Alice Pung named chair of judges for the 2023 Stella Prize
9 September 2022
Melbourne based author and lawyer Alice Pung was named chair of judges for the 2023 Stella Prize last month. The prize, which recognises the work of women and non-binary writers, is one of Australia’s most prestigious literary awards.
I recently read Pung’s 2021 novel One Hundred Days, which was shortlisted in both the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award, and the 2022 Australian Book Industry Awards. The story centres on sixteen year Kuruna, and her fraught — to put it mildly — relationship with her overbearing mother, which becomes all the more strained after Kuruna falls pregnant. Not an easy read, if I’m honest.
On the subject of the 2023 Stella Prize, entries are presently being accepted until Wednesday 12 October 2022.
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Alice Pung, Australian literature, books, literary awards
The Age Book of the Year prize 2022 winners announced
9 September 2022
In Moonland by Melbourne based Australian author Miles Allinson, which I’ve written about previously, has won the fiction prize in The Age Book of the Year prize 2022.
Meanwhile Leaping into Waterfalls by Sydney based writer and literary critic Bernadette Brennan — a biography of late Australian short story writer and novelist Gillian Mears — has taken out the award for non-fiction.
The winners of the prize, which was re-booted last year after a nine year hiatus, were announced on the opening night of the Melbourne Writers Festival.
The Dinny O’Hearn Poetry Prize was in the past awarded to works of — you guessed it — poetry, but this doesn’t appear to have been presented since 2012.
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Australian literature, Bernadette Brennan, books, literary awards, Miles Allinson
Make mechanical versions of electric circuits with Spintronics
8 September 2022
This looks like fun for young and old alike. Hailed as the first physical equivalent of electronics, Spintronics, a game recently developed by Upper Story, can emulate just about any existing circuit configuration.
Players feel the pull of voltage and see the flow of current as they discover electronics in a tangible and deeply intuitive way, using the first physical equivalent of electronics ever built.
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The midlife crisis as a creative transformative experience
8 September 2022
Andrew Jamieson, writing for WePresent, on the upsides of the sometimes debilitating midlife crisis experience. Shortly after turning fifty, Jamieson reports not moving from his bed for almost ten weeks, as all manner of uncertainties and anxieties weighed on him. Despite the melancholy some people might feel at reaching such a milestone, a midlife crisis can lead to a creative resurgence. I’m pleased something positive came of the ordeal.
In reading the accounts of these notable individuals and how they battled through their midlife crises, I began to realize that these harrowing feelings were perhaps not just some arbitrary misery, but rather a transformative experience. They seemed to turn ordinary individuals into exceptional men and women who achieved not only significant outward success, but also a striking level of inner serenity when facing the later challenges of their lives. Perhaps these anxieties and depression that I was so overwhelmed by could become a portal into some new phase of life.
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The Booker Prize 2022 shortlist
7 September 2022
The Booker Prize 2022 shortlist has been unveiled:
- Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo
- Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
- Treacle Walker by Alan Garner
- The Trees by Percival Everett
- The Seven Moons of Maali Almeid by Shehan Karunatilaka
- Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout
Featured above is the cover of Shehan Karunatilaka’s shortlisted title The Seven Moons of Maali Almeid. It would win the disassociated prize for best book cover on the Booker Prize shortlist, if there were such a thing.
The winner will be announced on Monday 17 October 2022.
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Booker Prize, books, literary awards
Five levels of encryption on the Australian Signals Directorate coin
7 September 2022
Sen, an all-round IT professional, writes about decoding messages embedded in the recently issued Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) fifty cent coin. While a fourteen year old boy in Tasmania is credited with making the discovery of four messages “hidden” on the coin, it turns out there is a fifth level of encryption.
The outer ring came close to looking like Morse Code and was giving some output that almost looked like real words, but just a bit too gibberish. After much banging-of-heads-on-keyboards we realised I’d transcoded the outer strings wrong, which meant of course we were trying to break codes that didn’t exist.
Note that Sen’s article contains spoilers, the messages are revealed in their entirety, so read it later if you still want to decode the coin’s messages yourself.
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Australian publishing industry diversity and inclusion survey 2022
7 September 2022
Recently released results of a diversity and inclusion survey (PDF) conducted by the Australian Publishers Association and the University of Melbourne, offer a revealing snapshot of the Australian publishing industry. Although more than eight in ten publishing professionals are women, few are in senior roles, while under one percent of workers identify as Indigenous or First Nations people:
- Fewer than 1% of Australian publishing industry professionals identify as First Nations
- 84.4% of survey respondents identify as women, 13.8% identify as men, and 2% identify as non-binary or prefer to use another term
- The proportion of men increases for senior roles
- 35.4% of respondents were experiencing mental health conditions at the time of responding to the survey
- 24.8% of respondents were located in places other than Sydney or Melbourne
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Australian literature, publishing
A spring of Sam (Southern Annular Mode) and La Nina summer?
5 September 2022
Image courtesy of disassociated.
While there’s a slim chance regions of Australia may yet be spared a third consecutive wet, rainy, La Niña weather event this summer, the outlook for spring is not so promising.
The Bureau of Meteorology advised last week parts of eastern Australian can expect higher than usual rainfalls, thanks to another meteorological phenomenon, a positive Southern Annular Mode, or SAM, for short:
Further, Dr Bettio said a positive Southern Annular Mode (SAM) is also likely, which pushes weather systems south, bringing wetter easterly winds to NSW and fewer cold fronts to western Tasmania. Dr Bettio said parts of Western Australia and western Tasmania are likely to experience below average rainfall this spring. Almost all of Australia is likely to experience warmer than average nights, while cooler days are likely for large parts of the mainland except the tropical north.
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All about bringing public electric vehicle chargers to Australia
5 September 2022
With electric vehicles (EV) set to sky-rocket in popularity in Australia, there has to be plenty of business and start-up opportunities in the sector. Publicly available EV charging stations, which I wrote about the other day, would be one of them.
Melbourne tech-writer Anthony Agius was behind two companies whose aim was to install and operate charging stations across Australia, and in a detailed article, he outlines what he discovered about making them available for anyone to use.
The point of this post isn’t to analyse why I’m not an EV charging mogul with dozens of stations making mad profits around the country. The point is to dump everything I’ve learned about this topic into a single place so even if I don’t make anything out if, maybe someone else will stumble across it, learn something and do what I couldn’t. Even if one extra EV charger gets installed because of this post, it’ll be an improvement over my pathetic attempt.
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electric vehicles, technology, travel
Apollo Remastered, beautifully enhanced photos of the Apollo flights
5 September 2022
Image courtesy of NASA.
The above image is of Aquarius, lunar module of the ill-fated Apollo 13 Moon flight of April 1970.
Here it is seen moments after being jettisoned by the Apollo crew. For those who came in late, Aquarius acted as a “lifeboat” for much of the shortened Apollo 13 mission, after an explosion damaged Odyssey, the command module. Without Aquarius the crew may never have returned home.
I’m not sure though if it features in Apollo Remastered, the new book by British author and science writer Andy Saunders, which contains a veritable trove of photos from the Apollo missions. Saunders has spent the last few years enhancing four hundred previously grainy images, making them far sharper and clearer than those originally released.
Some before and after examples of the remastered photos can be seen in this BBC report by Jonathan Amos. And if you’re not familiar with the Apollo 13 story, American filmmaker Ron Howard’s 1995 feature of the same name is well worth a look.
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