Historians in Australia tell our rich national story. We constantly discover new aspects to Australia's past that make sense of our present and open up possibilities for the future. To do so we rely on access to the private and public records, publications and artefacts that are the remains of that past. If our collecting institutions are forced to reduce staff and services even further than they have, the work of historians, researchers, teachers, genealogists and students at all levels will be seriously impeded.

Indicative of the gravity of this new round of 'efficiency dividends' is that the National Library's Trove platform may cease aggregating content from museums and universities. Trove is the central digital repository of Australia's past, a crucial tool for historians, and beloved by the 70,000 people who use it every day. It is an exemplary product of efficiency and innovation, admired around the world. To curtail Trove is to constrain understanding of our past.

These are national institutions, not Canberra institutions, and all Australians are affected when they are insufficiently resourced to fulfil their missions of developing, maintaining, and making accessible nationally significant collections.

The AHA asks that our national collecting institutions be fully funded in the May budget, not further cut back.

Australia's understanding of its past is a lot to lose.

Yours sincerely

Professor Angela Woollacott, AHA President

TYPOGRAPHICAL TESTS

Dear Editor,

Thanks to Peter Goldsworthy for his excellent and well-presented mini-collection of States of Poetry in South Australia (ABR, March 2016). By contrast, three of the five finalists for the 2016 Peter Porter Poetry Prize (in the same edition) required the reader to exercise considerable visual dexterity, in addition to complex language appreciation. It would be a pity if page-layout skills became an essential requirement for being shortlisted for poetry awards.

Michael Henry, Melbourne, Vic.

Whatever happened to poetry? Where is the purity of rhyme or at least rhythm, the soul-touching theme, the grace of words which rise like a song instead of sounding as if someone has worked hard to be 'clever' and 'different' and experimental?

Our greatest poets would shake their heads at all of them and ask: Whatever happened to poetry?

And no, I don't expect you to publish this.

Roslyn Ross (online comment)

Great! Once again a batch of soporific, narcoleptic, music-less musings selected because somebody deemed them aesthetically pleasing on the page.

Barbara Bradie (online comment)

Oh joy Amanda, joy,joy!

Peter Jeffery (online comment)

Congratulations to Amanda Joy. Good news!

Anthony Lawrence (online comment)

KATE MIDDLETON REPLIES:

I have come over many years to assess my own response to poems through a set of questions: does the poem show you the 'rules' by which it was written?; does it fulfil, or fruitfully deviate from, those rules?; and does it still surprise?

I don't think any particular 'type' of poetry is more likely to answer those questions for me in the positive: my tastes range broadly, and I am as much a fan of metre and rhyme as I am of poetry often described as experimental. It is certainly true that inherited forms can still be taught new tricks, and experimental poems can fall flat. My most important job in reading any new poem is to be open to what the poem has to say, and attentive to how the poem says it.

My fellow Peter Porter Poetry Prize judges and I used both intellectual criteria in selecting these poems (they are all poems we greatly admire) and – equally important – we agreed that the poems we shortlisted should all be poems we loved. I feel lucky that there was no contentiousness between us. Over the process we had much to say about each of these poems, agreeing that each has been both 'thought' and 'felt', and reflects a genuinely distinct poetic sensibility.

SIX MONTHS

Dear Editor,

In her review of my book Contemporary Australian Literature in the March 2016 issue of ABR, Susan Lever states: 'In 2014 [Nicholas Birns] spent six months in Australia, reading widely and talking to writers and critics.'

There is no reference to 'six months' in my book; in late June and most of July 2014, I was in Australia for one month, as is noted in the book, as a Rector-Funded Visiting Fellow at UNSW Canberra. This was my sixth visit to Australia (as of now sixth out of seven). It is an exiguous and no doubt accidental mistake, but given that there was a misstatement of fact that is nowhere attested in my book, I feel it should corrected.

Nicholas Birns, New York City, USA

A MISOGYNIST VARIANT

Dear Editor,

I think a female reviewer of Kenneth Cook's Fear is the Rider (ABR, March 2016) may have critiqued it more along these lines: John meets Katie at a pub and they get talking. He likes her breasts and these are frequently referenced in various stages of exposure throughout the rest of the story. John changes his own travel plans and decides to stalk Katie down an isolated road. She emerges unexpectedly from the scrub in fear of her life after some other maniac got there first and attempted to rape her. John and Katie flee together as he is suddenly the lesser of two evils.

This is a misogynist variant on Wake in Fright, and the publication is proudly driven by Cook's daughter no less. Another example of a lost manuscript that should have stayed that way.

Allison Kingscote, Manly, NSW

BLACK HOLE

Dear Editor,

Australian Book Review is to be commended for establishing Arts Update. A widening of the scope of performing arts criticism is sorely needed. As a Melbourne theatre practitioner, I am chagrined by the number of new Australian works that go unreviewed by mainstream media, with arts editors simply ignoring invitations to send their critics to these independent productions. Too many good plays accordingly disappear into a black hole, never to be seen again. I trust Arts Update will redress this dispiriting situation.

Kevin Summers, Bentleigh, Vic.