Perth born Shane Osborn, Australia’s first Michelin starred chef, officiated as guest of honour joining Luke Mangan (Awards co-founder, Glass, The Palace, Salt Tokyo) and Head of Electrolux Major Appliances Asia Pacific Gunilla Nordstrom to announce the winners.

The ‘who’s who’ of the culinary world came out to celebrate what is widely recognized as the most prestigious awards in the industry showcasing a hotbed of Australia’s junior talent.  Guests included:   Peter Gilmore (Quay), Jill Dupleix and Terry Durack, Christine Manfield (Universal), Philip Johnson (Ecco), food commentator Lyndey Milan.

The 2011 Electrolux Appetite for Excellence winners across three award categories are:

Electrolux Young Chef
Winner:     Richard Ousby, Quay
Runner Up: Victor Liong, Marque Restaurant

Electrolux Young Waiter
Winner:     James Sexton, Sepia Restaurant & Wine Bar
Runner Up: Anthony Moore, Bentley Restaurant & Bar
Judges Acknowledgement: Glenn Mill, Jacques Reymond

Electrolux Young Restaurateur
Winner:     Clint Hillery, Time to Vino, Sydney
Highly Commended:  Belinda Stapleton, Restaurant Botanica, Hunter Valley.

There’s a stack of info @ www.mvmu.com.au and below but in short: MVMU is a time-based music video making competition. It’s simple:

•    Bands and filmmakers register (for their respective city – Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane)
•    They are then paired up randomly and given just THREE days (Queen’s Birthday Long Weekend (June 10-13, 2011)) to create, shoot, edit and submit a music video.
•    Bands – all you need is a recorded original song (no covers)
•    Filmmakers – all you need is a camera and a crew

There are stacks of prizes to be won including the winning clip playing on Video Hits, PLUS a representative from the winning band and filmmakers will be flown to the Video Hits set to be interviewed on air!  All entries are also showcased at a special premiere at Palace cinemas in their respective cities.

Finalists this year include popular comedian Anh Do; novelist and screenwriter Melina Marchetta; academic, poet and translator Ouyang Yu; two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey and former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser. For more than 30 years, the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards have honoured hundreds of established and emerging novelists, playwrights, poets, scriptwriters, social commentators and writers of children and young people’s fiction.

Please note that this year the People’s Choice Award, which gives readers an opportunity to vote for their favourite shortlisted book in the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, will be open for the first time to all Australians (in previous years only NSW residents were eligible to vote).  Voting is via the website: http://www.pla.nsw.gov.au/  There are great prizes to be won by voting.

2011’s shortlisted writers were selected from more than 570 nominations across 10 categories. Prizes of up to $315,000 will be presented at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards dinner on 16 May, the first celebratory event of the 2011 Sydney Writers’ Festival (16-22 May).

For more details on shortlisted individuals, please visit http://www.pla.nsw.gov.au.

Media enquiries please contact: April Murdoch, Publicist; mob: 0434 581 944 & email: aprilmurdochmedia {at} yahoo.com(.)au

Vittoria Coffee Restaurant of the Year: Marque

Emirates Chef of the Year: Martin Benn (Sepia)

Plumm Wine Glasses Best New Restaurant: Manly Pavilion

Navman Best Regional Restaurant: Lochiel House, Kurrajong Heights

Star City Professional Excellence Award: Peter Doyle (est.)

