This month something truly remarkable has happened for Australia. It won’t make front-page news or cause a Twitter storm, but it exists for every one of us. The national, state, and territory libraries joined forces to launch one giant national digital collection of Australian publications. It’s called National edeposit – or NED for short.

By ‘Australian publications’ we’re talking books, journals, magazines, music, pamphlets, newsletters, novels, children’s stories, self-published poetry anthologies, maps, government reports. You name it, regardless of where it was published in this vast continent, NED will have it.

NED is a website. It’s a system and a service, connecting a network of publishers and libraries. Publishers go to the NED website to deposit and describe their electronic publications using a simple tool, choosing where and how they want them to be accessed. For the rest of us, these publications show up through the national discovery service, Trove.

Why is this special?

To begin with we have to understand the history of legal deposit. Most people may not be aware that legal deposit legislation has been in place in Australia for more than one hundred years. It obliges publishers to deposit everything they publish with the National Library of Australia as well as with their own state or territory library. This is what allows us to preserve and provide access to a full record of our national documentary heritage. It’s essential for sharing knowledge as well as helping us to understand who we are and how to make sense of the world.

Until recently, this legislation only applied to print publications. But publishers have been producing materials in digital form for decades. Libraries have responded by collecting electronic publications wherever they have the staff and the systems to handle them, and wherever publishers have been willing to share them. Federal legal deposit legislation was finally extended to cover electronic publications in 2016. That means that publishers are now obliged to deposit their electronic publications; and that’s where NED comes in.

Where it made sense for two libraries to collect a physical copy of the same item, it makes much less sense for two libraries to insist on a publisher depositing exactly the same electronic file twice. Instead, the nine members of National and State Libraries Australia (NSLA) decided to build one system capable of collecting, preserving, managing, and providing access to all Australian electronic publications for all Australians.

This is a world-first collaboration for the library sector. It dismantles barriers between our library collections while opening our systems to publishers so that they can describe their own publications, choose the access conditions they prefer (within the Copyright Act) and receive dedicated support from the NED team. For the public, it means that a large percentage of Australian publications can be accessed directly from home, and that something published in Cooktown can be read in Coober Pedy, say. The most restricted publications can be accessed with a visit to national, state, and territory libraries.

It has been a herculean task to build a system that can satisfy nine sets of technical requirements and legislation while balancing open access principles, copyright law, content security, and protection of commercial viability for publishers. We’ve had fantastic input along the way from the publishing sector and from each of our member libraries, as well as a knock-out IT team. Our steering group, with members from all nine libraries, has met one hundred times since 2017.

For us as CEOs and Directors of NED member libraries, there’s real pride in seeing NED formally launched after four years of scoping, planning, building, testing, and promoting by our dedicated colleagues. The work is far from over, and the service will continue to develop as we come to grips with changing publication formats over time. Right now, though, it’s time for NED to meet the world.

Authors and publishers can get started with NED now.

Explore the NED collection in Trove.

This is a slightly edited version of an earlier blog post published by State Library Victoria.

Like many of us, I think of the book as the great vehicle for the sophisticated expression of our humanity. The world needs the book more than ever. To thrive and indeed survive as humans we need to develop our capacity to make rational decisions based on evidence, logic, and an open, imaginative, empathetic engagement with each other, a capacity best facilitated, as we grow, by reading.

With Melbourne University Press I’m excited to have the chance to lead Australia’s oldest and one of its most prominent and prestigious university presses. MUP will continue to publish print books for retail markets in Australia and New Zealand and around the world. The press and its proven team will continue to work hard to add value to these books – editorially and in terms of their design and print quality – and to market them expertly and aggressively, in fulfilment of the traditional function of a university press: to advance trusted knowledge and informed commentary beyond the halls of academe and into the broad public sphere.

Most of the authors of MUP books for the retail market will, I expect, be university-based scholars working in the fields of Australian Studies and History, including writers of biography and memoir. But the press will also be actively commissioning works by journalists, independent scholars, and other members of the public, and will eschew any narrow interpretation of what constitutes a serious, relevant contribution to public debate and discussion.

MUP will, additionally, seek to take advantage of the opportunities afforded within the digital age to publish more specialised books, including in disciplinary fields beyond the humanities and social sciences (which are the focus of most university presses around the world), and effectively reach the international audience that exists for such works, via electronic open-access publishing.

For more specialised forms of research, especially, there are compelling arguments in support of open-access publishing. Evidence suggests that such publishing maximises readership, including of course outside universities, as well as citations, that in doing so it facilitates new and sometimes unexpected cross-disciplinary intellectual pathways, and that it minimises costs of delivery, with all of the benefits this entails for the public and its research funding bodies.

At the Association of University Presses annual meeting in Detroit this year, open access was at the forefront of participants’ minds, as it has been for a number of years. It is also a central preoccupation within STEM publishing circles. Vivek Mehra, MD and CEO of Sage India, told a New Delhi audience earlier this year that there is a growing demand from authors to allow their works to become open access over a period of time.

Award-winning MUP books by Mark McKenna, Jenny Hocking, and many others published over the past couple of decades, often through the Miegunyah imprint, along with such important new releases as Joelle Gergis’s Sunburnt Country, on the implications of climate change for Australians, exemplify the best traditions of university press publishing. MUP will continue to maintain these traditions while pursuing new opportunities to provide leadership, in world terms, in the publication of more specialised research.

In June 2019 I got a new perspective on an industry I’ve been part of for twenty-five years. I have attended many Australian Booksellers Association’s (ABA) conferences as a bookseller, but this year’s ninety-fifth annual conference in Melbourne was my first as CEO of the ABA. More than three hundred delegates came together to discuss the industry, to hear from publishers and authors about the hottest new titles, and to catch up with friends old and new over a drink. Authors such as Elliot Perlman, Kitty Flanagan, and Clare Bowditch were provocative and entertaining, as was the Gala Awards Dinner MC, Benjamin Law. Seeing the conference from this fresh perspective provided valuable insights into the state of the industry. The industry presentations focused on innovative events programs and improving the supply chain, and it was pleasing to find the mood among booksellers both realistic and guardedly optimistic.

