The ‘50 Books You Must Own’ brochure, a valuable initiative as part of the 2004 campaign developed with our industry partners, was generously sponsored by Visine. The books were chosen by the Australian Booksellers Association Marketing Committee. The purpose of the booklet was to assist occasional book buyers in making their choice of what book to buy so that they could participate in the promotion.

The Australian government’s special Books Alive funding is spent almost entirely on point-of-sale items, window displays and advertising on television, in magazines and newspapers featuring the Australian Books Alive titles and strongly promoting books and reading.

The Australia Council treasures our wealth of great writers and remains committed to ensuring that we will remain a healthy nation of readers, book buyers and book lovers in the future.

Ben Strout, Executive Director,
Arts Development, Australia Council, Sydney, NSW

Great reads, indeed

Dear Editor,

Jenny Darling (‘Letters’, ABR, September 2004) has expressed disappointment at the paucity of books by Australian authors included in the Books Alive campaign booklet ‘50 Books You Must Own’. She has also linked the campaign with the Australia Council’s role of increasing awareness of Australian culture.

In fact, the Books Alive campaign is a component of the federal government’s Book Industry Assistance Plan, which committed $240 million over four years from July 2000 to help offset the substantial impact of the GST on the book industry. The $8 million allocated to Books Alive is administered by the Australia Council, but is not part of Australia Council funds. The campaign has a set of government-approved objectives that are distinct from the general objectives of the Australia Council.

The Books Alive booklet was a new element of the campaign for 2004 which ran during the first two weeks of August. Its main purpose was to help people choose a book to buy during the campaign, which would then enable them to purchase one of the six Books Alive promotional books for $5. It should be noted that all six Books Alive books, around which the campaign publicity was centred, are by Australian authors.

The Australian Booksellers Association was asked to select the titles for the campaign booklet. The brief given by the Books Alive team was to compile a list of ‘great reads’ for adults, and a corresponding list for children. We invited input from all our 750 members, after which a group of experienced booksellers made the final selection of both the fifty adult books and the twenty children’s books.

The emphasis on ‘great reads’ as the basis for selecting titles for the booklet reflects the underlying objective of the Books Alive campaign: to actively encourage an increase in reading and book buying, particularly amongst occasional readers or lapsed readers. These are people who understand the value of books and reading, but who need encouragement to make more time for reading or to redevelop the reading habit.

Research conducted during development of the Books Alive campaign clearly showed that an ever-expanding array of entertainment options and leisure activities, together with the general busyness of people’s lives, are making it increas­ingly difficult for books and reading to compete for time and attention. This is of particular concern when parents are reading less to their children as well as reading less themselves.

Through the Books Alive campaign, we need to promote reading experiences that have the power to compete with available alternatives. We also need to help connect individuals with the ‘right books’ for them. The titles in the Books Alive booklet were intentionally selected to cover a broad range of styles and genres – something for everyone – and to offer strong reading experiences that will hopefully inspire those who chose from the list during the campaign to come back for more.

Perhaps the Books Alive campaign could consider compiling another booklet of ‘50 Books by Australians and about Australia’. As Jenny Darling says, we need to do all we can to recognise and promote our own writers and to develop our cultural voice. At the same time, there is still a lot more we need to do to engage large segments of our population more fully with books and reading in general. This was the aim of the Books Alive booklet. While any list of recommended titles will always stimulate debate, there is no doubt that both the adult and children’s lists in the booklet are full of• great reads’.

Kathleen Mapperson, CEO,
Australian Booksellers Association, Kew, Vic.

A lost opportunity

Dear Editor,

Like Jenny Darling (‘Letters’, ABR, September 2004), I was taken aback by the ‘50 Books You Must Own’, not only at the paucity of Australian authors included but also at the fact that, according to the Books Alive programme, close to one million copies of this booklet were distributed during the Books Alive period.

