I almost forgot to report the winners of the RE Ross Trust Play Award, which were announced at a glittering dinner before the assembled literati of Melbourne on Monday night. The occasion was the announcement of the winners of the Premier's Literary Awards, but we snuck in on their sequinned coat-tails. Such occasions do make me think of Dorothy Parker's report on Literary Rotarians, in which she claimed to have attended a literary gathering after drinking a cup of tea that "tasted very strange".

"When I came to my senses," reports Mrs Parker, "I was in the brilliantly lighted banquet hall of one of the large hotels....By pleading a return of that old black cholera of mine, I got away before the speeches, the songs, and the probable donning of paper hats and marching around the room in lockstep. I looked with deep interest the next morning [different times: Ed] for the bookmen's and bookwomen's accounts of the event. One and all, they declared there had never been so glamorous and brilliant a function. They wrote of it as they write of every other literary gathering - as if it were one of those parties that used to occur just before Rome fell. From that day to this, I have never touched another cup of tea."

But I digress. Unlike Mrs Parker, I was obliged to stay for the speeches, which were judiciously placed between courses and were also nicely short. I enjoyed Richard Flanagan putting a spanner in the works by damning corrupt state government in front of a very uncomfortable looking Premier Brumby, and enthusiastically clapped all the winners. In short, I was a good little Rotarian. And I clapped very hard for the RE Ross Trust Award winners, whom you can read, with judges report, here. After all, as one of the judges, I agreed heartily with the decisions.

Ms TN has not been idle this week. Oh no. She's been dragging her jetlag out to no less than four openings (not ideal for the first week back, but no matter). All of which will be reported on in due course. The "due course" is because I've also been sitting underneath a pile of plays, reading until my eyeballs fry into little blasted hollows in my skull, for the RE Ross Trust Play Awards, which I am co-judging with Tom Healey and Patricia Cornelius. Back to normal reportage next week. I hope.

But there's no shortage of reading to be had for you lot. For example, megablogger Chris Goode at once reminds me that I didn't write about a couple of knock-out exhibitions I saw in London (the Cy Twombly retrospective at Tate Modern and a modestly exquisite exhibition of small press poetry, Certain Trees, at the V&A) and removes the necessity for doing so. As the man says: "Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons at Tate Modern is, simply, the best exhibition of modern painting I've ever seen. There are some quite incredible things here, and unlike many survey shows spanning such a long trajectory in an artist's work (from the very early 50s right up to 2005), there is absolutely no period where you feel anything other than excitement at Twombly's intrepid and affectionate sensibility."

Some fascinatingly ambivalent responses too to Black Watch, which finally hit London, and which I'm ever more sorry I missed when it was here in Sydney. And other stuff. Lots of other stuff. If you find your eyes watering, you can just do what others do, and print out his posts to read on the bus.

Elsewhere, Ming has got her hands on Chris Mead's Platform Paper on ethnic playwriting, and is wondering why Australia is so behind the eightball, compared with the UK, in at least addressing the issues of representation. And George Hunka over at Superfluities Redux has, among other things, been thoughtfully reviewing recent New York productions of Sarah Kane and Howard Barker. Much of the rest of the US blogosphere is navel gazing about centralism, regionalism and sustainability. All good solid stuff circling around the problems of making art in an era of crass corporatism and economic depression, especially in a nation without solid governmental funding, but somehow it seldom lets the rest of the world in to the conversation.