Bookshops, to be honest, have always needed saving. Not from themselves – many of them are profitable businesses with solid ties to their communities – but from hearsay or conventional narrative. My first exposure to this narrative was Borders’ opening in Australia in 1998 (Jam Factory, Prahran), when it was widely thought that existing bookstores would be crushed by the US giant. People wondered how Readings in Carlton, say, could possibly survive having a Borders across the road from 2002. Readings’ owners, faced with an international giant on their doorstep, were concerned. Yet the new Borders store helped to increase total book sales in the area by seventy-five per cent. This is known as clustering: similar businesses open in close proximity to a successful business. In 2011 Borders, succumbing to private equity mismanagement, collapsed under the REDgroup’s debt burden, but the narrative hardly changed. There was much interest in Borders’ demise, and media interest was intense. Given the collapse of Borders, the death of bookshops was surely nigh!

Readings Kids Carlton on Lygon Street, Melbourne (photograph by Jean Pierre/Google Maps)

So here we are, supposedly lurching from one near-death experience to the next. It is something we hear in the industry often – I thought bookshops were dead – but it isn’t really the case when you scratch the surface. What is happening in bookshops is a struggle reflecting the mounting indebtedness of Australian households and falling consumer confidence. A few bookshops have closed recently, always distressing for proprietors, staff, and customers. A few have opened, while others are renovating or expanding their premises, increasing staff hours, and diversifying stock. Bookshops are more dynamic and sophisticated than the narrative of existential crisis suggests. They occupy a unique space at the intersection of art, knowledge, and commerce. Booksellers and their customers tend to think of their interactions as equal exchanges, a sharing of information rather than a commercial transaction. This form of ‘soft capitalism’ does not provide for hard-selling or scripting, so bookshops depend upon relationship marketing and the perception of authenticity. It’s genuinely romantic, but it is repetitive, labour-intensive work, and the challenges facing the sector are myriad.

What are these challenges? How about the old chestnut, ‘books are too expensive’. The reality is that the average selling price of a book in Australia is now lower than it was sixteen years ago. Paper prices have also increased, crunching publishers’ margins and leading to much hand-wringing. No one wants to increase prices – consumers think them too high already – and Amazon runs retail at a loss to maintain its discounting practices. Authors’ incomes are averaging $12,000 per annum. If they fall much lower, will people continue to write? If fewer people write and there is less money for editors and designers, we may see a decline in quality and volume, with lots of people out of work. Meanwhile, wages continue to rise (though modestly), and rising property prices increase leasing costs. Besides, reading is so yesterday! Perhaps the narrative is true and it is simply a matter of time.

Nonetheless, bookshops aren’t going anywhere. The ABA’s membership is stable. It is full of smart, passionate booksellers. The major growth area in book sales over the past decade has been in children’s books. This growth has been significant enough to stimulate the opening of a host of new specialist children’s bookshops. One of my last projects as a bookseller was the design, fit-out, and launch of Readings Kids in Melbourne. I still derive much pleasure when I see it lit up at night, filled with children of all ages clutching piles of books. I can report from the trenches that the readers of the future are consuming now in great quantities, and they are choosing Australian stories. The quality and creativity in Australian children’s publishing is incredible. Bookshops carry huge ranges of Australian-authored titles, and they take pride in championing our authors.

At the recent ABA conference dinner, Archie Roach read from his upcoming memoir and performed songs with Paul Grabowsky. It was a deeply moving experience. At one point an old colleague squeezed my arm and asked, ‘Can you believe our lives?’

Archie Roach playing at the ABA conference dinner (photograph supplied)

More than mere retail outlets, bookshops are places of art and entertainment, of creativity and contested knowledge and ideas. They are democratic and tolerant too. Bookshops support Indigenous literacy programs, asylum seeker support centres, and other marginalised people. I’m familiar with the way they nurture young people through their first jobs and into adulthood.

It’s no exaggeration to say that bookshops saved me. I started working in one twenty-five years ago, a university dropout with a young child and no money. I’m familiar with the way booksellers nurture young people through their first jobs and into adulthood. My task now is to help support Australian bookshops so that other young people can have these kinds of opportunities.

Love Your Bookshop Day, the ABA’s annual celebration, is on Saturday, 10 August 2019. Full details: https://www.loveyourbookshopday.com.au/events

Few people escape from publishing. Most people, once they get a foot in the door, stay put. Mary-Kay Wilmers has been working in the industry for more than fifty years. She began at Faber & Faber when the company was still dominated by ‘GLP’ (the ‘Greatest Living Poet’ himself, T.S. Eliot, much mentioned in Toby Faber’s epistolary history of Faber). Wilmers, co-founder of the London Review of Books in 1979 and sole editor since 1992, occasionally writes ‘pieces’ for ‘the paper’ (LRB-speak). Now, two admiring colleagues of hers, John Lanchester and Andrew O’Hagan, have collected some of her occasional writings in a volume called Human Relations and Other Difficulties (Profile Books, $27.99 pb).

We meet the warring Connollys: literary critic Cyril Connolly, who ‘famously marked his place in a book he had borrowed with a rasher of bacon’, and his second wife, Barbara Skelton, who bedded many but doesn’t seem to have liked anyone (‘What a terrible waste of time people are,’ she wrote in her diary). Coolly, Wilmers is often deadly: in her essay on Patty Hearst she mentions a pre-kidnap beau called Steven Weed – ‘not a name that would necessarily wish fame upon itself’.

Wilmers is generally suspicious of aphorisms, but ABR liked this one in her article on seduction: ‘One way or another, a plot had to be devised to get Adam and Eve out of paradise.’ This piece, in true LRB fashion, occasioned a lethal exchange of letters. Christopher Ricks, in acidulous form, rebuked Wilmers for misremembering one of his pronouncements: ‘I hope that Ms Wilmers the editor of the LRB is more scrupulous than Ms Wilmers the insufficiently edited contributor to her pages.’ (Wilmers, adverbially deft, was sorry that Ricks had ‘taken the lapse so darkly to heart’.)

Hacks shouldn’t miss Wilmers’s article ‘The Language of Novel Reviewing’ – that toughest of assignments. Wilmers notes some of the pitfalls, the minor misprisions. Here, on her own turf, she is decidedly epigrammatic: ‘Every liberal and illiberal orthodoxy has its champions’; ‘Sometimes it seems as if novel reviewing were a branch of the welfare state’; and ‘Just as some novels supply their own reviews, so many reviews supply their own novels.’

Wilmers is funny about the triads of adjectives flung at novels: ‘exact, piquant and comical’, ‘rich, mysterious and energetic’, etc. etc.. She might have been thinking of those triadic puffs beloved of trade publishers – usually written, at any one time, by a cohort of six reliable encomiasts.

As the largest and one of the oldest literary associations in Australia, and the peak body representing Australian literary studies, the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) joins with its affiliated Associations in expressing the gravest possible concern about the non-appointment of the Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney following Professor Robert Dixon’s retirement this year.

