It's Miles Franklin Time.

I know I will be very happy when every office runs an Archibald, Booker and Franklin sweep just for fun. All shortlistees are deserving of their place and the various artists usually have a long and distinguished pedigree like fine blood stock.

I am putting my money on The Book of Emmett by Deborah Forster (a first novel from a Melbourne writer) for the Miles Franklin, but what a field.... Castro, Hartnett, Temple, Miller and Silvey. Craig Sivey's Jasper Jones would be in my Quinella, let's see how far off I am.

So as you can see, occasionally a talented unknowns emerge from the artistic ghettos and attics (in reality warehouses and garden shed throughout suburbia). That is why I was so pleased that Glenda Guest won last weeks Commonwealth Best First Novel Prize. It is an honour for her and a recognition that our Creative Writing higher degrees do not produce second-rate writing. It is just the sort of publicity our beseiged academics, like Glenda's supervisor and mentor, Nigel Krauth needs.

ERA points(Excellence in Research Australia)may be the focus of University proficiency measures of academic compentence, yet something like this (Prestigious Awards in the Creative Arts) comes along and the various University Media Units are straight onto the major dailies, attaching their pettard to the student's achievement. Yet is the Creative Work adequately recognised under the ERA. At least some Universities do... but sadly not ALL. One in that I am particularly familiar with is totally recalcitrant on this metric and denies themselves some Federal Government fiscal reward for ignoring these outputs.

The other issue is that the sheer quality of work produced by students such as Glenda, and Janine Carey (appointed Writer In Residence at Queensland's Great Keppel Island!) Add that to her shortlisting for the Callibre Prize, and her publication in the forthcoming Australian Review of Books for that work... part of her PhD artefact).
These students work are inspiring all of us to aim higher and keep pushing through the tough times in the PhD writing journey.

These just have to be indicators of teaching merit and proficiency surely? How hard can it be to find alternative ways to measure teaching other than quantitative anonymous student questionnaires which often attach the Course content criticisms to the actual lecturer (teacher). Somehow our Higher Education system's push for Quality Frameworks is revealed as totally inadequate (as is the case I would argue, in ALL organisations).

On this thought, Mark gave me a link to humourous (yet deadly true) article from the Campus Review. It's called What's in a name? By (psydonym) Henry Barnes... the whole issue of management decision making, accountability and transparency is opened up for much warranted scrutiny.

http://www.campusreview.com.au/pages/section/article.php?s=Comment&idArticle=15508

Can we have metrics to measure management efficieny as conditional upon Quality Measures recognition and Funding? Or is that just too far out there and upsetting for too many underperformers in high poistions of authority and power?

With that last tasty morsel I will retreat back to my washing machine and well spun load, having already completed the supportive mother/taxi driver priority on the day's schedule, and then having filed (and Endnoted) all my newly searched journal articles and references. I think I will take a screen break before getting down to writing my book chapter.

Yeah sure, I hear you say!

Well, that's my honest plan... at this stage, anyway.