summary by Anna Hepworth
From the depths of our archives, we have extracted an A4 (yellow, ~80 gsm bond, double sided) sheet laid out as two side-by-side A5 pages, with voting forms and official information for the a) 1996 Australian National Science Fiction Achievement “Ditmar” Awards and b) the Australian Science Fiction Media Awards (ASFMA). Confusingly both sides/pages are set out with information for one award presented on the right hand side, and the nomination details for the *other* award on the left. Cleverly, Doug worked out that this is presumably because what I have is a print master, which could have been cut in half to produce two separate voting forms, one for each of the awards.
As results for the ASFMAs can be found at Wikipedia, Fancyclopaedia, and at the Aust SF wiki, and the latter of these two resources have much more detail, with both the nominees and winners listed (as well as details from other years), these details have not been transcribed. Information on the Ditmars is less readily found with a basic google search, although in this case the Wikipedia entry contains the full nomination list and winner details (various author pages also turn up with this particular search).
As to the officialese, the full details for the ASFMAs can be found in a google groups forum, which appears to be the full text of an official publication by Richard Scriven. A similar copy of the Ditmar details was not found, and thus it has been reproduced below.
One additional item related to these awards that we also found was the SF Bullsheet for Dec 20th, 1996, which a potentially complete listing of published items that were eligible for nomination for the 1997 awards.
ps. In the researching of this article, we discovered that in 1996 Perth’s own G. Christopher Dyson made an early attempt at online publishing, releasing “Kingdoms of Clouds” exclusively at a (now defunct) iinet members page. We would be interested in knowing more about this, as none of those present at the writing of this remember being aware of the novel previously.
1996 Australian National Science Fiction Achievement “Ditmar” Awards
Official Voting Form
Voting is open to any person who is a member (full, supporting or voting) of The Festival of the Imagination 1996.
If you are not currently a member of The Festival of the Imagination 1996 and wish to vote in the 1996 Ditmar Awards, you may enclose a completed membership application and appropriate fee (a voting-only memberhsip [sic] is $10) with this voting form.
Voting Closes: 6.00pm, Saturday, 6 April 1996
All voting for the 1996 Ditmar Awards closes at 6.00pm on Saturday, 6 April 1996. Postal votes must be postmarked on or before 31 March 1996 and be received by last mail on Thursday, 4 April 1996 to be included in the vote count. Votes that arrive after this time will not be considered, unless delivered in person at the Convention. Proxy voting is not allowed. Any individual can only vote in any category once.
Votes will be counted using the Optional Preferential System. Please mark your votes in descending order of preference (1, 2, 3, 4). You do not have to vote in all categories or mark preferences for all nominations in a category.
You must provide the information requested below. This will be used to ensure the eligibility of your vote. All votes will be treated confidentially.
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