AVCAL, the peak industry body for the Australian VC and PE industries has released its 2009 Yearbook and things look grim, at best.

Katherine Woodhope, AVCAL CEO , says that while the PE sector is powering along and now rivals that of Europe and North America, she’s hoping the yearbook:

“acts as a wake-up call to the risk of near extinction of our VC sector”

Ouch.

Key takeaways from the report include:

• $0 raised in FY2009 for seed stage investment
• $180M in total VC investment in FY2009
• 44% decrease in average deal size from almost $2M in FY2008 to $1M in FY2009

AVCAL doesn’t report on exits specifically for VC but that might just be because there’s nothing really to report on.

I know last year was a tough year for VCs all around the world, but the local VC struggles go beyond that. There are a bunch of smart VCs and Tech Angels in Australia who are being held back by structural deficiencies, many of which have been addressed by a recent paper developed from the thoughts of over 30 people involved in the Australian tech startup scene.

That having been said, the start-up scene in Australia has never been stronger and the difficulty in sourcing seed-funding and beyond means that founders are much more effective at creating bootstrappable (is that a word?) businesses, which is a good thing.

Aussie start-ups continue to do well both here and overseas (for those who don’t know many Aussie start-ups , watch this space, you’ll get to know many of them soon . If AVCAL’s report is anything to go by, it looks like Aussie start-ups will be relying on themselves to maintain that success for quite some time to come.