Hirst quickly invokes the old academic/journalist divide: ‘Neill proceeds as a journalist, quoting different testimony and viewpoints’, so implying no more than a modest compilatory intention. Over the last few years, I have accumulated an unruly file of material relating to the ‘Aboriginal problem’, and have flinched from the challenge of ordering it to usefulness. Neill orders her dispersed and disparate material excellently well. She quotes because she cares about accuracy; and, having quoted, she moves to expose the flaws in both analysis and logic that can vitiate good intentions when they proceed from a political mould. Even more valuable, she presents a range of research findings, many of them new to me, which focus squarely on painful because baffling issues, like the decline in Aboriginal literacy in the Northern Territory, and the higher incidence of suicide among Aboriginal males when they are not in custody, but living in their ‘ordinary’ world. If this is journalism, we could do with a great deal more of it in academe.

It was presumably the frank statement of these disquieting research findings that led Hirst to grant White Out residual virtue as ‘a good compendium of politically incorrect information’. The detachment of that response leads me to identify what has been journalists’ greatest contribution. In recent years, professional journalists such as Tony Koch, Paul Toohey, Stuart Rintoul and now Rosemary Neill have used their newspaper columns as trumpets to summon us away from our distanced debates and abstractions, to face the terrible actualities of the present.

Hirst then chides Neill for endorsing ‘positions on policy that are contradictory’, giving as evidence his gloss on her tentative recommendations: ‘sometimes more money appears to be needed; sometimes money is not the answer.’ But where is the contradiction in that? It sounds true to me. He also fusses over her failure to rehabilitate that antique term ‘assimilation’, with its trailing clouds of historical associations. I found Neill’s characterisation of assimilationist policies between the wars one of the fairest I have read – but why would we want to resuscitate that discredited term now, save to revive some old political battle? Hirst lists Neill’s ambitions: that Aborigines should live as long, have as much access to jobs and education, and enjoy as much physical security as the rest of us. Don’t we all want that? I think Hirst would allow that we do, but he sees, mysteriously to me, an unavoidable corollary: ‘the implication, then, is that Aborigines are to be coerced or cajoled into living according to the general community standards.’ He seems to assume that social discipline will have to be imposed on these reprobates.

These are extraordinary inferences to draw from the information Neill presents. One example only: of course some men who drink to excess and beat their women will be loath to change their ways. Only a local alliance between other men, women and law enforcement officers will stop them, as some such alliances are beginning to do. These people organise and act not to meet some standard of ours, but to meet their own. Hirst also claims that there will be resistance to the withdrawal of social welfare payments. To my knowledge no one is advocating the withdrawal of, for example, unemployment relief where no jobs are available, but people are making determined pragmatic efforts to develop rewarding jobs. Progress, if it comes at all, will come piecemeal and in a number of modest local forms, and will require the nurturing of gallant, necessarily fragile local initiatives. That is the lesson we are learning now from the failure of the grand, authoritarian, simple-minded policies of the past.

Hirst unveils his own solution in his last paragraph. Aborigines (and, presumably, the rest of us) cannot hope for betterment in the present situation ‘until the libertarian impulse has exhausted itself’. It would, therefore, seem our moral and political duty to go out and help exhaust it – not a recommendation I expected to hear from John. I don’t blame him for ducking the question of what’s to be done, but I admire Neill for having read, reflected and arrived at some tentative conclusions.

Before reading Hirst’s review, and knowing him to be a fair-minded man, I thought Neill’s title White Out to be a touch inflammatory. Now I recognise the force of the metaphor of us shuffling around in a fog of our own making. Brava, Rosemary Neill.

Inga Clendinnen, Horseshoe Bay, Qld

Gideon Haigh responds to Paul Strangio

Dear Editor,

It’s curious that Paul Strangio should object so strenuously to my review (ABR, June/July 2002) of his Keeper of the Faith; curious because, if anything, I erred on the side of generosity, fully understanding the ordeal of first-time publication. I endeavoured even to spare him direct criticism by explaining his book’s weaknesses in terms of the systemic failure of imagination in academic publishing, rather than by reference to his own inadequacies. He repays me with a gross misrepresentation of my views, even a little personal abuse, and a self-regarding bleat exhibiting no comprehension of any of my criticisms. This is a new concept for me: that if you don’t like a review of your book, you simply write in with your own.

