Naughty authors

Dear Editor,

The Australian Society of Authors (ASA) has taken issue with the 2005 Books Alive campaign because, unlike the 2003 and 2004 campaigns, it no longer supports only Australian writers and because it offers no support for emerging writers. The Books Alive programme was launched in 2003 and featured six books by Australian writers, one of them previously unpublished. The 2004 programme featured another six books by Australian writers. These Australian books were available for $5 with the purchase of any other book.

Books Alive’s initial aim, improving book sales, was a success. The Books Alive website reports the selected titles dominated national bestseller lists during the 2003 campaign. As well, total book sales were twenty-three per cent more than book sales from the same period in 2002. The Perth bookseller Chris Bothams, who is now a member of the panel selecting books for the Great Reads Guide, reported that his store sold over 600 Books Alive titles in the first few days of the 2003 campaign. ‘What this campaign has done is to put books right out there as a viable alternative to CDs, DVDs and movies as a leisure option,’ Books Alive quotes Bothams as saying.

The ASA has no issue with increasing the sales of Australian books. But that no longer appears to be the focus of Books Alive. Books Alive had the potential to be a unique opportunity to promote Australian literary culture. It has mutated into ‘an Australian Government initiative that aims to encourage all Australians to experience the joys of reading’. Again, the ASA has no issue with reading campaigns. It has been ASA members, after all, who have helped inaugurate the Premier’s Reading Challenge in NSW. This reading programme has now been emulated in all other states. It has been an outstanding success in encouraging children to read.

Why then did the ASA take issue with the 2005 Books Alive Great Reads Guide?

First, it’s a matter of who’s managing the funding. Books Alive is funded through the Australia Council. The Australia Council’s role is to promote Australian arts. It is not the Council’s role to promote the arts in general, irrespective of where those arts originate. Hence, we were astonished to discover that half the writers the 2005 Great Reads Guide promoted were not Australian.

We question why the Australia Council is spending money promoting foreign authors. Were Books Alive sponsored by the federal Department of Education or through the Australian Publishers’ Association, we would have no objection to it as a promotion of reading (though we think it is really a promotion of books for sale). However, we do object to the primary Australian funding body for the arts financing the promotion of foreign writers. Can you imagine national arts organisations in the US, the UK, France, or Germany financing a campaign that publicised books not written by US, British, French or German authors? Why should Australian authors accept such an affront?

But there are other troubling issues. The Australia Council already forces the ASA, for the purposes of its mentorship programme, to accept that ‘young and emerging’ writers must be aged between eighteen to thirty, when we would argue that ‘young’ and ‘emerging’ are in fact different terms. The Vogel Award is open to writers under thirty-five, and an emerging writer might be of a more mature age – for example, Elizabeth Jolley or A.B. Facey.

However, on the evidence of Books Alive, it appears the Australia Council is indifferent to – no, is prepared to slap in the face with a big, wet fish – any but already established Australian writers. All the books on the Great Reads Guide have already achieved notable success. There are no ‘emerging’ writers – young or mature. Unlike 2003, there is no longer any attempt to bring unknown works to the attention of buyers.

Also, the vast majority of the books come from the largest publishers in the country, publishers who already invest in their own successful marketing campaigns. If the Australia Council is to promote this sort of campaign – which, if it was really a reading campaign, should not be measured in terms of books sold – why doesn’t it concentrate on that part of the book industry most in need of assistance? A book each from Text and UQP is a token effort when there are no titles from, for example, Giramondo, Brandl & Schlesinger, Five Islands, Black Dog, Black Swan or Black Inc.

In its response to our complaints, the Australia Council has cited the fact that the ASA was a member of the Books Alive Reference group, as if we had driven and designed the current strategy. This is not so. When we were shown the concepts for the 2005 campaign, we expressed our concerns straightaway. Our concerns were dismissed by both the Books Alive director and by the APA.

As part of its defence of Books Alive, the Australia Council notes that it is ‘justifiably proud’, as it should be, of its direct funding of writers. This funding amounts to $2 million, the same amount as that allocated to Books Alive. But then the Council makes mention of the fact, in what we perceive as a thinly veiled threat, that the Literature Board ‘provides at least another $2 million to support Australian publishers, writers’ promotion and writer service organizations, including triennial funding for the Australian Society of Authors’. Is this meant to imply that we shouldn’t offer criticism because we receive triennial funding? Sorry, Australia Council, grand pooh-bahs! Profuse apologies! We didn’t realise these were the rules. We’ll tug our forelock and go back to living on the poverty line, muttering the mantra ‘We are naughty authors’. We simply thought our arts organisation ought to be spending our tax money on us! Unhappily, it seems we were mistaken. By funding the current incarnation of Books Alive, the Australia Council appears more interested in encouraging the sales of British and American authors rather than in enhancing Australia’s literary culture.

