Calibre Prize
Hold your nerve
I have not told anyone that there is a small child growing in my bedside table drawer. The Ziplock bag containing E’s hair, a mass of tangled brown. A handful of baby teeth.
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We fell into the ocean backwards, making the OK signal for the camera. Later I replayed that footage several times, but it never seemed accurate: all flailing flippers and ungainly limbs, smiles stretched around the mouthpiece, that messy shattering of the surface. Nothing like the slow, deadly grace of being underwater.
Australia’s new Commonwealth government has pledged to initiate a ‘universities accord’ and build consensus on higher education policy questions. This follows a period of torrid relations between universities and the government where constructive dialogue was patchy at best. We may have heard little from Labor about universities over the course of the past nine years, but its ‘universities accord’ election pledge at least recognises that, for the good of Australia and its people, it’s time to reopen constructive channels of communication.
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This catalogue accompanies the current exhibition of Ken Whisson’s work at Melbourne’s Heide Museum and, later, at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition and catalogue are a joint exercise by MCA curator Glenn Barkley and Heide’s Lesley Harding. As with most exhibition catalogues, it offers an artist’s statement; a Foreword (by MCA director, Elizabeth Anne Macgregor); a 10,000-word curatorial essay; a list of works; biographical notes, listing Whisson’s exhibitions and the collections that represent his work; a Bibliography, detailing references to Whisson; and Acknowledgments. All of the works in the exhibition are reproduced in thumbnail illustrations, and more than sixty paintings and twenty drawings are reproduced in larger colour plates. Also featured is an interview that Whisson gave to Sydney-based artist (and friend) Joe Frost in 2009. All this comes in a modestly sized catalogue that has been crisply designed by Liz Cox.
Dear Editor,
This is a note to congratulate you on the quality of the latest Calibre Prize essays, by Jane Goodall and Kevin Brophy, in the April edition of ABR. The two pieces maintain the incredibly high standards of the Prize, of which I was honoured to be an inaugural judge.
This memoir moves through points of intensity in Kate Llewellyn’s life, from an idyllic childhood at Tumby Bay on the Eyre Peninsula in the 1940s through to her leaving Adelaide to make a new life in Sydney in the 1980s. By this time she is a recognised poet, but her life is in turmoil. The book does not set out to tell a success story; rather, it describes that uneven movement from childhood innocence through adult experience, with all naïveté, self-delusion, idealism, and hard-learned lessons. It is quintessentially a poet’s book, its stories heightened by arresting images, its movement circling rather than linear.