no new shorts opened yesterday. https://asxonline.com/content/dam/asxonline/public/reports/2017/jan/shortsell_gross_20170111.txt
Also no change to the aggregated short interest as Friday 6th January...still 6.67%, 23.5M shares...
So one can conclude that short covering was not the cause of the rise in SP last Friday.
http://asic.gov.au/Reports/Daily/2017/01/RR20170106-001-SSDailyAggShortPos.pdf