My response will be as economical as Mr Strangio’s is not. I did not describe Keeper of the Faith as immoral, inaccurate, tendentious, dishonest or dishonourable. I said it was boring. This is unavoidably a matter of opinion. But I’d submit that a book of 464 pages containing not a single intimate anecdote, provoking thought, arresting description, felicitous phrase or even unexpected word is, by any measure, dull; not least when what it says instead, about the subject and about politics in general, is so utterly predictable. He asks for my response to his book’s ‘themes’, but what is there to respond to? There was a tension between Jim Cairns’s scepticism about parliamentary democracy and his choice of career as an elected official. There was a tension between Cairns and his leader Gough Whitlam because they came from different backgrounds and traditions. Oh, and he sympathised with the underdog because of his humble origins. And ... well … there just isn’t much else. Hard-hitting, eh?

I’m clearly a new experience for Mr Strangio as a reviewer. I have no agenda. I’m neither an academic rival, nor his ideological nemesis. I approached Keeper of the Faith solely as a reading experience – and wouldn’t repeat the exercise at gunpoint. Mr Strangio’s assertion that I have ‘no head for a serious, sustained and unashamedly political narrative’, that I prefer ‘historical writing that is dilettante in style and non-challenging in content’, is simply the tired academic pretence that prolixity equals rigour, and monotony means objectivity. Now that he’s been published outside the academy, Mr Strangio should come to terms with the idea that his books will be read by different sorts of people (that’s what he should be hoping for, anyway). Some will not like his work. Will he throw a tantrum every time that happens?

Gideon Haigh, North Caulfield, Vic.

Wagga Wagga to the world

Dear Editor,

I read Gideon Haigh’s review (ABR, June/July 2002) of Paul Strangio’s biography of Jim Cairns with interest. When I got to his thoughtful aside about university presses – why the hell are they publishing so many PhDs? – I wanted to cheer. This may have been because I had spent the morning declining PhDs masquerading as book proposals. I have worked as a publisher for two university presses over the course of ten years or so, and pretty much any working day has involved declining a thesis or two. I am not going to engage with Gideon Haigh’s specific criticisms of Dr Strangio’s book, or with the author’s published response. However, both pieces raise important questions about theses as books, and the role of academic publishing, and these merit a response from someone who is immersed in the area.

The decision not to publish a thesis doesn’t reflect a cruel or arbitrary nature. It reflects the simple fact that most PhDs, while extremely worthwhile, are not books, no matter how thoroughly they are revised. They are written within fixed constraints, for an audience of two or three examiners, as an exercise in proving a candidate’s ability to conduct research, write it up and develop an argument. The trouble is that PhD candidates are often advised on all fronts – by supervisors, examiners, peers, heads of departments, grant-giving bodies – to turn their thesis into a book.

Countless times I’ve read a proposal based on a thesis and thought to myself ‘great topic’. If only, I think, the author could expand the coverage from say, five years to 150, or from Wagga Wagga to the world, or from two novels published in the 1950s to the entire body of Australian literature, maybe film and television as well. I’ll have to break it to them that the subset of readers interested in Maori gangster rap and the theories of Deleuze and Guattari is quite small. It sounds glib and perhaps disrespectful, but I’m grappling with how to make a smart young person who remains passionate about their field produce a book that will be significant and saleable. Sadly, more often than not, I decide that ultimately the attempt won’t be worth it.

It’s understandably demoralising for a post-doctoral fellow (official or not) who has struggled with producing 100,000 carefully argued words over several years to be told by a publisher who spends ten minutes reading a proposal: ‘This sounds great, but can you write a completely different book, please?’ – if she doesn’t reject it outright. To paraphrase myself, I’ll say: ‘I know you’ve been trained to cover all bases and justify every point and to keep yourself out of the story, but would you mind removing the excessive detail, the supporting quotes from everyone who has ever mentioned your subject, and make it bolder and broader?’

Sometimes an author can pull it off, and the risk taken by both parties reaps rewards; the author finds a real voice, and is relieved to liberate him or herself from literature surveys and theoretical perspectives that, for many readers, sit ill with the topic. He or she may be driven by the urge to reach out to thousands of readers. Most important here is a writer who really can write. The publisher may end up with a winner that makes author, booksellers and thousands of readers happy. The press makes money on the book, and the commissioning editor feels not a little relieved. It is an understatement to note that among revised PhDs these are the exceptions.

