Month: December 2023

The Booranga Writers’ Centre has been unsuccessful in it’s bid for annual funding from Create NSW under Chris Minn’s Labor government.

This came as a real shock to the Booranga Committee as Wagga Wagga Writers Writers, to give Booranga its full legal title, has been operating for 30 years.

Booranga serves its members and the local community through hosting Writers-in-Residence at their facility located on the Charles Sturt University Campus in Wagga Wagga, and through the publication of its annual anthology fourW. It also supports local and visiting writers with venues, book launches and reading events.

Business Manager Dr Greg Pritchard said ‘this is a real blow to the writers of the region and may mean the Centre has to close. At the very least we will have to severely curtail our activities’
‘It’s very disappointing’ he said, 'as Booranga had a great year with many events, a book sale, open day, writing film night, 10 open mic events and associated workshops and I have just been distributing copies of fourW thirty-four the centre’s anthology of new poetry and prose from all around the Riverina, Australia and internationally.’
‘We participated in the public meetings in 2023 about the new cultural policy, and the call from creatives in the Region was for more funding for regional areas, not to defund one of the Riverina’s key cultural organisations.’

Booranga President David Gilbey said he was very disappointed, ‘I've often said that so long as there was ongoing funding (from the NSW
Government) Booranga could continue - this was the genius of the original funding from Arts NSW back in the 1990s. Its cessation is certainly a mortal blow to Booranga as we know it.’ 

Metric — ‘Formentera’, from their 2022 album ‘Formentera’. Live at the Fillmore in Philadelphia, 2022.

2 paragraphs from Doris Lessing’s ‘Under My Skin’ (vol one, autobiography to 1949)

Something else happened, which I have had to think about ever since. At a Mission in Old Umtali there was an afternoon’s fete, and black people as well as white wandered about under the trees drinking tea and eating cake. I had never been with black people as an equal, in a social situation. I was delighted. I was curious. I was threatened, and did not know how to behave. I went up to two old black men standing each with a teacup in his hand and began chatting, social stuff, of the kind my mother was so good at. I chattered and they listened, looking gravely down at me. Then one said gently, ‘You see, I am very old and you are very young.’

Nothing very much, you’d think. I had been given the mildest of snubs, with a smile that forgave. But that was not it. There was something about the occasion, the old men, the words, that ‘got to me’. I knew they had. But what? What happened? Yet not for years did anyone say anything as powerful, making me think, forcing me to use words, incident, old men, as if hidden there was some kind of original excellence, which I must refer to. But nothing had been said, judged in terms of simple sense. And yet everything had. Long after, when something of the same kind happened, and then again, and again – I understood it doesn’t matter what words are used, if a person waits, unconsciously, not even knowing it herself – himself — wanting to hear something, be struck by something, needing it, then words as apparently empty as ‘It’s a fine day’ can have the same effect. But time was needed for that little incident to lodge itself in my mind as a paradigm, and ….