2010 Judging Panel announced.

The judging panel was announced today for the Second National Republican Short Story Competition. The short story competition will open on 1 May 2010.

Professor Brian Matthews is Honorary Professor of English at Flinders University. He has won the Victorian, New South Wales and Queensland Premiers' awards for literature and the Gold Medal of the Australian Literature Society. His most recent book is Manning Clark A Life.

Professor John Warhurst recently concluded fifteen years as Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University. He is Adjunct Professor at both ANU and Flinders University, Senior Deputy National Chair, Australian Republican Movement and was ARM National Chair from 2002 to 2005. He also writes a weekly column for the Canberra Times.

Professor George Williams is Anthony Mason Professor of Law and Foundation Director of the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law at University of New South Wales. He is a National Committee member, Australian Republican movement and regular reviewer of science fiction and fantasy books for The Book Show on ABC Radio National and for The Weekend Australian.

Dr Glenn Davies is Queensland State Secretary, Australian Republican Movement, a republican historian and author, and a 2008 and 2009 Aurealis Awards Speculative Fiction judge.

2009 First National Republican Short Story Competition Winner Announced

Kel Robertson is the winner of the 2009 First National Republican Short Story Competition.

2009 is a milestone as it will be 10 years today since the republican referendum was lost. To commemorate this event and to remind Australians what they still don’t have the Australian Republican Movement held the First National Republican Short Story Competition.

Short stories were required to portray an Australian republican future in a positive light and demonstrate the absurdity of a hereditary monarch as the Australian Head of State in twenty-first century Australian society.

The First National Republican Short Story Competition challenged Australia’s fiction writers to speculate on the possible futures of the Australian republic. Speculative fiction writers deal with possibilities. They speculate. They make the future seem real.

Mr Robertson’s winning short story was titled Rook Feast and tells the story of the final meeting between the King of England who is under house arrest and a Minister of the British government. The Minister (who is also a relative) has come to inform the last King of England “on a perfect English spring day” what is to be his fate. Set in the future where a post-tourism-age appears to have killed the monarchy, Mr Robertson’s story explores concepts of the hidden costs of monarchy through a ‘security expenditure issue’, and the theme of the inevitability of the popular will of the people. The plot is written around a discussion of what will be the individual future of the last King of England.

Rook Feast won the First National Republican Short Story Competition on the strength of the writing. The judges agreed Rook Feast was a fine, well-written short story that successfully managed to take in and make much of the required republican theme. He wins $611.99, and his short story will be published on the Australian Republican Movement website at http://www.republic.org.au/

Kel Robertson, 52 lives in Canberra, and is the author of two critically lauded crime novels featuring the Chinese-Australian Federal Police investigator, Brad Chen. On learning of his win, he commented:

“I am truly delighted to win this competition. I enjoyed myself immensely writing this story; the whole experience was entertaining. As a young man I was very much of my time and had great sympathy for the royal family whereas now I find myself bemused by their activities. It was great fun being able to have some gentle pleasure at their expense.”

The First National Republican Short Story Competition has helped to foster the emerging Australian republican speculative fiction genre. A daily blog was run in conjunction with the First National Republican Short Story Competition as creative stimulus material for writers – see http://republicanfiction.blogspot.com/ Each blog detailed an example of Australian republican speculative fiction writing.

Before every great invention and before every great journey is the idea. Without ideas and imagination, we are all trapped in the past. Mr Robertson’s Rook Feast is an exercise in imagination and helps to lead the way into a possible republican future. The Australian Republican Movement congratulates the winner of this year’s competition and extends its thanks to all entrants.

The First National Republican Short Story Competition presentation ceremony will be held on Wednesday evening, 18 November 2009 during the National Republican Lecture, Southern Cross Club, Canberra.

The Republican Short Story Competition will be run again in 2010.

Republican challenge to Australian writers

The First National Republican Short Story Competition closed today. The winner will be announced on 6 November 2009.

2009 is a milestone as it will be 10 years on 6 November 2009 since the republican referendum was lost. To commemorate this event and to remind Australians what they still don’t have the Australian Republican Movement is running the First National Republican Short Story Competition.

Short stories will be required to portray an Australian republican future in a positive light and demonstrate the absurdity of a hereditary monarch as the Australian Head of State in twenty-first century Australian society.

