News Snippets / Upcoming Events

June 5 & 6 at Folk Redlands: Once again Folk Redlands are combining with the Indigi Day Out Weekend to present a weekend of interesting environmental displays and stalls, and fabulous music from two stages in the Indigiscapes Centre’s lovely bush setting at 17 Runnymede Rd, Capalaba, Brisbane.

This will be the 5^th Folk Redlands Festival and I’m performing at 1pm on Sunday afternoon - June 6 - at the Tallowood stage (below the cafe).

The music festival can be moved indoors in the rare event of inclement weather, and this is always a great weekend and a wonderful place to bring your children – there are lots of kid’s activities - and a picnic hamper (or buy a delicious meal from the Folk Redlands BBQ), and just relax under the tall trees and listen to some excellent performances. There’ll also be workshops for song writers and musicians and the entry is free.  Bring your own chairs/rugs.

For further information click Folk Rag, go to www.folkredlands.com or contact Pat 07 3821 5979 / 0416 003 320). See also Performances.

Library Panel & Discussion: March is Mystery Month at the Logan West Public Library in Browns Plains in Logan City and I’ve been invited to participate in a panel of mystery/crime writers to chat about our books, our writing and why we chose a life of crime! There will also be an opportunity for the audience to ask questions. My fellow panellists will be Pat Noad, Brenda Cross and Karen Tyrrell all from CrimeWriters Queensland.

Date: Monday March 8, 2010
Time: 10 am - 12 noon
Address: 69 Grand Plaza Drive – UBD page 240 - map reference C17.
Contact: Kim Gerstenberger (Reference Librarian) Email: kimgerstenberger@logan.qld.gov.au / Phone: 07 3412 4164 or phone the library on 07 3412 4160

Reprinting Escape from the Past: I’ve just signed a contract with Gold Coast (Queensland) subsidy publisher Zeus Publications, to publish a second edition of my time travel novel set partly on the notorious Moreton Bay colonial prison island of St Helena. This came about through a request from an old folkie friend who owns and operates AB Cruises which run the Cat o’ Nine Tails tours to St Helena Island. Originally Escape was being sold on the boat and they’ve always been keen to have it again. We thought about the possibility of publishing online, but when a writer friend from CrimeWriters Queensland mentioned Zeus, I contacted the publishers and we are now on the way to a reprint.

This will take about six months, and I’ll be inviting all my readers to the launch. Keep watching this blog for information – also New Releases.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to visit Queensland's most historic island, go to: www.catoninetails.com.au or www.sthelenaisland.com.au. St Helena is now a beautiful National Park, four kilometres from the mouth of the Brisbane River. For more than 60 years it was home to hundreds of colonial Queensland’s miscreants, and the prison ruins still stand in mute witness to its former role as our foremost maximum security prison for men. The island is rich in history and has a fascinating and colourful past.

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About Avaaz.org

Last year I was introduced to Avaaz.org, a rapidly growing community of global citizens who take action on the major issues facing the world today. The aim of Avaaz.org is to ensure that the views and values of the world’s peoples shape global decisions. Avaaz.org members act for a more just and peaceful world and a globalisation with a human face. Avaaz means Voice in many Asian, Middle Eastern and Eastern European languages.

In Avaaz’s own words: Avaaz.org is a new global web movement with a simple democratic mission: to close the gap between the world we have, and the world most people everywhere want. Across the world, most people want stronger protections for the environment, greater respect for human rights, and concerted efforts to end poverty, corruption and war. Yet globalization faces a huge democratic deficit as international decisions are shaped by political elites and unaccountable corporations -- not the views and values of the world’s people.

Technology and the internet have allowed citizens to connect and mobilize like never before. The rise of a new model of internet-driven, people-powered politics is changing countries from Australia to the Philippines to the United States. Avaaz takes this model global, connecting people across borders to bring people-powered politics to international decision-making.

Coming together in this way, Avaaz has become a wonderful community of people from all nations, backgrounds, and ages. Our diverse community is brought together by our care for the world, and a desire to do what we can to make it a better place.

The core of our model of organizing is our email list, operated in 13 languages. By signing up to receive our alerts, you are rapidly alerted to urgent global issues and opportunities to achieve change. Avaaz members respond by rapidly combining the small amounts of time or money they can give into a powerful collective force. In just hours we can send hundreds of thousands of messages to political leaders telling them to save a crucial summit on climate change, hold hundreds of rallies across the world calling for action to prevent genocide, or donate hundreds of thousands of euros, dollars and yen to support nonviolent protest in Burma.

In less than three years, we’ve grown to over 3.5 million members in every nation of the world, and have begun to make a real impact on global politics. The Economist writes that Avaaz is poised to deliver ‘a deafening wakeup call’ to world leaders, the Indian Express welcomes ‘the biggest web campaigner across the world’ and Nobel Prize winner Al Gore says ‘Avaaz is inspiring, and has already begun to make a difference.’

Avaaz After Copenhagen

On December 12, Avaaz organised a truly inspiring campaign to encourage world leaders to come out of the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit with a fair, ambitious and legally binding agreement to stop a climate catastrophe. While this didn’t happen, the movement begun by the citizens of the world continues to grow and, I’m sure, will eventually persuade even the most reluctant countries to make the necessary changes.

