Patrick Allington

I would like our critical culture to take more active and creative steps to resist the trend towards cultural criticism being a choice between, on the one hand, timidity or a ‘Team Australia’ mentality, and, on the other hand, abuse. Here, I’m talking most specifically about book criticism and book chat, but the dichotomy exists more broadly in discussions around most Australian artistic, cultural, political, historical, and social matters (because Gough Whitlam was either a saint or he was the devil; because Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North was either brilliant or it was awful, and so on). Arguing about the tone of book criticism tends to throw up solutions that become part of the problem: the solution to too much nepotism or chumminess in book criticism must be the negative review; the solution to too much ‘snark’ in book criticism must be niceness. What we most need is a re-commitment to subtle (but still passionate) arguments, and to be less fixated on our worry that the inhabitants of the twenty-first century digital instant world aren’t interested.

A second point: we need more critical engagement with literary magazines. So much more.

James Bradley

I am not convinced by the narratives of decline and crisis that surround Australia’s critical culture: despite the decline of the broadsheets, Australian criticism seems to be in surprisingly good health. There is no doubt that the notion of what constitutes Australian criticism is less geographically and institutionally defined than it used to be, or that the subjects and modes of critical writing have expanded and mutated to become more digressive and personal, and more attuned to cultural forms and genres such as television and genre fiction. But while this shift has been at least partly enabled by the transformation of the media landscape in recent years, that transformation has also intensified many of the problems that have always beset Australian culture. Venues for professional development are limited, rates of pay have fallen, and career paths are now largely non-existent. None of that will change until online publications begin to pay the people who write for them – not just because people should be paid for their work (especially when other people are profiting from it), but because developing a critical voice and a critical culture requires writers with adequate time and money.

Miriam Cosic

Literary criticism is not doing too badly, but performing arts criticism is in a parlous state. Often reviews are so brief they are glorified consumer guides, and their platforms are getting way too close to advertisers. Special deals on tickets, sponsorships: how do we take reviews of client productions seriously? This is akin to the view I used to take as a newspaper literary editor about reviewing our own staff writers’ books. If the reviewer says they’re good, well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? And if they say the books are bad, well, why do we have lousy writers working for us and/or how loyal are we to our colleagues? Far better to run an excerpt, and let readers decide. The performing arts are different, of course, but readers still must get the sense that the critic is disinterested and not related by blood or money to the people he is reviewing. And a parallel problem arises: if the critic says the opera is lousy, why is the magazine promoting it? And if the paper is sponsoring a concert, well, how convincing is the critic’s glowing review? So, a single development? Remove the critical platform from any whiff of marketing or advertising connection with the arts being reviewed.

Peter Craven

Obviously, I am no judge of my own work as a critic, which is extensive, and I clearly support Peter Rose’s resolve to increase payments. I would like to see a lot more parity in our critical culture. The best of what appears in our book pages is as good as it gets anywhere. When I see something like a Tom Switzer review of a political biography, or Cathy Ford reviewing a novel, I am tremendously cheered. It’s also a real pleasure to read some of the younger people. Anything by Andrew Fuhrmann has real critical spark. Apropos of politics and society, I like the work of Richard Ferguson. (These are both people with whom I have worked.)

We need to ensure that the standard of our book pages is at least as high as that of our journalism. That’s not consistently the case now, though there are plenty of exceptions. I would like to see more writing which is intellectually supple but which also crackles with style, a criticism which is expert in registering the quality – and content – of the book being reviewed, but also has pace and wit. These are familiar slogans, I know, but it might be good if younger people reviewing books learn to sing to the tune of whomever they most admire, if they are fearless in their evaluations, have a good command of metaphor, eschew academicism, and know how to be funny. I suspect that some kind of torch needs to be handed on from people who are liable to be more narrowly literary in training but broad in their sympathies and editorially skilled.

I am appreciative of the literary editors, my friends Jason Steger, Susan Wyndham, and Stephen Romei, and I deplore the collapsing of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age’s book pages into each other and the closing of The Australian’s review of books a couple of years ago. I applaud the establishment of the Sydney Review of Books and the Australian Book Review Fellowships, which yielded Fuhrmann on Patrick White’s plays and will soon give us Shannon Burns on Gerald Murnane. I wouldn’t mind seeing the newspapers publish a daily book review in addition to their weekly efforts.