The colossal exceptions are when you read the proposal that really is a book, the author having worked hard to take it to another planet from where the PhD began. Your heart beats faster, and you think: ‘This really is good. We must publish it, pretty much as it stands.’ In reality, after ten years of looking at hundreds – maybe thousands – of proposals for revised theses, for me there have been a handful of these glorious moments. Perhaps some of the authors responsible for them have been from that exclusive cohort who set out to write a book, decide they may as well get a doctoral qualification out of it as well, and somehow get away with it.

More often than not, however, it’s better to decline the proposal outright and put everyone out of their misery. Occasionally, I’ll offer a bit of free counselling, saying, at least implicitly: ‘You’ve done it, you’ve done it competently, now move on.’ Invariably, the best practical advice is to turn the thesis into a journal article or two, enabling the author to reach specialists who really will engage with his or her work. A book that sells in small quantities and is seen as a discretionary purchase even by those who are experts in the relevant field or related to the author doesn’t help anyone.

So why do university presses continue to publish books that started out as PhDs? Very often we’re talking about a gap between what we truly thought an author could achieve and what was actually delivered. Thousands of hours of work by all parties may improve it, but not save it. Misplaced faith is a fact of life in all avenues of publishing, as files of cancelled contracts and overstocked warehouses will testify. There is also the weight of numbers. While I am hopeful that the message that a thesis isn’t a book is starting to sink in, it needs to sink in far and wide: in 2000, 27,886 students were registered for a PhD, according to DEETYA. Of course, they’re not all in the humanities and social sciences, where, unlike the sciences, getting a book from your PhD has, traditionally, been the assumption, but a fair proportion are. It’s too scary for me to do the sums and work out that if only a quarter of those who pass send me a proposal …

More often than not, though, some theses get published because university presses are following their mission: to disseminate knowledge, and to contribute to the cultural and intellectual life of the nation. It is not unreasonable to expect that a few of these tens of thousands of PhD students, some of Australia’s best and brightest, funded by the nation to analyse, read, debate and discuss, will produce a book from their work that sets part of the world on fire.

Looking at the bigger picture, it’s not news that the market for academic books is shrinking at a time when the number of books published continues to grow. Observers of academic publishing will have noticed the ground shifting in recent years. Fewer specialised monographs are being published, PhDs or not. More textbooks are now published by university presses than was the case a decade ago. And, encouragingly, university presses are publishing more general books, not always written by academics, or perhaps written by academics decidedly not writing for other academics. This, in some ways, is filling the gap left by many of the trade publishers as they find their traditional markets shifting as well.

So while we should celebrate the relatively few ex-PhDs that manage to transcend the constraints under which they were originally written, Gideon Haigh is right to plead that academic publishers be wary, very wary indeed. In general we are, but the academic culture in which we largely work doesn’t always share our perspective.

Phillipa McGuinness, UNSW Press, Sydney, NSW

Wither poetry in Melbourne?

Dear Editor,

What is the current place of poetry within our literary festivals? What opportunities do they offer poetry readers to relate to the diversity of fine contemporary poetry published in Australia today? Why – given their potential importance in offering poets access to a larger reading and book-buying audience – isn’t there a greater emphasis on poetry at our literary festivals? Should festivals forfeit access to Literature Board and other public subsidies unless they provide a programme of readings each day they operate? Should there be a minimum quota of poets (say, twenty per cent) among invited guests?

Some festivals, like the recent Sydney Writers’ Festival, deal with poets and poetry publishers in creative and inclusive ways. This May, the audiences for the several poetry-related sessions and readings at Hickson Road were large and lively. Not so this year’s The Age Melbourne Writers’ Festival. The above questions were provoked by a consideration of this year’s programme. The title of one panel talks of poetry publishing as a ‘dying art’, but no poetry publisher is listed among the panellists. This year’s programme gives the work of major poetry publishers hardly any space at all. Whilst the list of invited poets includes well-known ones, a mere five poets, including only one indigenous writer, will take part in five sessions in a programme representing hundreds of writers. At Paper Bark Press, we could not understand why the new work of a poet of Rodney Hall’s importance was not included in the same festival where his New and Selected Poems was due to be launched.

