Cirrus@Austlit

Christopher Bantick writes on the state of arts funding in Tasmania including a perceived shift in governmental attitude to the arts from the incumbency of Premier Jim Bacon - who instituted the Tasmanian Pacific Regioon Prizes - to his successor, Paul Lennon.

'There are three certainties about Australian fiction today: fewer books are being published, sales are falling and shelf-lives are shorter. Is the literary novel dying down under?' (Editor's headline)

Rosemary Neill canvasses opinion on this subject from across the literature sector. Her interviewees include writers Brian Castro and Mark Davis, publisher Shona Martyn and Literature Board head John Emery.

In countering Stella Clarke's 'Havoc in History House', McKenna writes that Clarke 'trivialised my [McKenna's] arguments to make it appear as a simple battle between imaginative historical fiction and the noble boredom of "insecure academics" chipping away in the drudgery within "the orthodoxies of salaried history processing".' McKenna states that he has never claimed 'that history should be left to the historians', he is simply trying to 'remind us of the differences between fiction and history, and point to the dangers and consequences of confusing the two.'