My understanding is that Books Alive was set up to help the publishing industry recover from the horrors inflicted upon it by the GST on books. As Books Alive is an Australian government initiative developed through the Australia Council, surely their aim would be to get more Australians reading Australian books. But the ‘50 Books You Must Own’ booklet features many international best sellers. Are we seriously expected to believe that Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, John le Carré’s The Constant Gardener, Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October and John Grisham’s A Time to Kill need help with advertising? And what of the Australian content? Why aren’t Australian authors such as Thea Astley, Frank Moorhouse, Miles Franklin, Patrick White, Glenda Adams, David Marr, Kate Grenville, Elizabeth Jolley, Amanda Lohrey, Robert Dessaix, Andrew McGahan – I could go on and on – featured?

Booksellers may choose the list, but is it too much to ask that for just two weeks of the year (which was the time frame for Books Alive) we have a focus on Australian authors? What a lost opportunity!

Lyn Tranter, Balmain, NSW

An expensive sop

Dear Editor,

I have read Jenny Darling’s letter (ABR, September 2004) and think she makes a very valid point. However, the genesis of the Books Alive campaign (of which the ‘50 Books You Must Own’ booklet was a part) was a grubby deal that the Howard government did with Senator Meg Lees to get the GST passed. The Democrats had promised that they would not allow books to be taxed, but Senator Lees caved in. Under that arrangement, the government agreed on a $240 million programme to assist the book industry following the introduction of the GST. A sum of $117 million would go towards an eight per cent subsidy on educational textbooks. This programme ended on 30 June 2004.

Other features of the package included $48 million for an Innovation, Infrastructure and Development Fund and a Skills Development Program to improve the competitiveness of the Australian printing industry; $38 million to extend the libraries’ lending rights scheme for Australian authors from public libraries, to cover educational libraries; $28 million in grants to primary schools to increase their holding of Australian books; $8 million for a books marketing initiative (based on the successful UK model) to promote reading and literacy; $1.2 million to improve the statistical collection of the Australian publishing industry.

The funding for Books Alive came from the $8 million marketing initiative. As I understand it, the Australia Council was enlisted as the ‘honest broker’ to administer the funds. The money was intended to assist the industry as a whole, and not Australian books in particular. To that end it’s perhaps unfair to be critical of the Australia Council – they didn’t ask for the money. Personally, I think the whole exercise has been a shameful waste of money and reflects on the dishonesty and naïveté of the Democrats.

The fact that book sales have remained static or declined (in fact, have declined in real terms) since the introduction of the GST seems to indicate that the $240 million has been a waste of money. I suspect that neither the Democrats nor the government ultimately cared very much about the book industry, and that the S240 million was a sop to keep everyone quiet-which it achieved admirably.

Mark Rubbo, Readings, Melbourne, Vic.

Brenda Niall on being misreported

Dear Editor,

I can’t imagine how John Slavin (ABR, August 2004) got the idea that Shirley Hazzard has been ‘criticised, particularly by Brenda Niall in ABR (February 2004) for the recidivist depiction of Australians in her novels as post-colonial vulgarians’. And what can he mean by ‘particularly Brenda Niall’ I wonder? Who are all the others?

My review reminded readers that the Australia of Hazzard’s novel The Great Fire was the 1930s and should be read in that context. I praised the satiric art with which Hazzard presents some of her Australians abroad as unsurpassed even by Patrick White. And I pointed out that ‘Hazzard does not give her cultured heroes a monopoly on psychological war damage’. The crass Australian official Rystrom has his nightmares, too. All this seems to accord very well with Hazzard’s own comments as reported by Slavin.

Slavin must be thinking of someone else’s review. Admiring Hazzard’s work as I do – you might even say admiring it ‘particularly’ – I’m not happy to be misreported.

Brenda Niall, Camberwell, Vic.

The servant of humanity?

Dear Editor,

Having read Geoff Davies’s book Economia: New Economic Systems to Empower People and Support the Living World and then Philip Clark’s review of it (ABR, August 2004), I would like to share some observations with you.