There is no ambiguity about the value and importance of this Chair. At a time when Australian literature and Australian cultural work are so strong and diverse, with such dynamic, sustained, and path-finding engagements from so many writers – especially Indigenous writers and those from diverse cultural backgrounds – we see that there is a matching and energetic interest from readers, students, and teachers across sectors and from academic researchers both here and abroad. For these audiences, the value, quality, and diversity of Australian literary writing and literary study are obvious. At this moment of strength and energy, therefore, the University of Sydney Chair in Australian Literature is a position of the greatest importance. Any delay in this appointment is simply difficult to understand.  

Even more than the critical role of ethical custodianship of intellectual work and literary history, the University of Sydney Chair of Australian Literature is a key figure to focus the present momentum of Australian literary studies both inside and outside the University. As researcher, teacher, and advocate, this senior academic (as evidenced by the work of Professors Wilkes, Kramer, Webby and Dixon) can support, direct, and foster communication in ways that assist national and international dialogue in this significant field of enquiry. To lose this Chair, and indeed any Chair in Australian Literature, is to lose a leader who has the vital capacity for coordination, outreach, and consultation, and who may advocate for and represent this important work, which brings enduring benefit to both the nation and the world. We therefore join with our colleagues at the University of Sydney and across the field to voice our insistent support for the continuation of the Sydney Chair of Australian Literature.

This article first appeared on the ASAL website.

Sometimes Western Australia feels a long way from anywhere. Of course, that can be an attraction. It makes for something distinct and telling: everyone either revels in it or rebels against it, and both are productive in their own way. But now we must resist. The University of Western Australia’s recent decision to close UWA Publishing (at least in its present form) has made the gap between here and the rest of the country yawn. Western Australians need support from other literary communities across Australia if UWAP is to be reinstated.

Being part of the local literary community is a privilege. We are close-knit by necessity, and we are proud, proud of our books, writers, and readers – and of the potential we have to contribute to a thriving national literature, one that can sometimes feel under threat.   

I am still trying to find my way as a writer. But I can vouch for the positive influence that UWAP has had on my practice – the books it has published, workshops and launches, and other moments of coming together. What cannot be discounted, too, is the enthusiasm of Terri-ann White and her team. It takes special vim and personality to operate as they do, and to lose a publisher and advocate like Terri-ann would be a travesty. Part of my journey into writing involves work at UWA, in an administrative role at Westerly, and I support the statement put out by the magazine. I saw pathways and possibilities at UWAP, and to have such a valued, progressive, vibrant, and longstanding press in the state belied our isolation. As did the way UWAP consistently punched above its weight under Terri-ann.

UWA’s decision is a blow to the arts and to optimism, and is indicative of something that has fermented for too long across the country, in national debate, and in mysterious funding meetings. I don’t for a second accept that open-access opportunities make up the real reasons for the funding cut, but that might not even be the most salient point: as Emmett Stinson points out in The Conversation, ‘it is laughable to claim UWA Publishing’s cultural impact can simply be replaced through open access’. That’s why UWAP’s likely closure is a national concern: as Stinson notes, ‘when cuts are needed, literature is always first on the chopping block’. That kind of loss is difficult to stomach.

Full disclosure: the already-unstable literary landscape is arguably worse for young writers like myself. Working for a university, I know firsthand the scrabble for casual, sessional, or part-time work that characterises that world. Without access to publication by UWAP, its track record of excellence, and its commitment to literary values in Western Australia, the prospects for those who want to write and engage imaginatively with the place in which they live are scuppered. Please, sign the petition being circulated by Melinda Smith, and complain. Make noise. Indeed, make so much noise that even those with cotton wool in their ears can hear you all the way over here!

Word gets around quickly. Within a week of the University of Western Australia announcing the closure of UWA Publishing after eighty-five years, and the peremptory sacking of its staff, a petition had gathered almost 10,000 signatures. This is nothing new. Proposals to close UWAP in 1973, 1990, and 1996 were soundly defeated, after being robustly debated at UWA’s Academic Board, Convocation (alumni), and Senate. This rescued UWA from vociferous criticism voiced nationally and internationally.

In a recent memorandum foreshadowing the closure, innocuously titled ‘UWA Publishing: Proposal for Change’, only one intriguing justification was advanced: ‘Currently, only a small proportion of the authors and content published by UWA Publishing relate directly to the University and its work.’ Even if it were true, this shows an astonishing unawareness concerning the role of the 500 university presses around the world.

UWAP, like every other university press, is decisively not intended to showcase ‘authors and contents’ relating directly to UWA today. Nor is it primarily a publicity or marketing organ for UWA, though it does have this value as a significant outcome. Instead, the expert, peer-reviewing process maintains the independence of UWAP from parochial interests and institutional pressures. Its aim is to publish, in finely crafted books, excellent research across all disciplines and fields, written by experts for an international readership and of interest to the wider community. This is commensurate with the educational missions of any reputable university, to advance learning on an international scale and to nurture community links. These aims are very different from those of commercial publishers.

Some world experts on scholarship relating directly to Western Australia will obviously be working at UWA, but their books undergo the same stringent peer review as manuscripts by international scholars. As a corollary, it is not surprising that experts on Western Australia based elsewhere will approach UWAP, since it is the appropriate channel for publication. In fact, without UWAP the world would be uninformed about Western Australia, except as a tourist destination, given the isolation of the state from the east coast and media indifference.

The memorandum dismisses UWAP as ‘small’ and ‘academic’ and describes its output in only minimally inclusive terms: ‘non-fiction books in the areas of Western Australian history, natural history, art, fiction, poetry and some other scholarly works.’ As a corrective, the very informative history A Press in Isolation: University of Western Australia Press 1935–2004, edited by professional historian Criena Fitzgerald, lists more than 500 titles from 1935 to 2004. Since then there have been about the same number. Subjects include public health, physics, environmentalism, economics, history (of all countries and ages), Indigenous studies, languages, architecture, urban planning, art history, theatre, business management, educational theory and practice, international politics, migration, music (contemporary and classical), cultural issues, biography, literary history, and a host of others. For some years, there was an important series of quality, prize-winning children’s books published by UWAP under the Cygnet imprint, as part of UWA’s wider educational mission, feeding into primary and secondary educational curricula in Australia and beyond. Opening up new readerships, most recently the list includes quality literary fiction and poetry emanating from creative writing students and staff at universities across Australia.

