Author Tim Flannery is to work at Macquarie University, according to The Sydney Morning Herald. Having just won a Lannan Foundation non-fiction prize worth US$150,000, Flannery will start at Macquarie's Division of Environmental and Life Sciences in first semester 2007. "He's got an office," according to one guy there I talked to. But he hasn't been assigned any units of study, so he won't start teaching straight away. He was going to start in mid-2007 but he wanted to start at the same time as postgraduates, so he moved the date back, I was told. "Don't quote me, you've got to go through our media people," said Jane, the personal assistant to the dean of the division. "All I want to say is that he'll be starting at the beginning of next year," she said.

The Division of Environmental and Life Sciences comprises a number of departments, but Flannery will be working at the division level, apparently.

The Lannan Foundation is based in Los Angeles.

Lannan Foundation established its Literary Program in 1987 to support the creation of exceptional poetry and prose written originally in the English language, and to increase the audience for contemporary literature.

Also on their Web site:

In 1960 J. Patrick Lannan, Sr., entrepreneur and financier, established Lannan Foundation. A self-educated scholar and liberal thinker, he believed strongly in the social importance of charitable programs and in the cultural importance of innovative and controversial forms of visual and literary art.

I think the operative term here is 'liberal'. Used in the American sense. Ours as well? Well, once were warriors... David Malouf won a Lannan prize in 2000.