Gillian Dooley

The standard of reviewing in the main literary periodicals is, on the whole, very high. More money would be nice, but I’m not sure it would improve the critical culture as much as increasing the variety of voices published in a range of periodicals. There are many ways to nurture new reviewers. Reviewing can be offered as a topic in creative writing and literature courses. I was involved in something along these lines at Flinders University for a couple of years, but it was discontinued. It was a useful way to get the students thinking about the different ways of writing about books, and we published most of the reviews they produced for their honours topic in Transnational Literature. However, you don’t need a literature degree to be a reviewer. As an editor, I encourage anyone with an informed interest in reading to give it a go: I believe that kind of mentorship is an important part of the editor’s role.

Morag Fraser

Australian culture would itself be enriched if our critical and professional cultures burst their silos and spoke (and wrote) in a language compelling and comprehensible to a broadly educated general audience. We have enough specialists speaking a private language with their peers. We need more informed, public-spirited communicators who understand the societal responsibilities of their disciplines and are willing to speak to them in a way that might conceivably inform and influence public opinion. Imagine a prime-time book panel with David Malouf, Marilynne Robinson, Paul Krugman, Orhan Pamuk, and Suzanne Cory – science, music, poetry, economics, theology, politics, and social conscience informing one conversation. Imagine the opinion pages of our daily newspapers filled by writers commissioned not for ‘political balance’ but because they are expert, dispassionate – and beguilingly readable.

To achieve this cultural amalgam, editors across all varieties of print and electronic media would need to diversify their contributor base and pay rates sufficient to attract such writers. Funding bodies would need to support the initiative. Australia’s academies would need to lift their myopic fixation on research by crediting academic writers with a disposition to parlay their expertise into a public good. Pipedream? No. We have been there before.

Kerryn Goldsworthy

I think the most effective development would be one of which I’ve already seen evidence: earlier adoption of, and faster adjustment to, the possibilities and rapid shifts in online models of writing and conversation. Two of the most exciting sites of arts criticism, on or offline, that I can remember encountering ten years ago were the Australian writer and theatre critic Alison Croggon’s now sadly retired blog Theatre Notes and the New Yorker’s music critic Alex Ross’s still-active blog The Rest Is Noise. While blogging is no longer the force it was a few years ago, I have in more recent years seen Australian writers and critics engaging in informal but sometimes quite long conversations online, swapping and workshopping ideas about books and writing that have eventually found their way into complex and considered long-form pieces, as well as into standard-length reviews. Social media, well used, provides an effective communications network and an immediate online forum for the kind of grassroots discussions in which information and ideas can be quickly exchanged, requested, supplied, and/or fleshed out. Exploration of the possibilities for online communication and publication has for several years now been lifting the sea level, so to speak, of artists’ and critics’ awareness and general knowledge of what is happening in their field – not just in literature but in other art forms as well.

Lisa Gorton

I wonder why we aren’t inventing new, local critical terms to characterise what’s happening in Australian literature now? Alongside book-by-book reviewing, I would like to see long-form critical essays on a range of books, grouped not by publication date but by shared aesthetic interests. I think that would allow critics to consider not only whether a book might appeal to its buyers, but also how it might fit into the history and future of Australian literature. 

Melinda Harvey

I am taking ‘improve’ to mean ‘make better than it already is’, because I reject the idea that it is in trouble. Two developments would really give things a shake. The first is a pipedream, sadly: the end of the quantitative measurement of publication outputs in our universities. The Australian Research Council’s rules around what constitutes research excellence effectively means that academics are told what kinds of things they should and shouldn’t write. Book reviews don’t ‘count’, so whenever an academic writes one she is seen to be wasting her time. Some academics choose to ignore the diktat and write them anyway, because they believe in the intrinsic value of participating in public debate about books, but just imagine if we could inject more of that expertise into our critical culture?

There is another development I’d like to see: more ‘young Turks’ pushing the boundaries of literary criticism in our very lively magazine scene in the way that they are doing in fiction, poetry, and memoir. Editors: give them the space.

