The Victorian Writers’ Centre, like its Sydney counterpart, may claim to serve all the writers in the state of which it is the capital, but no one pretends that a Warrnambool poet or Hamilton novelist can slip into Melbourne any time of the week to listen to other fascinating creatures ravel out their weaved-up folly. And no one in New England can make regular visits to the Sydney centre (aptly located in the purlieus of a former lunatic asylum). So the capital city-based Centres, like their country cousins, resort to despatching contract-satraps to the far empyries: it is, I suppose, the best they can be expected to do.

The reason why many (some?) writers live in New England is precisely because they suspect that the big smoke 1s no more than a big haze. By and large, New England writers I’ve met are very content to write outside the metropolitan literary abattoirs and rendering-down works. Isolation of a sort is handy for writers – unless they are simultaneously compelled to hold down annoying jobs which suck out their energies, a state of affairs by no means limited to provincial writers. But at least we don’t have the multiple opportunities to be distracted by participation in confusing and thought-provoking launches, readings, and committee which big-city writers are prone to frequent – to the detriment of their perspective on the entire raree-show. Publishers who inhabit the big smoke can be contacted whenever a manuscript is in view, so that while we miss some chances to be approached at the beanos with lucrative offers of commissions, remote primary producers nevertheless tend to come up with the goods from time to time.

And provincial publication outlets, including book publishers, small presses, and journals, enable us to fly our kites relatively unhampered by pressures to conform to internalised censorship based on imitation international diktats and vetos of metropolitan literary guardians.

The flip-side to this happy state of affairs is that we like to be informed, at least, about what our reptile contemporaries are doing from time to time. Those who think that a single publication in a journal in the big smoke is a guarantee of acceptance may be living in cloud-cuckoo­land, but it’s a pleasant confirmation of self-placed confidence to know that there are editors who welcome fables from the fringe as well as tall tales from the terraces and mews of inner cities. Younger writers, and those who have just joined the paper-chase, will see, though, in the stray journals which come their way a sameness of thought and taste. Fiction, poetry, and reviews (including weekend newspaper reviews) often appear modish or craven to readers outside the ambience of the coteries which replace writing with cultural production.

I don’t think many inveterate readers, whether city or provincial dwellers, are fooled by the epithet avant-garde anymore. In my neck of the woods, people take subscriptions to the Australian Women’s Book Review, Adelaide Review and Sydney Review, as well as Granta, the New York Review of Books, the TLS, the London Review, Art Review, Paris Review, Salmagundi, Kunapipi, and a host of others. If it’s not clear to city readers, it’s fairly clear to some of us that much of the writing which passes for experimental and on the edge is, as William Parker recently said of Damien Hirst’s painting, ‘so safe, so predictable, so orthodox, so ... how shall I put it? ... so avant-garde.’

At the same time, we can publish chancy stories, novels, and poems anywhere in Australia or abroad. Mail­art, electronic and radiophonic publishing is not the pre­serve of city writers. Far from it. Dan Byrnes registered the first Australian electronic book publishing company from Tamworth; and following the early 1970s example of Aberdeen (NSW) poet James Burns, numerous regional Australian poets (and artists) have exhibited concrete poems and graphics in mail art shows in Mexico, Hungary, Fran c and elsewhere for nearly twenty years. The playfulness of international exchanges (including, at the finish, the exhibition ‘Sign of Peace’ which Winifred Belmont and I curated in 1986 in Melbourne) operated outside the readings and forums of 1990s Australian concrete and language-poets who saw deconstruction much as cargo-cultists saw John Frum. Travelling exhibitions and roaming bands of poets make some inroads into regional centres and provincial towns. But across-the-counter availability of a wide spectrum of literary journals is still pretty much as it was in the 1940s, when Norman Bartlett wrote in Meanjin that Australia had boasted only thirty ‘little magazines’ since Federation.

Bartlett’s division of literary periodicals is still apt. He discerned three major types: the little magazines proper, which welcomed new ideas and were generally rebelling against current taste; the ‘fellow-travellers’ – weekly or quarterly reviews aimed at an intelligent and critical minor­ity not generally interested in art or literature; and the commercial publications providing whatever their editors thought would sell to a wide public. In the provinces, we are familiar with the second and third categories. The weekend papers, 24 Hours, Oz Arts, Writing, and anything else that can be bought at a newsagency or local gallery provide some insight into the (carefully moulded) ‘wide public’ taste and present no problems of access. For those who can get SBS television, or who watch or listen to writing programs on television or radio, the situation improves. We’re stymied, though, if we want to see what the avant-garde and those who are tired of the avant-garde are up to. This is not such a bad thing for remote writers, who really want to get on with developing a line which is genuinely distinctive. But there’s always the nagging suspicion that we’re out of touch.

The New England Writers’ Centre makes some attempt to collect current issues of a wider range of little magazines, so that we can inform members of available outlets. I guess people who administer similar centres in Sydney, Melbourne or Wagga Wagga do the same thing. It helps a ‘new’ writer to know that there are more than two or three journals about the country which will take stories and poems. More importantly, it’s helpful to know what sort of stuff they publish, and what, if anything, they pay for contributions. It’s tedious to have to go through the motions of telling the tyros that it doesn’t matter that the Australian or the Courier-Mail has nothing personal against them if they get their work back with ‘The editor regrets’. There’s no telling some people, though. ‘I don’t see the point of sending anything else’: what do you do with such a case except suggest they’d better get a professional attitude or give up the game?

Nor is public funding of writers’ centres to enable readings by travelling big-shots in one location the whole answer. The New England Writers’ Centre has hosted visitors such as Susan Hampton, Gabrielle Lord, Yusef Komunyakaa and John Forbes, and shuffles local writers such as Sophie Masson, Dan Byrnes and Paul Cliff around to encourage schools, libraries and writers’ groups, and so reinforces the ‘industry’ of solitary workers. I guess other provincial centres do the same. We can do little else for the moment. A travelling exhibition of small magazines, and a public education program on the advantages of knowing where to get hold of such things, is the next step. It’s self­help, really.

One of the encouraging things about ABR from the provincial viewpoint is its role in keeping writers as well as general readers up to date about publications. Unlike the little magazines which carry few reviews the ABR has enabled us, at least, to see what our contemporaries (re­viewers as well as writers of fiction, biography and so on) can provide by way of models. And it has, I think, boosted sales of Australian books in every place that has a half-way decent bookshop. In Rosemary Sorensen’s tour at the helm, the ABR has become a practical tool for more writers than those at the centres might imagine. We’d be stuffed without it. So if this collection of rambling jottings on little magazines looks like a piece of in-house back-scratching, I make no apology.