The Sydney Morning Herald Silver Service Award: Alon Sharman (Arras)

Louis Roederer Sommelier of the Year: Matthew Dunne (Aria)

Brown Brothers Wine List of the Year: Rockpool Bar & Grill

Small wine list of the year: Spice Temple

Regional Wine List of the Year: Margan (Broke)

The Josephine Pignolet Best Young Chef: Jason Saxby (Quay)

Vittoria Legend Award: Michael McMahon (Catalina)

Sydney Fish Market Best Seafood Restaurant: Fish Face

Dan Murphy’s Best BYO Restaurant: Il Perugino

Coopers Sustainability Award: Margan (Broke)

iPhone App People’s Choice Award: Tetsuya’s

The Chef’s Hats 2011

City

Three Hats: Marque, est., Quay

Two Hats: Aria, Assiette, Becasse, Bentley Restaurant & Bar, Berowra Waters Inn, Bilson’s, Bistro Ortolan, Buon Ricordo, Claude’s, Four in Hand Dining Room, Guillaume at Bennelong, Icebergs Dining Room and Bar, Lucio’s, Pilu at Freshwater, Rockpool, Rockpool Bar & Grill, Sepia, Tetsuya’s, Universal

One Hat: Ad Lib Bistro, Altitude, Arras, Astral, Billy Kwong, Bird Cow Fish, Bistro Moncur, Bistrode, The Boathouse on Blackwattle Bay, Bodega, buzo trattoria, Cafe Sopra, Catalina, Etch, Fish Face, Flying Fish, Golden Century, Jonah’s Whale Beach, Koi, Longrain, Mad Cow, Manly Pavilion, Omerta, Ormeggio at the Spit, Oscillate Wildly, Otto Ristorante, Pendolino, Pier, Restaurant Balzac, Sailors Thai Restaurant, Sake Restaurant & Bar, Sean’s Panaroma, Spice Temple, Yoshii.

Regional

Two  Hats: Lochiel House (Kurrajong Heights), Rock (Pokolbin)

One Hat: ashcrofts (Blackheath), Bacchus (Newcastle), Bamboo Restaurant and Bar (Casuarina Beach), bells at killcare (Killcare), Bistro Molines (Mount View), Caveau (Wollongong), dish (Byron Bay), Darley’s (Katoomba), Eschalot (Berrima), Fins (Kingscliff), Italian and Sons (Canberra), Lolli Redini (Orange), Muse (Pokolbin), Neila (Cowra), No. 2 Oak Street (Bellingen), Ottoman Cuisine (Canberra), Restaurant Como.

I shuffle on down the street.
I can’t help dragging my feet.
Got my two arms leading the way.
And all the people there stop and say…
‘Let’s move like a mummy!’

And so it began; my night in the cemetery, esky of well-stocked beer held tight, howling at the moon about dancing to the devil’s drum, taking witches out dancing and children burning alive. It was tremendous fun, but maybe you had to be there. I was in another world, I was deep in The Graveyard Train and there was no way out. My raised head and out-stretched arms silhouetted against the murky, moon-lit cemetery as I cried out more of their words in wicked delight.

Flames are burning so they close the ride!
But they don’t hear the screaming of the kids inside!
All the children went the same…
Fire licking their tiny brains.

On the hypnotising album in question, The Drink The Devil and The Dance, the majority of these lines are moaned in grim unison by a superb chorus of undead vocalists. The lead vocalist stands out front of this murky procession, leading the lurching in inspired fashion. I’m not sure who to credit for this role, but it’s an impressive performance nonetheless. Listening to this album, there are times when my vibrant cackling comes as a shock even to me, when the giddy delight I get from hearing someone croon about the inevitability of time tearing love apart disturbs my sensibility in a deep and profound way. While this is an admission I may regret making public, I find an immeasurable, perverse joy in howling lines such as these.

You see, if I haven’t made it clear, The Graveyard Train are a band that wallow in the squalid splendour of life’s greatest, most inevitable tragedies. It would be depressing, if it weren’t so catchy, so darkly comedic. It is a truly demented take on the time-honoured gothic folk and blues of the American South: stomping, uproarious, karaoke music for The Devil. The call-and-response nature of the lyrics are likely to leave all who hear it a giddy, swaying mess, spilling their beer all over themselves as they howl to the deep, blackened sky.

