2010 Second National Republican Short Story Competition Winner Announced

Helen Bersten and Sean Oliver Ness were each awarded today a ‘Highly Commended’ in the Second National Republican Short Story Competition for their short stories Double Lives and Inauguration Day.

The 2010 theme was ‘Life and Death in an Australian Republic’. Australia’s speculative fiction writers were challenged to speculate on the possible futures of the Australian republic.

The Judging Panel comprising Professor Brian Matthews, Professor John Warhurst and Professor George Williams decided not to award a 2010 First Prize. Instead they have awarded two ‘Highly Commended’ prizes and recommended the prize be jackpotted for 2011. This is not an unusual outcome for literary competitions. Winners will receive $50 each.

Winner of a ‘Highly Commended’ in the Second National Republican Short Story Competition is Helen Bersten. Mrs Bersten is a librarian, who has been working for the last 32 years as Honorary Archivist for the Australian Jewish Historical Society in Sydney. In 2005 she received an OAM for her voluntary service to the historical society. She has also been a voluntary reader on Radio 2RPH (Radio for the Print Handicapped) for the last 6 and a half years. She is an avid writer of letters to newspapers and an amateur poet, who proof-reads others' works and dreams of writing her own magnum opus. She is a wife, mother of 3 and grandmother of 5.

In Double Lives, Mrs Bersten tells dual stories: one set during a Presidential meet’n greet where his new team of advisers, Team PC (People’s Choice), are getting to know each other. At the same time a fictional crime story is being told about the night the Dunbar sank at South Head in Sydney Harbour.

The Judges commented that Double Lives is both imaginative and innovative. The attempt at a dual narrative – one commenting on the other, the past intruding into the present – is ambitious and difficult. They felt the complicated structure, though at times flawed, makes a genuinely ambitious and credible effort to produce a fiction. It is a story that has the required republican provenance but which tries to do other things and go to other places, both physically and psychologically.

Winner of a ‘Highly Commended’ in the Second National Republican Short Story Competition is Sean Oliver Ness. Mr Ness was born in North Queensland but his family moved to Hong Kong when he was young. He lived there until he was 12 returning to Brisbane and later study in Psychology and Information Technology at university. He works in the public service in Canberra. His interests include travelling, participating in Volunteer Emergency Services, following politics and, of course, reading and writing a lot.

In Inauguration Day, Mr Ness tells the story of James Hapeta, an Australian Federal Police Lieutenant assigned to Presidential protection detail with the Inauguration Day Presidential parade. As the Presidential motorcade travels through the streets of Canberra, Hapeta and his security colleagues attention to security is at fever pitch due to a discovered credible threat.

Ness’ sense of humour is evident in his reference to ‘Billies’. As the Presidential motorcade passes through Ainslie "an elderly couple: grey hair, plain clothes, a stiffness that stood out from the happy families [are holding] a poster-size portrait of the Queen [and] a sign that said "THE SECOND RUM REBELLION IS HERE – GOD SAVE US ALL!" Ness explains that in the early days, monarchists took the Rum Rebellion analogy and ran with it; in response, they were uniformly nicknamed Billy Blighs, or just Billies.

The Judges noted as nicely managed the following paragraph in Inauguration Day where Hapeta observes the scene around him:

The big houses faded as they turned a sharp corner onto Antill. On the left, they passed schools and public swimming pools and clusters of shops; on the right, rows of small homes and low-rise apartment blocks. State Policemen were on either side of the street, controlling the crowds. As the motorcade swept down the street, the low murmurs turned into a loud cheer that echoed off the apartment blocks. Streamers were tossed into the air, and confetti rained down like pink snowflakes.

When Hapeta breaks protocol and leaves his post to assist a ‘Statie’ the theme of ‘Life and Death in the Australian Republic’ emerges. The final scene is captured by a bystander with the photo becoming the defining memory of the day.

The two ‘Highly Commended’ entries were published on the Australian Republican Movement website on 6 November 2010.

Republican challenge to Australian speculative fiction writers

The 2010 Second National Republican Short Story Competition opened on 1 May 2010 and closed on 31 August 2010. The winner will be announced on 6 November 2010.

The theme for the Second National Republican Short Story Competition is 'Life and Death in an Australian Republic'. Short stories will speculate on Australian republican futures.

The Second National Republican Short Story Competition continues the momentum built from the successful 2009 First National Republican Short Story Competition. 2009 was a milestone as it was 10 years on 6 November 2009 since the republican referendum was lost. To commemorate this event and to remind Australians what they still didn’t have the Australian Republican Movement ran the First National Republican Short Story Competition.

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 Second 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.

Tomorrow when the republic comes

M. Barnard Eldershaw was the pseudonym used by the twentieth century Australian literary collaborators Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw

Their final collaborative novel, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, published in 1947 as Tomorrow and Tomorrow, is considered to be one of Australia's major early science fiction novels and was highly regarded by Australia's only Nobel Prize winner for literature, Patrick White. It is set in the 24th century and features Knarf (a novelist and historian whose name is an inversion of Frank Dalby Davison's first name).

The book is essentially a story-within-a-story, with much of it comprising an historical novel, written by the character Knarf, about "old" Australia from 1924-1946. This story is basically an alternative history of an Australian socialist republic from the 1920s on flowing from a revolution during the First World War. It was, however, censored for political reasons at the time: the censors demanded that 400 lines be cut, including references to National Security regulations and how they contradicted the democratic principles for which the war was supposedly being fought.

Speculating on the Republic

On 3 August 2010 Independent Australia published the the first review ever undertaken on the republican speculative fiction genre in Australia.

It seems strange there is no tradition of republican speculative fiction in Australia. It is through speculative fiction that change can begin. 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.

Republic - 'The Land Itself '

In 2000, the Australian speculative fiction writer Sean Williams published in Eidolon. The Journal of Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy, Vol.7, No.2 (No.29/30) the story he had written too late for the 1998 Aurealis Republic issue.

Williams’ decribes ‘The Land Itself’ as “not just a post-human take on the whole Republic issue, but as post-Australia (if that’s a thing).”

One of the Australian colonies wants to secede from the motherland and its envoy has to jump through several increasingly strange hoops to do it. He follows this up in 2005 with his second novel, The Resurrected Man which is set in a future Australia (2069) that was part of the United Republics of Australia in which ‘Old Stott-Despoja’ had just been voted in for another term.

Australian identity, Australian literature and an Australian republic

On 7 July 2010, David Donovan wrote in Online Opinion that a major reason for an Australian republic is to aid the further development of a distinct and unique Australian identity. This identity comes through the way we think about ourselves and our nation: the stories we tell, the songs we sing, our legends and our myths. From our literature and popular fiction, we can see that Australia has built a narrative about who we are as a nation, and new chapters are being added all the time as the national identity is updated with each new era.

As part of this process, the Australian Republican Movement runs an annual speculative fiction short story competition. Entries close in August for the current installment of this competition. This year, writers are asked to present stories about Australia’s republican future, under the theme “Life and Death in the Australian Republic”.

There is no real tradition of speculative republican fiction in Australia. A great many of Australia’s most important works of fiction look towards our past rather than ahead. Moreover, with some exceptions rather than preferring bright and optimistic tales, the stories with which we seem to most identify have a strong sense of adversity, injustice and persecution at their core.