View images and post comments at: http://www.avaaz.org/en/after_copenhagen

The Avaaz team said of the event:
It’s been a tough ending to an amazing week. In all-night negotiations, leaders have reached a weak agreement in Copenhagen that fails to set the emissions targets needed to prevent catastrophic global warming. The agreement was stronger on funding, but it was not binding, and set no urgent deadline to sign a real climate treaty. Big polluters like China and the US wanted a weak deal, and potential champions like Europe , Brazil and South Africa didn't fight hard enough to stop them.

But while leaders failed to make history, people around the world did. In thousands of vigils, rallies and protests, hundreds of thousands of phone calls, and millions of petition signatures, an unprecedented movement rose to this moment. After hearing the result of the talks, one member from Africa wrote, ‘It takes a lot to get an elephant moving, but when you do it is hard to stop...the elephant is moving...’

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The Global Wake-Up Call Is here!

On 21 September 2009, at more than 2600 events in 135 countries across the globe, we joined together to issue a deafening wakeup call to world leaders on climate change. The breadth and creativity of events is breathtaking, and our message broke through to leaders and international media. Watch the video of highlights, then post a comment to the live blog below!

World leaders have heard us. But as Tuesday's UN summit showed (22 September 2009), one day of action won't be enough to get real progress on climate. We need to come back again and again, louder and louder, until we get a fair, ambitious and binding climate treaty.

We'll keep the pressure high through the TCKTCKTCK campaign until Copenhagen, with another global day of action on October 24, and start planning right now for the LARGEST CLIMATE MOBILIZATION IN HISTORY ON DECEMBER 12, in the final days of the Copenhagen negotiations.

Avaaz is now 3.6 million members strong in 14 languages, in every country of the world. On Monday, our movement took a huge step forward -- we showed that we can not only send millions of messages to leaders or donate millions to worthy causes, but that in just a few days we can flood the streets and crash phone lines from Mexico City to Mumbai.

If we stick together, anything is possible.

With hope and excitement for the future,

The whole Avaaz team

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  China Wind 

If you’d told me a year ago that I’d be blogging a novel online, I’d have utterly denied it. After all, if I’m not the world’s worst Webophobe, I’d be a close second. However, never say ‘never’! Last December I read an article in the Weekend Courier Mail that inspired me to do just that - to publish a novel online – to give it away to readers, just for the experience. I chose a novel I’d written after a holiday with my sister in Hong Kong in January 1994 – one that I was unable to place with a publisher, but that I thought deserved a wider readership than just my immediate family and friends.

I talked it over with my whizzy webmaster, Mary Brettell, and we explored the various ways I could blog the novel myself. I discovered that the free online publishing programs on the Net were either far too complicated for me or didn’t allow anywhere near the space I wanted to do the thing properly, severely limiting the amount of words/characters allowed. In frustration I decided, if I couldn’t do it the way I really wanted it, I wasn’t prepared to compromise.

Then Mary suggested I do it in Word, convert it to web pages, and publish it on my own website. With infinite patience she took me through the procedure; I mastered this huge and steep learning curve, designed the pages then had a great deal of pleasure illustrating each chapter with pictures that Juliette and I had taken in Hong Kong, revisiting a very happy event from the past.

Anne and Juliette in Macau		Anne on junk in Hong Kong

I very much enjoyed writing China Wind and it’s still as fresh to me as it was when I created it. It’s a tale of conspiracy and revenge in the high-rise glass towers of big business ... with a dash of corruption, secret criminal societies, a beautiful promiscuous woman ... and a twist of romance. A new chapter appears each weekday until Wednesday 6^th May at China Wind. Previous chapters are also linked, so you won’t miss out on the beginning of the story.

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Mary B’s new CD

With a Little Help from My Friends ...

My whizzy webmaster Mary Brettell has just released her new CD With a Little Help from My Friends...  The title reflects the theme – all the songs on the album were written by local singer/songwriters, all Mary’s friends and acquaintances. Not only that; all the musicians and backing vocalists are Mary’s friends – as talented a bunch as you’d find anywhere.  After years of bewailing the fact that all her songwriter friends seem to just ‘have songs come to them’ and ‘why don’t they come to me?’ Mary wrote her first song, Danish on the Deck; a lovely tribute to her talented buddies, and as good as any of the others, and included it on the CD.  I see she’s been hiding her light under a bushel all these years.

Mary also selected one of my latest, Good Cleaning Man, a tongue-in-cheek ditty in praise of men who help around the house (take note, guys!) which gives a whole new meaning to ‘house cleaning’.

You can get this outstanding CD from Mary at www.bretell.com.au. Meanwhile, Mary is off once again to the UK to perform at the Clennell Hall Folk Festival which is held in the Clennell Hall Hotel near Alwinton, in the beautiful Northumberland National Park. Northumberland. See Anne's Diary April - June 2007.

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Previous Diary Entries:		April - June 2008	July-Sept08	Oct-Dec 2008
Jan-Mar 2008	Oct – Dec 2007	July - Sept 2007	Apr-Jun 2007	Jan-Mar 2007	Oct-Dec 2006
Jan-Mar 2005	Apr-Jun 2005	Jul-Dec 2005	Jan-Mar 2006	Apr-Jun 2006	July-Sept-06
August 2003	Sept-Dec 2003	Jan-Mar 2004	Apr-Jun 2004	Jul-Sep 2004	Oct-Dec 2004
January 2003	March 2003	April 2003	May 2003	June 2003	July 2003