Economists and economics mean different things to different people. Economists seem to be an endless source of ridicule in the joke world, but unfortunately in the real world economists and economic models are used (and abused) by governments and such bodies as the International Monetary Fund, to help predict the future, with such predictions often negatively affecting the lives of many. There are those that consider that economics (that is the theories about how economies work) is a science and, as such, is subject to the continual rigour of scientific processes. There are also those, like myself, who have travelled the world and worked in many countries, and who have become very concerned about the disparity between economic theories (and the predictions made by numerical models derived from such theories) and the outcomes of the implementation of such theories on people and the environment. All is not well in the theory and application of economics, and one should wonder why.

One of the themes of the book Economia, by Geoff Davies is to debunk the myth of economics being a science, in a very deliberate and articulate manner. Davies makes the point strongly and clearly that standard market and economic (neoliberal) theory misses the rigour of the scientific process, theory construct and continual validation, whereby prediction is tested against actual outcome, and adaptations made. Furthermore, the theory fails to define a consistent relationship between predicted market behaviour and reality. In fact, the basis of neoliberal economic theory and the process of theory construct is very suspect from n scientific perspective. This is of obvious concern given the emphasis placed on such economic theories, and models derived therefrom, by governments and institutions to guide development and trade; and Davies’s contribution should not be dismissed lightly. It is refreshing that a scientist should examine the theory and practice of economics.

The example he sites of the North American Free Trade Agreement {NAFTA) is one example. Not only is there concern about the theory on which the economic models are built, but there is deep concern about the assumptions used for modelling of the effects of NAFTA. Such assumptions included: economics of the trading nations were in ‘general equilibrium’; capital does not cross national boundaries; trade is balanced; there is full employment. One could well ponder the reality of these assumptions, and should query whether these assumptions have been met by what has happened since.

The review by Clark acknowledges the ‘immense canvas’ that Davies has tried to paint, but does not give the reader the central idea that Davies is trying to weave this canvas out of what he believes are essential components of which economics, to be more useful and relevant, must be composed. The components are one of society, local community, quality of life and environment. To fully understand the contributions of these components, Davies has chosen to put these into an historical context, which has the added value in demonstrating how simple and local concepts have grown into complex and global ones. If economic theory has not worked well in the past (in a predictive sense), then all does not bode well for the future, unless there is radical change in the theory. Davies discusses what direction that change may take, by noting that simple self-organising systems, economic systems and complex living systems are fundamentally the same, with a common theme of self-organisation.

A simple definition of economics would be that it is a system, which has developed independently of economic theories, is the banking and monetary sectors. Davies has taken upon himself to examine both of the sectors, which adds to the immensity of the canvas, but it is illuminating, and these sections I found particularly rewarding and insightful. Did Abraham Lincoln have it wrong with his vision that: ‘Money will cease to be the master and become the servant of humanity. Democracy will rise superior to money power.’ How did the Bank of England include such a statement in its original charter as: ‘The bank has benefit on the interest of all monies which it creates out of nothing.’

As an election approaches in Australia, economics jargon and analysis is again being sprayed around by the politicians and journalists, but one wonders how many of these in free­flow fully understand what they are talking about, let alone those that are being subjected to this tirade. Yet economics is acknowledged as being a critical issue in the election. As such, Economia provides a useful guide to understanding the jargon and the relevant relationships and systems involved in the economy, and would assist in giving us a solid basis for more informed decisions in this area.

Peter Williams, Nedlands, WA

Touché

Dear Editor,

Thank you for drawing my attention to the misspelling of Jackie Onassis’s name in my book The Editor’s Companion (‘Advances’, ABR, September 2004). Because you are so zealous in the pursuit of accuracy, I feel obliged to point out that my surname is not McKenzie.

Janet Mackenzie, Mansfield, Vic.