The Graveyard Train have an admirable, self-aware dedication to peddling such blues and country-infused murder balladry with a wry, tongue-in-cheek charisma. They are a band best described, and self-described, as a group of  ‘Six men (who) play men’s instruments just as men were born to do. Chain, washboard, steel guitar, banjo and harmonica – instruments with a long history of storytelling underlay six voices tempered by whiskey, blood and poverty.’

If your mind has already thrown up Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds as a frame of natural reference, then pat yourself on the back, because their back catalogue is clearly a tomb from whichThe Graveyard Train have been digging. By way of convenient comparison, I would liken The Graveyard Train to the darkly comic Nick Cave you can find in tracks such as The Weeping Song and The Kindness of Strangers. Indeed, the sinister forces abundant in Run Billy Run jig with a similar, malicious intent to those found in the classic Bad Seeds track, The Curse of Millhaven.

It’s a heinous, horrific trip that, unless they record a duet with Kylie Minogue, seems destined to remain well hidden from the Top 40 charts. But for the select few inclined to hop aboard, The Graveyard Train will be a thrilling, harrowing, bumpy joyride.

Article written by Craig Tuck.

Come to this first Community Forum and find out how to stop this and why. Get informed. Be inspired. Have your Say!

** Heaps of great SPEAKERS **
- on Business, Urban Planning, Arts Industries, Health & Tourism…

Help draft a public proposal for an Arts precinct and help keep The Old Kings School in Public Hands for a new heritage friendly cross-cultural and ecological precinct – for everyone in the Parramatta City region.

** ITS TIME! for State Arts infrastructure in Parramatta.

More info: http://www.facebook.com/oldkingsschool
Support here: http://www.petitionbuzz.com/petitions/oldkings

10am – 12pm, Friday 28th of January

Jubilee Hall, (next to Parramatta town Hall)

The communities of Sydney need to know about the public land grab that could occur under our noses! Come to the Community Forum and find out more. Have your say and help draft a public proposal for an Arts Precinct, and help save the Old Kings School!

The magazine is sold by authorised vendors on the streets of Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Canberra and regional Victoria. Vendors come from a range of backgrounds including mental illness, homelessness, long-term unemployment, intellectual and physical disability, drug and alcohol dependency, family breakdown and others suffering from social isolation, such as refugees.

Get onboard & buy an issue, it’s an awesome read!

Entry is open to books, scripts and digital narrative which have been published/produced between 1 January 2010 to 31 December 2010. To be eligible authors must be citizens or permanent residents of Australia or whose work has Australia as its primary focus. The closing date for entries is 5pm Monday 31 January 2011.

There are 8 categories in the Awards: Fiction, Non-Fiction, Children’s Book, Writing for Young Adults, Poetry, Scripts, State Library of Western Australia West Australian History Award and the new Digital Narrative Award which recognises the use of new media in storytelling/writing. An additional Premier’s Prize of $25,000 is presented to the overall winner, chosen from the category winners.

Prize money is made available by the Western Australian Government. The West Australian History Award is sponsored by the State Library of Western Australia. Short listed entries will be announced in June 2011.

The National Maritime Festival aims to raise the profile of the Maritime Centre Newcastle and increase community awareness of the vital importance of our Maritime heritage. At its simplest, the National Maritime Festival provides a welcome spectacle and a day of entertainment and involvement for many, many thousands of Novocastrians as well as visitors from interstate and overseas.

The Australia Day Maritime Festival provides for education, cultural integration and community involvement while enhancing the use of maritime facilities. The annual National Maritime Festival leaves a lasting legacy of pride and enjoyment of our Harbour City of Newcastle. The National Maritime Festival is a chance for you and your family to experience a day on Newcastle harbour celebrating my story, your story, and our story .

What: Newcastle Australia Day Maritime Festival 2011
Where: 3 Honeysuckle Drive, Newcastle, NSW
When: Tuesday 25 and Wednesday 26 January 2011
Cost: Free