Some books are revered classics and collectors’ items, such as George Seddon’s Sense of Place, which has taken on new significance in the environmental debate. The multi-volume Dictionary of Western Australians is invaluable, while there are definitive and beautiful volumes on the flora and fauna of Western Australia, marine biology, shipwrecks off the Western Australian coast, and others. All are lavishly illustrated reference works, cited and consulted by scholars in libraries around the world.

Each book bears UWA’s logo, which has contributed to UWA’s reputation among the world’s top 100 research universities. To be visible beyond this ‘isolated’ region, the University and state need – more than most – a distinctive publishing outreach to make its impact felt internationally.

An article in The Conversation pours scorn on the ‘Open Access’ model of publication that the memorandum advocates. Other universities that have followed this line have sunk into oblivion overnight.

Even in commercial terms, closing the press makes no sense, since book consumption is burgeoning, with flexible print-on-demand, e-books, sale of individual chapters, and huge online publicity machines.

It seems regrettable that, once a decade, all these reasons for consolidating UWA Publishing – intellectual, educational, reputational, and financial – need to be rehearsed. ‘Executives’ on short-term appointments come (and go) without corporate memory of what UWA’s historical excellence is built upon. They can be sucked into thinking that short-term cost-cutting and rhetorical ‘Operational Strategies’, alongside new multi-million-dollar buildings, are a worthier legacy than the rich and ongoing ‘in-kind’ contribution of UWA Publishing over its first eighty-five years.

Dear Chancellor French, I write this open letter to you to make certain points about the environment of university press publishing, in support of UWA Publishing and its Director, Professor Terri-ann White, and her team.

According to reports, the memorandum proclaiming the closure of UWA Publishing spoke of a resurrection of the press as an open-access publisher of works within the University’s areas of research. That is a reasonable goal, but it is one thing to adopt such a model with a new press; it is another to entirely cast aside a publishing program and identity that have been built up over decades.

Open-access publishing is appealing in many ways, and perhaps should be part of the picture of a contemporary university press, but it is not without its limitations. On the supply side, if a work is only published open-access the publisher does not have a material incentive to edit a work in such a way as to maximise its readership, because even if the publisher is concerned to obtain as many readers as possible, the fact that she is then not selling the work for profit means that her scarce resources can only be best used elsewhere. Open-access publishing in that sense favours quantity over quality. On the demand side, with open-access publishing it is difficult to obtain a strong presence for one’s titles in the retail sector, to generate broadsheet reviews and other media, and, most importantly, to attract the best authors and build up the prestige of your brand. It is very hard to imagine an open-access UWA Publishing, having thrown out the locally focused printed-book baby, obtaining anything like the standing the press has now. 

Terri-Ann White (photograph via The Garret Podcast)

The much-anticipated Open Access and Monographs Evidence Review, released in October by the Universities UK Open Access and Monographs Group, has as its first policy recommendation: ‘Immediate open access for all monographs may not be feasible. We recommend consideration of a mixed-model policy that offers various routes to compliance (including one which offers a suitable period for delayed open access).’ Overall, the Review’s recommendations make clear that a wholesale switch to open-access publishing is at the moment unrealistic and would be counterproductive. Any such transition to open-access publishing will take time and careful planning. It cannot be argued that open-access publishing can simply replace conventional publishing.

University press publishing in Australia has played a different role from that which it has and continues to play in the United Kingdom and Europe. In order to survive, almost all Australian university presses have had to publish works for an audience outside the academy; the library and scholar market here is too small to sustain a program of purely academic titles. While MUP is now expanding its scholarly and open-access publishing to reach an international audience, it must be acknowledged that that traditional Australian role for university presses is legitimate and, in one important respect, is preferable: these established Australian arrangements encourage scholars to write for their local and national audiences and so for the taxpayer base that helps to underwrite the cost of their education and employment. 

Just two years ago, UWA Publishing was the toast of the Australian publishing world when Josephine Wilson’s Extinctions won the Miles Franklin Literary Award. UWA Publishing’s publishing program has had a strong literary dimension, like that of the University of Queensland Press and many university presses in the United States, many of which also focus, like UWA Publishing, on histories and other studies of its region. For a university publisher based in Perth, perhaps the most isolated city in the world (in terms of how far one has to travel to reach a city of the same size), this regional focus would hardly seem to be controversial. To be clear, UWA Publishing was not publishing simply commercial titles or operating as effectively a trade publishing house.

University leaders often think of the institutions they lead as standing against the forces of irrational authoritarianism which, all too evidently, are on the rise around the world. They are right, but I am afraid that if they undermine the capacity of their staff to contribute to local and national discussion, debate and culture, these leaders are stripping away the very things which can most effectively counteract anti-intellectual and authoritarian demagogueries. Local cultural bonds and communicative channels provide a strength of community which is the basis for confidence in democracy. As Australia’s great sociologist Raewyn Connell argued in her influential work Southern Theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science (2007), the most valuable forms of intellectual work may actually be those which have particular, rather than supposedly universal, social relevance.

It is very much to be hoped that Terri-ann White and her team are recognised as being best positioned to take UWA Publishing forward into whichever future the University decides, on the basis of a proper assessment of the situation, is most desirable.

Sincerely
Dr Nathan Hollier, CEO and Publisher, Melbourne University Press

John Hawke – poet, academic, and poetry editor of ABR – chaired the judging panel for the 2020 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. At the Porter Prize ceremony held at the Boyd Community Hub on January 16, he addressed various themes in his opening remarks. Following readings of the five shortlisted poems, Morag Fraser then named A. Frances Johnson as the overall winner of the Porter Prize.

As we celebrate the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, I would like to pay specific tribute to Australian Book Review, and to Peter Rose and his dedicated team, for the support they give to poetry – and not just through the management of this important award.

We’re all aware that this is a time when the institutions that support culture are being tested. Poetry – always the most marginal of literary forms, when judged in relation to the market – is especially vulnerable in this climate. So the threat to UWA Publishing, and especially the removal of the Chair of Australian Literature at Sydney University, are particularly difficult for poetry, as is the major reduction in research funding over recent years within the area of literary studies. And the kind of funding pressure that’s being exerted on literary journals, which have always been the lifeblood of our poetry culture, obviously exacerbates this further. So I’m very appreciative of the space that ABR finds for poetry in every issue. The number of poems they manage to include over the course of each year is impressive. This includes not only the best local work across the remarkable range of styles that are currently being pursued by Australian poets, but also significant international figures, thus creating a genuinely representative national forum.

