Transcribed and summarised by Elaine Walker
The newsletter is A4 pages folded into A5 size. The colour is mostly buff except for some inserts in the middle. The front page has a drawing which appears to be by Shaun Tan, drawn that year, of some fish with what appears to be an exoskeleton, or bony plates and fangs (harkening to long long ago) about to take a bite on what looks like a trilobite on a hook.
In small caps it has the title
Festival of the Imagination 1996
This Issue Featuring
Details on:
| Our Esteemed Guests | Supporting Businesses |
| The Programme Structure | The Short Story Competition |
| The Upcoming Freeform | The WASFF Report |
| The Auction | Accommodation |
GPO Box G429 Perth WA 6948
Neil Gaiman, Bruce Sterling, and also Pat Cadigan, Sean McMullen, Stephen Dedman, Nick Stathopoulos, Terry Dowling, Grant Stone, Shannah Jay, Sean Williams and for FGOH Robin Pen.
Dates for the con: April 4th-8th, 1996.
Membership prices at the time were $60 for a full membership, $20 for supporting and $10 if you just wanted to vote.
Venue was the Kings Perth Hotel on Hay Street. ($80 for a single, $85 for double/twin)
pp. 3-5 had a bio piece on Bruce Sterling.
pp. 6-7 has a bio piece on Neil Gaiman (The Perfect Guest?)
pp. 8-9 is the centre pages with the inserts in them and p. 8 has smaller bios on other guests (Terry Dowling, Shannah Jay, Sean McMullen and Sean Williams.) p. 9 had information on the programming structure.
The inserts consisted of a form to get a membership/huckster’s table/t-shirt/room etc. etc. in a mint colour as something called a ‘foldalope’ (A4 double sided sheet) with the Ditmar Reporter giving information on the Ditmar Awards of the previous year and eligible works for 1996 on white paper within that.
On page 10 the bony fish with trilobite bait makes a comeback along with the details for the short story competition. The competition theme in fact requiring the stories to be based on those Shaun Tan artworks.
Page 11 did not have a page number on it, which may have been to do with the Freeform it was advertising with an Illuminati theme.
Page 12 had information on the Auction and Accommodation – Apparently the con had plans to book out the entire hotel and at the time of this newsletter already had 40 rooms (2 floors) booked entirely.
Page 13 was advertising, giving the list of businesses where if you bought your membership there you could get a $5 discount (if you proved you had bought something off them).
Page 14 – WASFF report. Enough said except that the committee for the year was: Mark Bivens, Luigi Cantoni, Robin Clarke, Ann Griffiths, Peter Kelly, Richard Scriven and Mark Suddaby.
And then the last inside page (p.15) had the membership list as of July 20th 1995. There were three columns. I don’t want to count them but someone has to. There were 2 Principal Guests, 1 Special Guest, 9 Invited Guests and 79 Full Members with 9 Supporting Members.
And the final back page had a quote
| I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become more complicated. |
| Poul Anderson |
And then the accreditations, editor, contributors, committee, friends of the committee etc.
| If you’ve finished reading and want something else to do, go back through the newsletter and colour in all the O’s |