If the real aim is to promote reading, we suggest that the Books Alive selection panel consider an Amazon.com approach. A campaign something along the lines of, ‘If you liked Maeve Binchy (or Jodi Picoult or Ian McEwan), try this book by an Australian writer’ would support Australian writers, and would encourage both book buying and reading. How about it next time?

Jeremy Fisher, Executive Director, Australian Society of Authors, Sydney, NSW

John Dawson replies to Robert Manne

Dear Editor,

Might I respond to Robert Manne’s letter (ABR, August 2005) in as many words?

1. Keith Windschuttle’s much-maligned statement, referring to Aboriginal raids described by Lyndall Ryan, states: ‘On the surface most of the actions by the Aborigines were nothing more than what would be recognized as crimes in any human culture: robbery, assault and murder. For the guerrilla warfare thesis to be credible, these acts have to be elevated above the level of crime or revenge. For this they needed two qualities: a political objective and a form of organization to achieve their end’ (Fabrication, p.31). Whitewash presents no evidence of political objectives or organisation – the best it can do is to politically correct plunder into ‘economic warfare’.

Fabrication states: ‘white settlers themselves supplemented their supplies by hunting native game, mainly kangaroo. But this only lasted until January 1811 when more reliable supplies of traditional British food became available’ (p.88). James Boyce demonstrates that hunting for skins continued. I called this correction ‘tinkering’, because Boyce makes no case that the hunting led to Aboriginal starvation. Windschuttle’s evidence and arguments to the contrary are either endorsed or ignored. The only case of starvation Boyce could find was attributed to harassment rather than to depletion of game.

Manne’s claim that peaceful early settlement contradicts Windschuttle’s observation that Aboriginal culture did not restrain the killing of whites is a non sequitur. Aborigines who could kill whites with cultural impunity wouldn’t necessarily kill whites if they benefited from cohabitation and/or feared retaliation. Manne can’t believe that Aborigines would refrain from killing whites in the early years if their culture permitted it; but he believes they would refrain from repelling invaders in the early years even though they were patriots. He believes their patriotism kicked in with escalating settlement; but he can’t believe their revenge and plunder could kick in as opportunities for attacks against vulnerable whites on the frontier escalated – as the empirical evidence demonstrates.

2. Manne’s ‘crazed positivist’ accusation is a furphy. Windschuttle doesn’t say: ‘it was possible to know exactly how many Tasmanian Aborigines the British settlers killed.’

3. Manne claims that Windschuttle requires proof for every Aboriginal killing but no proof of death by disease. Actually, Windschuttle provides a convincing case for Aboriginal deaths by introduced disease. It doesn’t include a tally for obvious reasons – diseases were not as visible, newsworthy or officially notable as killings.

4. Henry Reynolds’s statements ‘against the genocide idea in Tasmania’ were acknowledged in Fabrication; but Reynolds equivocates. For his black-armband constituency, he manages to write a whole chapter titled ‘Genocide in Tasmania’, in Genocide and Settler Society, without declaring whether genocide did, or did not, occur. He invokes an ‘indelible stain’, but these days he’s reluctant to estimate death tolls lest he be called on to justify them. Manne follows Reynolds’s lead.

5. Manne asks why, if I ‘excluded every one of Whitewash’s authors, except Greg Lehman’, postmodernism was discussed in Washout? This is what I say (p.252): ‘For more than a generation the academics explicitly embraced the notion that the writing of history is “inescapably political” … Greg Lehman recognizes and approves of the partisan nature of these 1960s style historians, but he represents a new generation, and the next step in the same direction … the belief that there is no one truth … and therefore no such thing as a lie. In this he openly expresses what too many academics believe half the time but still feel the need to dampen down or dress up.’

6. Manne claims that I accused him of doctoring the words of an Aboriginal woman, ‘whose evidence concerning the slaughter of her family Windschuttle had ridiculed’. What I did was quote all involved verbatim, so readers can judge who slaughtered, who ridiculed and who doctored. I will apologise, after Manne proves what I said false, and apologises for his long list of malicious accusations that have been proved false, e.g. his plagiarism concoction that graced the front page of The Age, then disappeared except for a letter of apology from his co-accuser.

7. Nothing above goes ‘to the very heart of Windschuttle’s case’, which is the fabrications and inflated death tolls that created a distorted black-armband history. Manne, Boyce and Reynolds evade these fabrications like the plague. While claiming that every silence in my letter concedes his point, his review’s silences on such issues are not, apparently, anything I may complain about; and ‘nothing of substance now remains’ for him to say! The left may rate Manne’s style ‘transparently reasonable’, but compared with what?

John Dawson, McKinnon, Vic.