At the centre of this activity, of course, is the annual Porter Prize, so generously supported by Morag Fraser and Andrew Taylor. It attracts the very best poets and the most significant individual poems being produced in Australia. As I remarked in a previous speech, the longlisted poems from which we select the official shortlist are all potential winners, and the overall standard is beyond ‘competition’. So this shortlist is only a representation of the quality of work we were privileged to read over so many substantial and skilled entries.

John Hawke speaks at the 2020 Porter Prize ceremony (photograph by David Johns)

Beyond this, of course, are the thousand submissions we receive, which is an indication in itself of the seriousness and the value with which people regard poetry as a form of artistic communication. You have the sense when reading through the large number of entries for a competition of this kind that you’re listening in to a national conversation, overhearing what people are really thinking and feeling about the issues that are most important to them. But this is very different from the discourse one receives through the incessant, dubious channels of social media or the staged discourse of panel debates. There is certainly an evident attention to pressing social issues, but the approach is deeper. It’s not just polemic, although there is a role for didacticism in poetry. People use poetry to address issues in a different way.

That’s because, in the best poems we received, every detail is saturated with lived experience, and convincingly framed through technique. And in an era of carelessly automatic speech, words themselves are centrally valued. We also don’t get ‘bots’: the experiences of these poems are always genuine. Those emotions can often be quite naïvely expressed, but the poems we have here are masterfully formed – to the extent, in fact, that we have not one but two intricately woven sequences of sonnets.

A. Frances Johnson, Lachlan Brown, Morag Fraser, Peter Rose, Julie Manning, and Ross Gillett at the 2020 Porter Prize ceremony. Claire G. Coleman was in Sydney and was represented by Jane Harrison (photograph by David Johns)

Claire G. Coleman’s ‘That Wadjela Tongue’, the outstanding poem of many we received on Indigenous issues, is a protest poem, but one which is highly sophisticated in its structure and argument. As Philip Mead noted in his judge’s comments, ‘the poem is about English and the way it can be armed for protest, but with the consciousness of the loss of Noongar speech’: it’s a ‘risky table-turning kind of rhetoric’.

Lachlan Brown’s ‘Precision Signs’ also reverses expectations of language from within: in this case, it is utilising the specialised registers of internet memes and corporate-speak, ironically reshaping these around the traditional form of the sonnet.

Read in the wake of the nightly reporting of cruelties from the Aged Care Royal Commission, A. Frances Johnson’s ‘My Father’s Thesaurus’ couldn’t seem more current, but this very moving evocation of caring for an ageing parent suffering from dementia is once again, as its title suggests, focused on language – as what Judith Wright called ‘the human tool’ for our orientation in the world, even in face of encroaching neurological deficit.

The beautifully written poem ‘Constellation of Bees’ by Julie Manning impressed all the judges with its attentive observational approach to the natural world: it’s a didactic poem about bees (echoing the most famous didactic poem, Virgil’s Georgics IV), but approached with a keen ecological consciousness, foregrounding the catastrophic effects of insecticide.

Finally, because you need one in these times, a love poem: but a very fresh one that makes us see a familiar coastal landscape in a new way: Ross Gillett’s ‘South Coast Sonnets’. 

ABR subscribers can read the 2020 Peter Porter Poetry Prize shortlist here.

Tell us about your studies at Monash University.

I’m currently studying a double degree of Arts and Commerce, with a double major of Literature and Theatre studies in the former, and a major in Economics for the latter. Quite a wide range, as I’m often told, but I’m hoping to be a jack of all trades, master of some.

How did the ABR internship fit into your studies?

The ABR internship was a wonderful opportunity offered by the university to inject some practical experience into my Literature major.

How long did you spend at the magazine?

One day a week for three months. Just long enough to see a few issues come out and to witness the fruits of my labour – and also to marvel at the coffee consumption!

What were your tasks?

I was chiefly responsible for digitally archiving past ABR issues for the website, a big new initiative of the magazine. Let’s just say my ‘Books to read’ list has expanded exponentially, though some of the books reviewed in ABR going back to 1978 may sadly be out of print.

What skills did you acquire or refine while interning at ABR?

My proofing ability has skyrocketed immensely, just from sheer volume. I’ve also gotten a great insight into strong literary writing style. My future essays certainly won’t know what hit them.

Which aspect of your work did you enjoy most?

Working on the archive gave me a real glimpse into the vibrant history of Australian literature. It was fascinating to discover how alive (and unique) Australian literary criticism was even in the 1970s and 1980s.

ABR is a small team – with a staff of four in an open space. What was it like being part of the team for three months?

The open plan office allowed me to easily integrate into the workflow of the magazine. Instead of being separated in my own office, I got to feel a part of the team.

How did your time at ABR alter your sense of the magazine?

I gained a newfound respect for the huge impact ABR has on the development and presence of Australian literature, as well as fostering new writing talent. That this impact is achieved and sustained by a staff of four is all the more impressive.

You also work part-time for a large hotel in the city. What would you say are benefits of interning at a smaller organisation such as ABR?

The greatest benefit is the opportunity for more personalised learning. If I have any question about how something’s done, I can just ask and be taught immediately.

Would you recommend the internship program to other students?

Certainly! It’s an excellent chance to get out of the stuffy classroom and see what’s happening in Australian literature right now.

Australian Book Review, while congratulating successful applicants, deplores the Australia Council’s decision not to fund it and other literary magazines in the 2021–24 round. For the first time in decades, Australia’s national literary and arts review will not be funded by the federal government. 

In depriving ABR and other fine literary magazines of funding, the Council and its peers demonstrate an unfortunate disregard for the magazine sector, little understanding of its contribution to the literary ecology, and no appreciation of the dire consequences for readers, authors, contributors and publishers. 

ABR, with its literary and arts criticism, plays a leading role in an already diminished critical culture, one that benefits the literary and arts sectors. Its enthusiastic support for emerging writers and freelance writers is widely acknowledged.

There is no point in sugar-coating ABR’s predicament. Non-funding imperils the work and the future of magazines around the country, already battered by the unique threat posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. It seems extraordinary that the Australia Council, at such a perilous time, will not fund seasoned, proven, innovative magazines that so strongly promote Australian writing and publishing.

ABR does not have a wealthy owner or a vast bequest. It is not part of a university. After a most successful year in 2019 we presented to the Council an ambitious and expansive program, with many new features, including (most importantly) rising rates for our hundreds of writers, an additional issue each year, and total payments to writers of $1,200,000 in 2021–24.

