In all our our collections of Australian fannish ephemera, we appear to have a single issue of ‘The Ditmar Reporter’. Why this is issue 2 (of volume 1), and no issue 1 exists in the collection, one can only blame the vagaries of haphazard archiving. A quick search on google brings no clarity as to whether later issues existed or not.
This item is a single A4 sheet of white ~80 gsm paper folded to make a four page booklet. Whoever produced it must have had fabulous eyesight, because the font size is excruciatingly small (and then even more excruciatingly smaller).
The front page screams in rather large type “NOMINATIONS OPEN!!” There is some general screed about the opening of the nominations, the categories available for nominating in (numbering 6, plus the William J Atheling Jnr Award), and the eligibility criteria, both overall and for specific categories. This covers most of the page. The rest – the name of the item is a strip up the left hand side of the page, and at the bottom we have “Inside this issue” with the single item “Nomination Form”. This last is technically incorrect – the inside is a list of works eligible for nomination, and the back page is the actual nomination form.
The actual list of ‘works eligible’ appears to be focused on two main categories (“Best Long Fiction” and “Best Short Fiction”), plus a single item listed under ‘Criticism’. As well, brief details of the Festival of the Imagination 1996 are included in the rather wide outer margins.