This narrow ‘take’ on poetry publishing is not what a publicly subsidised festival should be offering. Surely there is a legitimate requirement that these subsidised events should represent a wide array of literary publications.

Paper Bark Press is a serious publisher, in its sixteenth year, and values its reputation as an inclusive, open-minded and innovative publisher of poetry of the highest quality. That is why we are not prepared to put our authors into this festival. Paper Bark has decided that it will not proceed with the launch of Rodney Hall’s long-awaited The Owner of My Face: New and Selected Poems and Kevin Hart’s Flame Tree: Selected Poems. Nor will Robert Adamson read from his Mulberry Leaves: New and Selected Poems 1970–2001. Rodney Hall will now appear at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival in early October. Robert Adamson will appear at the National Poetry Festival in Brisbane.

Over the years, Paper Bark has enjoyed a considerable history with the Melbourne Writers’ Festival and has, we trust, made a significant contribution. During the last ten years, we have launched a number of award-winning poetry titles there, and our poets have regularly participated in the festival. In 1999, for instance, Paper Bark launched five poetry titles at the festival. Of these titles, Peter Minter’s Empty Texas won The Age Poetry Award, Jennifer Maiden’s Mines was awarded the Kenneth Slessor NSW Premier’s Prize for Poetry, Peter Steele’s Invisible Riders was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Prize, while Kevin Hart’s Wicked Heat was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry. In the same year, Pure and Applied, by Gig Ryan, won the Victorian Premier’s C.J. Dennis Prize for poetry.

This year, there is no recognition that poetry is a vital and many-sided art with a wide readership and an active local publishing and reviewing scene. With such a failure to deal well and representatively with the poets, no wonder there is a question mark in the title of the session ‘Poetry for the People?’

Paper Bark hopes that our withdrawal from The Age Melbourne Writers’ Festival will stimulate discussion on the issues we have raised here.

Juno Gemes, Paper Bark Press, Sydney, NSW

Missing children

Dear Editor,

When my copy of ABR arrives, I always turn to the back pages (sad but true: children’s literature comes last) to read the latest in children’s books. On opening the August edition, I discovered adult fiction at the back. Could it be that children’s books had been promoted? But no, they weren’t there at all. Is this a one-off, or have reviews of children’s books been abandoned? I hope not. Good books for children are the foundation of a love of literature. I trust the review of Maurice Saxby’s Images of Australia: A History of Australian Children’s Literature 1941–1970 (ABR, August 2002) was not a farewell to this category. Take this letter as an enquiry with hope.

Errol Broome, Brighton, Vic.

ABR has certainly not abandoned its commitment to children’s book publishing, but we are reviewing our coverage, with a view to deciding how best to encompass such a buoyant, growing literature in the relatively few pages that are available. Pam Macintyre, in her review of Images of Australia, noted ABR’s ‘long and steady contribution to children’s literature’. Pam (co-author of The Oxford Companion to Australian Children’s Literature, and one of our editorial advisers) is contributing to this review process, along with others. The first of our new surveys of recent children’s books will appear in the October issue. Ed.

Ned Kelly the Australian

Dear Editor,

Alex McDermott (ABR, March 2002) makes a good case for a more nuanced assessment of the Kellys and their relations with police and squatters. At the same time, however, his suggestion of atavistic forces at work simply elaborates on the ‘mad Ireland made Ned’ analysis voiced twenty-five years ago by Manning Clark and, most recently, by Germaine Greer. Are we really to believe that the unsettled conditions of north-eastern Victoria prompted a reversion ‘to older ways of life’ that prevailed in Ireland before St Patrick and the English invasion, and that somehow survived in the imported folk memory? Can we accept that the same environment that John McQuilton claims ‘Australianised’ the Kellys and their ilk in fact ‘re-Irishised’ them? It is as fanciful as the old idea revived by John Molony and repeated by Greer that the Kellys were of Irish rebel stock. Central to the debate is the question of how Ned Kelly identified himself. Despite the rhetoric of the Jerilderie Letter (whose authorship is still problematic, to say the least) and its invocation of an Ireland that Ned never knew, Ned at no time called himself an Irishman. He was ‘a colonial’, ‘a native’ and, significantly, ‘an Australian’. The freedom he invoked was not that of the cattle-raiding bands of pre-colonial Ireland, but of a native Australian of Irish origin determined to build a new life.

Bob Reece, Fremantle, WA