The program we outlined is now impossible, to the great disadvantage of the 300 writers we publish each year. Economies will be significant and immediate. All our energy and passion will be devoted to the preservation of this sixty-year-old cultural institution beyond 2020–21, which is now in doubt.

ABR is blessed with a tremendously capable and committed staff and board, led by Colin Golvan AM QC, who will be succeeded as Chair by Sarah Holland-Batt on April 15 (Colin will remain on the board after that). We enjoy considerable loyalty from subscribers, contributors and Patrons who, we know, will be very concerned by these developments. We will keep them apprised as we look elsewhere for support and goodwill at this doubly difficult time.

We will have more to say when we learn more about this egregious decision and the very regrettable disregard for the support of a number of the nation’s key cultural periodicals.

Peter Rose, Editor and CEO

The cancellations started in the middle of March, just after Adelaide Writers’ Week. One by one, the various writers’ festivals advised that due to Covid-19 they would not be proceeding. This was not good news for me personally, as I had recently given up a regular writing gig to focus on my speaking commitments. There were now major gaps in my diary. It was not good news for writers either – or for readers.

I felt especially bad for writers with new releases coming out just as we all went into isolation. The critical time for promoting a new book is in the first few months after its release. That is the period when publishers direct their main efforts towards promoting books. Publicists arrange appearances for the writer at festivals, libraries, bookshops and other literary events. For writers, this opportunity to talk about their work is the culmination of many years’ hard work writing the book, finding a publisher, and then working closely with the editor. How dispiriting to release your book into a publicity vacuum, missing out on the usual buzz that attends a new release.

Tough, too, on readers. Many of them learn about the latest books by attending festivals and other events or from hearing writers speak. Just when readers most needed book recommendations, as they headed into lockdown, their means of learning about the best new ones had disappeared.

So – I had time on my hands and a passion for interviewing writers, writers needed a new platform on which to promote their books, and readers were thirsty for information. A perfect storm. All of a sudden, I realised that I should create a podcast interviewing writers about their new releases, connecting them to readers. The idea had crossed my mind before, but I hadn’t had time to pursue it – plus I was a little daunted by my lack of technical expertise. I found someone to help me with the technical side (the amazing Kel Butler of Listen Up Podcasting). Lo and behold, my podcast, Books, Books, Books, was born. 

Each episode would be a one-hour interview with an Australian or international writer about his or her new book – similar in format to a session at a writers’ festival, but a bit longer to allow for more in-depth conversation. Publishers were supportive, and before long I had my first three writers lined up: Julia Baird to discuss Phosphorescence, Malcolm Turnbull on A Bigger Picture, and Lionel Shriver on The Motion of the Body Through Space. I was fortunate enough to receive one of the Copyright Agency’s Covid-19 emergency funding grants. This enables me to pay each Australian interviewee a fee and covers my production costs.

The podcast has now been up and running for a little while, and I am loving every minute of my new role as a podcaster. I have created the dream job for myself – reading great books and then discussing them with their authors. There is nothing I enjoy doing more. 

You can listen to Books, Books, Books at https://www.nicoleabadee.com.au/podcast or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

'And now there is another unknown person ringing at my door.'

Svetlana Alexievich, Belarus, 9 September 2020

The members of PEN Melbourne know full well what this knock at the door signifies for a writer who has spoken out courageously against a tyrannical government.

PEN Melbourne condemns the arbitrary arrests of members and staff of the Belarus PEN centre for carrying out peaceful protests against the recent presidential election result, following claims that the vote was falsified. Those detained include secretary, poet, and translator Hanna Komar, project manager, poet, and translator Uladzimir Liankievic, and translator Siarzh Miadzvedzeu.

We abhor the arbitrary detainment, ill-treatment, and torture of hundreds of peacefully protesting citizens of Belarus; and the serious attempts to crush the people’s freedom of expression and their right to criticise the appalling record of the Lukashenko government on human rights and widespread corruption.

We are deeply concerned that charges have been brought against members of the opposition Coordination Council, including Svetlana Alexievich, Chair of Belarus PEN, world-renowned writer, and Nobel laureate. Ms Alexievich is now the only member of the Council’s executive presidium who is not in prison or in exile.

Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian investigative journalist, prose writer, and Nobel Laureate in Literature 2015 (Elke Wetzig/Wikimedia Commons)

Members have been charged with undermining national security. However, the Council was created to facilitate a political transition and to ensure a peaceful resolution of the post-election crisis in Belarus. After unidentified men attempted to enter Alexievich’s apartment recently, diplomats from several European Union nations gathered there to prevent her detention.

On September 18, the UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution from the European Union to launch closer monitoring of alleged rights violations in Belarus.

PEN Melbourne urges the authorities to drop all charges against Ms Alexievich and the other Coordination Council members.

Svetlana Alexievich has called on the international community to intervene and to speak out for the Belarusian dissidents: ‘We are a small country. I am afraid we cannot make it on our own.’

Hear these words and join the international calls to the Belarusian government to immediately release those citizens unjustly detained against their fundamental human rights and to cease the unjustified harassment of peaceful protesters.

Australian Literary Studies is one of Australia’s longest-running scholarly journals and a non-profit organisation which runs independent of government or university funding. Founded in 1963 by Laurie Hergenhan at the University of Tasmania, and edited from 2002 to 2015 by Leigh Dale at the University of Wollongong, it is now edited by Julieanne Lamond at Australian National University and Tanya Dalziell at the University of Western Australia.

ALS has a proud history of publishing innovative scholarship and supporting the study and reading of Australian literature in ways that expand the scope of literary studies internationally. The journal also strives to be accessible to students, researchers, libraries, and interested readers by offering a small-scale mix of subscription and open access publishing. New essays are open access for a period of at least four weeks; the archive is accessible via institutional or individual subscriptions.

In this way, ALS has been active in publishing scholarship on the work of Aboriginal authors; it has been less successful in attracting submissions from Aboriginal critics and scholars, and scholars from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. We recognise this situation and are taking action to redress it.

As a journal with a high degree of esteem in the field, it is important for us to use this position to amplify the work of these scholars; to continue to encourage, publish and promote literary scholarship in Australia and beyond; and to foster the readership of Australian literature and Australian literary scholarship in all its forms.

To this end, we are pleased to announce a new Book Reviews Program for emerging and early-career scholars. Reviews will centre on scholarly and non-fiction books about Australian literary cultures and/or by Australian literary studies scholars. The program will include mentoring in academic publishing from our editorial team and payment of $200 (for unwaged, precariously employed, or postgraduate colleagues).

