughts for the day’ you get on desk calendars and things), often some beautiful and ominous metaphor like Beverley Farmer’s ‘As with a net, the spaces in a story give it its form. I keep trying to cover the widest space with the fewest possible threads. Overdo this, of course, and the story slips through a hole in itself’, or Helen Garner’s ‘I love that feeling when a paragraph ends with some kind of resonance, so that you don’t finish off the thought, but leave the reader hanging with one leg over the abyss.’