You know it's that time of year when writers and editors begin to insert clichés into all of their communications. You know, clichés like 'You know it's that time of year' or 'As the year draws to a close' or even 'Looking back on the year that was'.

Well, if you're looking for some cliché-free space, do yourself a favour and check out Cordite 29: Pastoral, the contents of which have provoked a veritable mass of comments over the past few weeks.

Of course, comments aren't the only measure of a magazine's success. That's why we're over the moon to announce that Cordite has again been successful in receiving funding from the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts.

The funding, for the year 2009, will be used to pay our Australian contributors and produce the website. Our thanks to the Literature Board for their continuing support of Cordite. We'll be making a special announcement very soon as to the themes, guest poetry editors and submission periods for the year, so stay tuned.

It's also heartening to see, in the Board's report from its meeting, that two other Australian online magazines – Peril and Mascara – have received funding in this round. Congratulations to the editors.

While we're handing out props, I'd just like to specially thank my Cordite co-editors, Ali Alizadeh and Kay Rozynski, for their hard work this year. I'm really proud to say that thanks to Ali's editing prowess we've been able to post one review per fortnight on the site this year. A big achievement for us.

Likewise, Kay has brought a cool head to editing feature content on the site, as shown by the terrific features she commissioned for our Secret Cities issue and, more recently, Pastoral. Watch out for more excellent features in the new year.

Lest I forget this year's guest poetry editors (Terry Jaensch, Greg McLaren and Stuart Cooke) who've all done a great job under (often) difficult circumstances. Thanks guys.

Finally, a big thanks to all of the people who have submitted poems to Cordite this year; to our contributors whose work continually inspires us; and to our readers, without whom there woudn't be much point doing this whole intranet journal thingo thing.

Code is poetry – but words are still bullets.

Peace.