We particularly welcome expressions of interest from academics and critics of diverse backgrounds. Australian Literary Studies is committed to broadening literary conversations and recognises that the publication of Aboriginal scholars and critics, and writers from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, is vital to the promotion and support of Australian literature and its diverse readership.

Please let us know here of your interest or feel free to email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

We look forward to hearing from you

Julieanne Lamond and Tanya Dalziell

In her acceptance speech for the 2004 Sydney Peace Prize, writer Arundhati Roy suggested that ‘there’s really no such thing as the “voiceless”’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.’[1] Framed around the topic of justice, Roy’s lecture invited listeners to think about the mechanisms of power that stifle voices of dissent, those that push against political systems designed to erode fundamental human rights. Roy’s statement resonates because it implies that there is an element of choice in how we respond to cases of oppression. It is a choice not just for authorities but for communities and individuals alike.

At its core, PEN Perth seeks to amplify silenced voices. As an affiliate of PEN International, our Perth Centre advocates for writers, artists, and activists who face intimidation, prosecution, or imprisonment for their work in defending freedom of expression. We do this by campaigning for the release of imprisoned writers and promoting public conversation around issues concerning the responsible freedom of expression, press diversity and independence, citizenship surveillance, and information literacy, among others. Lending a spotlight on these writers is important not only because their individual human rights and dignity are at stake, but also because the issues they speak about point to wider abuses of power that suppress free speech and literary self-expression.

Perth has had a flourishing PEN Centre. Its first collective (1984–2002) worked on changes to Australian defamation laws, hosted a regional Asian conference and a World Congress, and advocated for writers in prison. After several years of hiatus, a group of writers recreated a Perth Centre in early 2018. While the underlying principles are unchanged, there has been a significant shift in the range of concerns due to advances in information technology, the ubiquity of the internet, and the advent of social media. This milieu has changed the concept of publishing and raises fresh questions about responsible freedom of speech, misinformation, and privacy. Furthermore, the global trend of far-right populism, the rise of China, and the use of the recent pandemic to expand state power pose concerns around the use of power to silence views contrary to those of governments.

PEN Perth’s program has primarily focused on Southeast Asia, where the penchant for authoritarian systems is widespread. This decision is based on our proximity to the region and the fact that the Asia–Pacific features the highest number of writers who have been harassed, tried, imprisoned, or killed with impunity in the 2019 PEN International Case List.[2] As evident in this list, the issues in our region are wide-ranging. China’s continuing persecution of the Uyghurs in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, the persecution of journalists and human rights defenders in Hong Kong, the Philippine government’s curtailing of critical media outlets, the use of religiously motivated legislation to prosecute writers in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, and the suspension of telecommunications services in Myanmar and India offer insight into the issues emblematic of this region.

As part of our campaign, we adopted the following writers:

• Peacock Generation (Myanmar) – Six performance artists arrested in 2019 following a Thangyat performance that criticised the Myanmar Armed Forces
• Kylie Moore-Gilbert (Iran) – Australian academic from The University of Melbourne sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment in Iran for allegedly spying
• Chau Van Kham (Vietnam) – Vietnamese-Australian activist arrested in 2019 and sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment for pro-democracy activities
• Yang Hengjun (China) – Chinese-Australian writer detained since 2019 on charges of espionage
• Gulmira Imin (China) – Uyghur poet sentenced to life imprisonment in 2010 for publishing poetry that criticised the government

PEN Perth launched its 2020–21 program on 15 September 2020, the International Day of Democracy, with the Peacock Generation artists in Myanmar as the focus of our first campaign.

Members of the Peacock Generation (Image source: Karen Escobar)

In May 2019, six members of the Peacock Generation (‘Daung Doh Myo Sat’) were arrested in Yangon, Myanmar, for performing Thangyat, a Burmese performance art that blends poetic verse with music and comedy. Dressed in miltary uniform, six members – Kay Khine Tun, Zay Yar Lwin, Paing Pyo Min, Paing Ye Thu, Zaw Lin Htut, and Su Yadanar Myint – performed skits that criticised the influence of the Myanmar Armed Forces (‘Tatmadaw’) on the country’s politics. In October 2019, the artists were convicted of violating Section 505(a) of Myanmar’s Penal Code, which prohibits the circulation of statements with the intent to cause officers or soldiers in the Myanmar Armed Forces to disregard or fail in their duties.[3] In December 2019, the artists were each sentenced to one year in prison. Four of the members were subsequently handed additional six-month jail terms for ‘online defamation’ under Section 66(d) of the Telecommunications Law due to performance content they are alleged to have shared on Facebook. While some of the artists have since been released, several members remain in prison.

Satirical in tone, Thangyat provides a forum to express social and political commentary. Public performances were banned by Myanmar’s authorities between 1989 and 2013 because of their critique of the government’s authoritarian rule. In March 2019, authorities in Yangon imposed a requirement for lyrics to be submitted to a government panel for approval.

With its lively cadences, wit, and acute observation of social themes, Thangyat is an important artform that voices the aspirations of its young artists for a future defined by political, social, and economic self-determination. Its dialogic form – one that features a back-and-forth exchange between lead performer and responding chorus – symbolically underlines the need for a genuine reciprocal dialogue where civilians can engage in public debate without fear of harassment or detention.

PEN Perth urges the Myanmar authorities to release the members of the Peacock Generation who remain imprisoned. We condemn the arbitrary arrest and detention of citizens who peacefully exercise their right to freedom of expression. PEN Perth also voices deep concern about the underlying laws in Myanmar – namely Section 505 of the Penal Code and Section 66(d) of the Telecommunications Law – that are used to silence criticism and debate.

If you would like to engage with the work of PEN Perth, support our campaigns, or participate in our program of events, please connect with us here.

References

[1] Arundhati Roy, ‘Arundhati Roy – The 2004 Sydney Peace Prize Lecture’, The University of Sydney, 4 November 2004. 

[2] PEN International, ‘The PEN International Case List 2019’. 

[3] ‘Myanmar: The Penal Code’. 

When I became editor-in-chief of Melbourne Poets Union Inc (MPU) in January 2019, there was an opportunity to take its publishing program in new and exciting directions. MPU, a Melbourne-based arts organisation whose raison d’être ever since its inception in 1977 has been poetry, had published anthologies and chapbooks. The Union Poets Series of chapbooks was a staple of its annual publishing program. It was an evolving situation as I rethought its chapbooks and other possibilities. Any change could not be cosmetic. As I completed work on MPU’s 2019 Union Poets Series, I envisaged other possibilities, more ambitious and ecumenical. The chapbooks needed a new, elegant look and to reflect the interests, preoccupations, and diversity of contemporary poets.