James Ley

On a purely material level, the more opportunities for professional critics to practise their craft and be adequately remunerated, the better. But in a more vague and Zeitgeisty sense, I think Australian literary criticism could stand to be, if not necessarily tougher or harsher or crueller, then certainly more argumentative. There is a tendency, in fiction reviews particularly, to identify significant themes but not necessarily reflect on the validity of those themes or take issue with them in a way that makes the critic’s own philosoph-ical stance apparent. It is up to criticism to articulate the kinds of cultural issues that are at stake in a work of literature and to make explicit the reasons why we should (or should not) take it seriously, since this is never self-evident.

Felicity Plunkett

My suggestion is inspired by an echo between the evocation in Czesław Miłosz’s ‘Ars Poetica’ of poet and poem as open to ‘invisible guests’, and the suggestion in J. Hillis Miller’s essay ‘The Critic as Host’ that a critic becomes both eaten and eater, consuming and consumed within a ‘double antithetical relationship of host and guest’. Miłosz imagines both poet and poem as inhabited and sometimes haunted: ‘our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, / and invisible guests come in and out at will.’ For the critic as invisible guest, radical courtesy (not faded or mousy courtesy, but robust, vibrant courtesy) involves a deep attentiveness to the text. It begins with creative humility – a capacity to wait and let the text reveal what it wants to, and openness to its possibilities. This kind of criticism needs the text’s hospitality to sustain itself, while it enriches the text as a parasite might, to use Miller’s metaphor. A healthy critical culture, like a healthy host, relies on and feeds its guests. More practically, critical reading and writing need to be hosted by editorial commissions. Deep reading needs sustenance and time. Then criticism’s radical courtesy and creative humility flourish.

Peter Rose

Pace the cynics, we have many outstanding critics in this country – and willing, attentive audiences. Every week I meet bright new littérateurs who, with due support, will replenish the editorial and critical ranks in coming years. That they deserve more encouragement, early guidance, better remuneration is clear. What we also need, collectively, is a fresh spirit of confidence and engagement. Crucial here will be a new mood of generosity among publishers, consumers – and reviewers themselves. It will seed new forums, new alliances, new conversations.

Editors are always looking for writers of flair, ones unafraid of rhapsody or impiety. Criticism is an art but also an entertainment – and occasionally a sport. We should not be coy about the good or polite about the mediocre.

Luke Slattery

The systemic weakness of Australian literary criticism is the failure of its literary editors, collectively, to create and sustain a metropolitan standard: the standard that one might expect in London, New York, Boston, or Los Angeles. The metropolitan style is hard to define, but, like pornography, you know it when you see it. Clive James and James Wood are great practitioners of the metropolitan style, as, in different ways, were Randall Jarrell and Edmund Wilson. At the core of the metropolitan style is a cool critical poise. It is firm, sceptical, reasoned, passionate, hostile to cant; its core value is accessible intelligence, an intelligence often expressed in wit, or at least humour. Perhaps most importantly, it is anchored in deep erudition yet eschews facile show and pretension.

The culture would benefit from a dedicated literary award for a critic or editor, to support a short-term placement at an overseas literary journal, or a generalist journal with a literary section. The award, in effect, would pay a wage and living expenses. With the carrot of a month at the New Yorker or the LRB, a career at the critical end of the literary world might seem a whole lot more attractive.

Geordie Williamson

Australia’s critical culture will never thrive in any broad sense without economic support. It is understood that some patronage is required for the production of certain forms of literary endeavour, whether from government or the private sector. Less thought is given to supporting the community of commentators who sift, judge, praise, encourage, and critique those works. And yet, without this critical response – the striking back and forth of the shuttlecock which Samuel Johnson saw as necessary to ensuring the public presence of a given text – the money, time, and care invested in those creative works is undermined.

A flourishing cultural ecosystem is one in which all aspects of cultural production, dissemination, and critique are supported: not lavishly, but proceeding from a sense of the need to support those aspects of an enterprise which, though critical to the health of the whole, are under-appreciated. Undertakings such as the Sydney Review of Books are a step in the right direction, but more needs to be done.