Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature #6/thyla6k
AUSTRALIAN POETS SERIES 6
Tom Shapcott, Jordie Albiston, Billy-Marshall Stoneking, Coral Hull, David Dixon, Melissa Ashley, John Mateer, Lee Cataldi, D J Huppatz, Diane Fahey
Selected by Coral Hull
Tom Shapcott
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Tom Shapcott was born in Ipswich, Queensland, one of Australia's mining-industrial areas. He is a twin. Left school at 15 but did an Arts Degree at Queensland University part-time in the 1960s, when he was working as a Public Accountant and had a young family. His first book of poems, Time On Fire (1961) received the Grace Leven Prize, then the only major poetry award in Australia. He has subsequently published 14 collections of verse, most recent being Chekov's Mongoose (2000, Salt Publishing), named by Elizabeth Jolley as one of her '3 books of the year' in The Age, Melbourne. He has also published 6 adult novels, 4 novels for younger readers and various ... |
[Above] Photo of Tom Shapcott by Mark Fitz-Gerald, 1999.
Jordie Albiston
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Jordie Albiston was born in Melbourne. Her first poetry collection Nervous Arcs, received first prize in the Mary Gilmore Award, second prize in the Anne Elder Award, and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Award. Her second collection is entitled Botany Bay Document: A Poetic History of the Women of Botany Bay. Her most recent collection, The Hanging of Jean Lee, explores the life and death of the last woman hanged in Australia (1951). Jordie received the Dinny O'Hearn Memorial Fellowship in 1997, and was original editor of the poetry e-zine Divan. She holds a PhD in literature, and has two teenage children. She is currently writing full-time on an Australia ... |
[Above] Photo of Jordie Albiston by Jenni Mitchell, 1998.
Billy Marshall-Stoneking
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Billy Marshall Stoneking has been living and working in Australia since the early 70s. In the 1980s, he edited The Stories of Obed Raggett, the first collection of original stories written by an Aboriginal writer in his own language (published bi-lingually in Pintupi/English parallel text). In 1991, he co-wrote and staged the first-ever poet-written, poet-acted and produced, verse play, Call It Poetry/Tonight, at the Sydney Theatre Company's Studio Theatre at the Wharf, that was subsequently aired on Australian national television. Billy's first, full-length dramatic play, Sixteen Words For Water was published by Harper/Collins in 1991. Much of Billy's work has been ... |
[Above] Photo of Billy Marshall-Stoneking by Billy Marshall-Stoneking, 2000.
Coral Hull
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Coral Hull is the author of over thirty-five books of poetry, fiction and photography. She is an animal rights advocate who has spent much of her life working voluntarily on behalf of animals, both as an individual and for various non-profit organisations. She has recently completed a book called Voices from the Dark, exploring mental processes and creativity. Her book Broken Land: 5 Days in Bre won the Victorian Premiers Award in 1998 and was broadcast on ABC Radio National. She received her first literary grant (Established Writer category) from the Literature Board of The Australia Council for the Arts in 2001. Coral is the Editor and Publisher of Thylazine, an electronic journal ... |
[Above] Photo of Coral Hull by Coral Hull, 2001.
David Dixon
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An editor for a Government Department, David Dixon has worked for ten years as a journalist for various publications and as a freelancer. He has also provided scripts for musical shows and a drama script for the ABC. When time allows, David works on short stories, script ideas and poetry. David's reading runs to Rupert Brooke, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Jane Austen, Dickens, Shakespeare, Dostoevski and Joseph Conrad. More modern, Graham Greene, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S Thompson (in small doses). He also firmly believes that the hugely-unfashionable Evelyn Waugh will be judged, along with D. H. Lawrence, as one of the greatest English writers of the 20th ... |
[Above] Photo of David Dixon by photographer unknown, circa 1997.
Melissa Ashley
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Melissa Ashley is a poet and fiction writer who lives in Brisbane, Australia. Her first collection of poetry and prose "the hospital for dolls", funded by an Arts Queensland Individual Writing Grant (2001), will be published in 2003 (PostPressed). She recently completed the first draft of a novel "the weird sisters", and is currently guest editing Stylus Poetry Journal. She is the former assistant director of the Subverse: Queensland Poetry Festival (1998-2001), and co-ordinator of The Arts Queensland Award for Unpublished Poetry. She has published her work in New Music, Short Fuse (New York), Subversions, Blue Dog, Imago, Hecate, Overland, Slope, New England Review, Famous Reporter, LinQ, ... |
[Above] Photo of Melissa Ashley by Stephen Booth, 2001.
John Mateer
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John Mateer was born in Roodepoort, South Africa. Since 1989 he has lived in Perth in Western Australia and then in Melbourne, Victoria. He has read his work at Poetry Africa 2001 in Durban, South Africa, at the Teater Utan Kayu in Jakarta, Indonesia, and at the 62nd World Congress of PEN, as well as at festivals and conferences in Australia. He has published a folio of poems for performance titled The Civic Poems. A number of his chapbooks have appeared in Australia, South Africa and Indonesia. In 1998-99 he was writer-in-residence at the Australia Centre Medan in North Sumatra in Indonesia. Currently he lives in Melbourne where he teaches a poetry course at the University ... |
[Above] Photo of John Mateer by Melissa Mateer, 2001.
Lee Cataldi
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Lee Cataldi was born in Sydney. Her father was an Italian. Thus she was born an enemy alien, but by the time she entered the education system she was as Australian as anyone else. She went to school in Hobart in Tasmania, to university in Sydney, and has worked as a teacher in Sydney, and in Lajamanu, in the Northern Territory. Later she worked as a linguist, documenting indigenous Australian languages, in Alice Springs and in Halls Creek. Between 1964 and 1973 she lived in Italy and in England. Since May 1968 she has been an active socialist. Invitation to a Marxist Lesbian Party won the Anne Elder Memorial Prize, and The Women who Live on the Ground won the Human Rights' ... |
[Above] Photo of Lee Cataldi by Janie Frazer, 2001.
D. J. Huppatz
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D. J. Huppatz has published a wide variety of writing including articles and reviews on contemporary art, catalogue essays, book reviews, poetry and fiction. His catalogue essays have accompanied exhibitions at 200 Gertrude St.(Melbourne), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), 1st Floor (Melbourne) and the Hong Kong Heritage Museum. In 1994 he became a founding member of 1st Floor, an artist-run gallery in Melbourne. 1st Floor is an art space which focuses on contemporary art, particularly collaborations between artists and writers. Out of this experience with 1st Floor he founded TEXTBASE, a collective of writers working in contemporary art spaces and has coordinated many ... |
[Above] Photo of D. J. Huppatz by photographer unknown, 2000.
Diane Fahey
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Diane Fahey was born in Melbourne, Australia. After spending a number of years living in Britain in the early eighties, she lived for six years in Adelaide, and now lives in Geelong, Victoria. Diane attended the University of Melbourne, and has subsequently combined writing with teaching in schools, universities, and in adult education. In 2002, she taught in the Professional Writing and Editing Course at the Centre for Adult Education, Melbourne. She holds a Diploma of Secondary Education and the degrees of B.A. and M.A. from the University of Melbourne, and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Western Sydney; its title is: 'Places and Spaces of the Writing Life'. Her poetry ... |
[Above] Photo of Diane Fahey by Beverly Hall, 2000.
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Thylazine No.6 (September, 2002) | |
