Month: February 2025

2024 Anne Elder Award judges panel announced

Australian Poetry has announced the three judges for the Anne Elder Award 2024 panel. They are Jeanine Leane, Theodore Ell, and Ella Skibeck-Porter. Theodore was the 2022 Anne Elder Award co-winner with Harry Reid (a judge last year) and Ella was Highly Commended in the 2023 Award.

2024 Anne Elder Award panel:

Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri writer, poet and teacher from the Murrumbidgee River near Gundagai. Her poetry has won numerous awards and prizes, including the David Harold Tribe Prize 2023. Jeanine is widely published in the areas of Aboriginal literature,  literary critique, and writing identity and difference. She is currently a First Nations Writer in Residence at the University of Melbourne where she previously taught Creative Writing and Aboriginal Literature. Jeanine’s current poetry collection, Gawimarra: Gathering  (University of Queensland Press), is short-listed for the VPLA 2024 Poetry Prize.

 

Theodore Ell is a writer and honorary lecturer in literature at the Australian National University. His poetry collection Beginning in Sight shared the 2022 Anne Elder Award. From 2018 to 2021 he lived in Lebanon, accompanying his wife on a diplomatic posting. Ell’s essay ‘Façades of Lebanon’, about witnessing the 2019 Lebanese revolution and surviving the 2020 Beirut port explosion, won the 2021 Calibre Essay Prize, and his memoir Lebanon Days was published in 2024. Ell’s poetry, essays, translations and non-fiction have been published in Australia, Italy, the United Kingdom and Lebanon.

 

Ella Skilbeck-Porter is a poet living in Naarm/Melbourne. Her debut collection These are Different Waters (Vagabond 2023) was shortlisted for the Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest and the Mary Gilmore Award and was Highly Commended in the Anne Elder Award. Her work has been widely published in journals and anthologies including Best of Australian Poems 2024, Living Systems: Poetry from Asia Pacific, HEAT, Otoliths, Rabbit and Cordite Poetry Review.

US politics — The client’s the voter…

There’s a thoughtful interview on the New York Times web site … ‘The Interview’ Feb 15, 2025, Lulu Garcia-Navarro in conversation with Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona …

Senator Gallego:

“The base Democratic voter wants to be rich. And there’s nothing wrong with that. And so our job is to expose when there are abuses by, quote-unquote, the rich, the wealthy, the powerful. Then that’s how we get those people that want to aspire to that to vote for Democrats.”

Lulu Garcia-Navarro:

“So Elon Musk, Donald Trump, are these the people who have actually figured out how to connect with the working class?”

Senator Gallego:

“Yes. Yeah. We just had an election that proved that. I mean — ”

Lulu Garcia-Navarro:

“Why?”

Senator Gallego:

“Well, I think because they both are two things that I think a lot of Democratic politicians are. No. 1, they actually understand, quote-unquote, the consumer. Right? And because they are engaged in, every day, one way or the other, trying to talk to the consumer. And in this case, it’s the voter, right?”

Lulu Garcia-Navarro:

“That’s so interesting. They’re salesmen, essentially.”

Senator Gallego:

“Yeah, exactly.”

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

“And they understand who the client is.”

Senator Gallego:

“Mm-hmm. The client’s the voter. And they don’t care. By the way, that’s the other thing that’s — they don’t care how they get the sale done. Right? This is why you saw during the campaign, Trump said, You know what? No tax on tips. We’re not going to tax your security, all this kind of stuff. And on the other side, people were like, Well, that’s really going to do something and do an imbalance to the budget deficit. What did Donald Trump care? He just wanted to win, right? What does Elon Musk want to do? He just wants to win, right? He knows where the voter is, and he’ll get there however he can get there. But they’re closer to the ground, to where the base voter is, than to some of us Democrats.”

 

Tim Winton on the lack of effective nature laws

(Tim winton, ‘The Guardian’, 22nd Feb 2025)

Having acknowledged our extinction crisis and the climate emergency, Anthony Albanese promised to introduce more effective nature laws. His government hasn’t delivered on that promise. A policy failure this monumental isn’t just politically embarrassing – in the real world of blood and fur and feathers, it’s calamitous. Because without positive action, precious things and places will die. That’s not tragic – it’s shameful.

Sad to say, part of that shame can be sheeted home to my home state of Western Australia. The last-minute intervention of our premier, Roger Cook, ensured the extinction of those new nature laws.

WA, of course, is the only Australian state without a 2030 emissions target – here, carbon pollution is increasing. So, no surprise that temperatures are already dangerous, fires and floods are intensifying, and homes and properties are becoming uninsurable.

Polling shows that most Western Australians want climate addressed properly as a matter of urgency. But the Cook government’s fealty to the fossil fuel industry, backed by local press barons, is almost tribal. Despite the science, they want to back the likes of Woodside to drill and pollute for another 50 years. That’s a death warrant for Australia’s corals.

After this week, our shock will turn to sorrow. But while we must own that grief, we should be sure to identify its sources and use that knowledge to bring about change. Elections aren’t our only opportunity to disrupt and destroy business at usual, but they’re a good place to begin.

Read Tim Winton’s full report here.