It seems strange there is no tradition of republican speculative fiction in Australia. In colonial times there were republican poets such as Charles Harpur writing in the 1840s and 1850s, and republican writers such as John Dunmore Lang and Daniel Deniehy in the 1850s and William Lane, Henry Lawson and John Norton in the 1880s and 1890s. But where have been the republican stories for the past century? There have certainly been many republican writers during this time but almost no examples where republican settings or arguments have been explored in Australian fiction. Republican arguments and explorations of the past and imaginations of the future are always written within the framework of constitutional debates.

Where do the people of Australia fit into this? Where are their myths and stories to tell and retell and remember about Australia’s emerging republican identity?

This First National Republican Short Story Competition challenges Australia’s fiction writers to speculate on the possible futures of the Australian republic.

Speculative fiction writers deal with possibilities.

They speculate.

They make the future seem real.

However, we can’t achieve anything unless we imagine it first. Before every great invention and before every great journey is the idea. Without ideas and imagination, we are all trapped in the past.

So, the ARM (Q) would like to point the way forward through Australian stories with a republican backdrop. They don’t have to be political thrillers or constitutional whodunits as long as they are an exploration of our future, our republican future.

One day to go until the First National Republican Short Story Competition closes.

The Night They Stormed Eureka

Jackie French’s junior fiction novel The Night They Stormed Eureka (2009) starts when Sam, a teenage girl, seeks refuge in a cemetery after having run away from her mother’s abusive boyfriend. In mental and physical pain, Sam imagines what life would have been like for the family of Percival and Elsie Puddleham, their names and dates carved on a headstone she shelters near. The depth of Sam’s longing for love and comfort reaches across the years to meet a yearning for a lost child, and she finds herself in mid-19th century Ballarat, not long before the bloody battle at the Eureka Stockade.

Now in 1854 Sam finds a warm, inviting home with the Puddlehams who run “the best little cook shop on the diggings”. But it was a time of great unrest among the miners on the diggings and Sam is swept up in the Eureka Rebellion, an iconic event on our national heritage landscape.

French’s recreation of the uprising against the British is not the Eureka of history books. She does not know if she’s changed the past or if it was another past. In Sam’s Ballarat the Eureka rebellion was really about turning Australia into a republic, rather than an uprising of miners over compulsory mining licence fees. And while there were only 120 men left in the stockade when it was eventually stormed, in The Night They Stormed Eureka this was because thousands were lured to different parts of the camp through trickery.

At the end of the story, Sam awakens in the graveyard to a concerned friend and worried teacher who, suspecting she was homeless, have been looking for her. Experiencing Eureka has changed Sam and, for the first time, she reaches out for help. What she learns at Eureka is that when you stand together, you can change the world.

Readers will be drawn into this world of treacle dumplings, pink bonnets, injustice, dreams and courage. Along with the Dickensian characters there are themes of race, equality, democracy and freedom. French states this is a story 'with historical background, not history’. Readers from 10 years and up couldn’t do better than read this novel to feel the texture of the event that almost turned us on the path to republicanism.

Five days to go until the First National Republican Short Story Competition closes.

The 1954 Royal Tour

Queen Elizabeth II is the only reigning British monarch to have set foot on terra australis. On the gold and blue morning of 3 February 1954, in the presence of a massive crowd, one million and more, she cam ashore at Farm Cove. This journey through Australia would be the longest single part of a six-month post-Coronation tour through twelve Commonwealth countries. In the eight weeks allotted to Australia, the Queen and her husband travelled to every capital city bar Darwin, and to seventy country towns.

In Janet Withers 2008 One Brisbane One Story short story “Winged Feet” it’s 1954, Queen Elizabeth is coming to Brisbane, and Flora’s school will participate in the welcome dance pageant. But how can she reconcile this with her father’s anti-royalist views? And should his socialist ideals prevail to move the family from the beautiful Clayfield home and garden that her mother loves?

When I told my father that the Queen was coming to visit he exploded. ‘The Queen! Down with the Queen and the Monarchy. She’s not even a reader, the Queen. She reads the Women’s Weekly and has trouble digesting that.’ …

‘Banish from under your bonny skies / Those old-world errors and wrongs and lies,’ quoted Dad from Henry Lawson. ‘We want a classless society, where all are free and equally educated. Down with the Queen and all she stands for!’

Conflict and loyalty are explored in “Winged Feet” amid a chorus of birds and a remembered streetscape of trees and flowers that add sparkle to this unconventional family story.