MPU has always sought to nurture poets, through readings, workshops, lectures, publications, and other ways. As a member, I have been a feature reader, but as its workshop coordinator when I joined the committee in 2017, I organised workshops, inviting well-known poets to present on topics as diverse as prose poetry and climate change, the latter workshop via Zoom during the lockdown. Its monthly readings, which Covid-19 scuppered in 2020, have featured members and well-known poets. Its annual international poetry competition, judged by a different poet each year, is a highlight of its programming.

As editor-in-chief, I wanted to honour its legacy of publishing first-time poets in chapbook form through its Union Poets Series. Steve Smart (president of MPU) and I also wanted to honour established Australian poets with a chapbook series. We received enough submissions for what became the Blue Tongue Poets to face any publisher’s dilemma. So much good poetry, but how to publish it all? I made a long list and then a short one. I had reserved the right to solicit manuscripts. A publishing program must have excitement generated by the risks it takes.

While I worked simultaneously on what eventually became the last two chapbooks in the Union Poets Series, I decided the series needed a fresh look. Enter Libby Austen, a book designer with many years of experience designing poetry collections. I had researched the history and design of the chapbook in the English-speaking world and had learned that sacrosanct ideas about chapbooks were speculative. Their design and content had varied according to place and time. It emboldened me to take risks. Libby and I wanted each series to have a complementary but distinctive appearance, one that sat between the immediacy of the chapbook and the elegance of the book. I also made a call for first-time poets to submit. A small number did, and I drew up another short list. By early 2020, I was seriously debating whether MPU should take advantage of its new look and close the Union Poets Series by replacing it with a new series to complement the (still unnamed) Blue Tongue Poets.

In This Part of the World by Kevin Brophy

Over coffee at King and Godfree in 2019 and early 2020, MPU patron and Emeritus Professor Kevin Brophy, Steve Smart, and I discussed strategies, pored over quotes, and tossed around names for the two series. The naming took some creative effort. Finally, we settled on the Blue Tongue Poets in 2019 and then the Red-bellied Poets in 2020, our desire being that the names should reflect the design of each one, the blue square on the cover of the Blue Tongue Poets and the red on the Red-bellied Poets. It was at our 2020 meeting, and after much discussion, that we decided to close off the Union Poets Series and launch the Red-bellied Poets in its stead.

In the Blue Tongue Poets, MPU published the first prose poetry collection of Ouyang Yu, Living After Death. It also published Jeltje Fanoy’s My Mother and the Cat, which explores migration and the mother–daughter dyad. An opening poem in a manuscript can so grab hold of the imagination that there is no question of not publishing the collection as poem after poem lives up to the initial promise. Such was the case with In This Part of the World by Kevin Brophy, and we launched the Blue Tongue Poets with it. As for Dominique Hecq’s Kaosmos, the intellectual and creative play of this long poem made publication imperative. In the Red-bellied Poets, science and poetry met in a bold visual display in Michael J. Leach’s Chronicity. A lifetime of thinking made Linda Adair’s The Unintended Consequences of the Shattering more than a début collection. David Munro’s Wearing My Father’s Hat, edited by Kevin Brophy, and with which we launched the Red-bellied Poets, impressed with its honest apprehension of suffering and meaning.

MPU works with poets to produce the best possible manuscript. I wanted to continue this tradition of providing deep editorial support, and as editor of individual manuscripts I had the opportunity of doing so. I had wanted to build a team of editors, but as Covid-19 spread I began to work with the poets via Skype or phone. As the pandemic unfolded, MPU cancelled gigs and other activities. Nonetheless, it was imperative to maintain the publishing program. Apart from our contractual obligations, the poets were looking forward to books that deserved MPU’s support.

I liaised with poets, designer, Kevin Brophy, and printers. I was grateful to Kevin for taking some pressure off by offering to edit David Munro’s Wearing My Father’s Hat. Before Kevin took up his Australia Council writer’s residency in Paris in 2019, I had worked with him on his chapbook In This Part of The World, which I had chosen because of the meditative quality that distinguishes his poetry, but which I grew to love for other reasons, such as his subtle turn of phrase and line. We later refined his manuscript and discussed artwork via email.

A launch is a celebration of the book for both poet and publisher. It is also an opportunity for the latter to recoup costs. Like other publishers in 2020, Covid-19 affected MPU’s planned revenue, a reality of the business side of poetry as a publishing endeavour. As other publishers had already done, MPU turned to online launches, with unexpected benefits. People interstate or overseas could attend our launches, which also became more interesting as audience members asked questions of the poets. Recording launches and uploading the videos to social media increased exposure for both poet and publisher. Online launches have generated sales, albeit modest ones. Without online launches, works would have disappeared into a vacuum or been made to compete with next year’s releases. Richard Mudford produced book trailers which were posted to social media. For Jeltje Fanoy, he produced in place of a trailer a video poem.

As outgoing editor-in-chief, I am amazed at what MPU has achieved with its two new chapbook series, during a pandemic. Ultimately, MPU is all about its membership. Since its inception more than forty years ago, MPU has continued to feature in the lives of poets. It is also remarkable that, despite Covid, MPU has seen its publishing program grow and develop.

In November, Melbourne University Publishing will release the two-hundredth title in the second numbered series of its Miegunyah Press imprint. This is Doing Feminism: Women’s art and feminist criticism in Australia, compiled and edited by Anne Marsh, art historian and Professorial Research Fellow at the Victorian College of the Arts.

Doing Feminism is a highly appropriate work to mark this publishing milestone. First, it is a major, intellectually rich, culturally significant, and lavishly produced work, and thus an expression of the best traditions of the Miegunyah Press. Doing Feminism represents more than 220 artists and groups with 370 colour illustrations punctuated by extracts from artists’ statements, curatorial writing, and social critique.

Secondly, the publication of this title through the Miegunyah Press suggests our awareness that the world we are now publishing for is far removed, not only in time, from that of the early 1950s, when Sir Russell Grimwade – industrialist, philanthropist, forest conservationist, and one-time deputy chancellor of the University of Melbourne – made provision in his will for extensive resources to be afforded to Melbourne University Press. We now have a considerably broader sense of what art, culture, politics and aesthetics are and can be.

It was Russell’s hope that the family home, ‘Miegunyah’, set on three acres in Toorak, would become the offices of MUP, with space set aside for a printery and a residence for the press Manager.

The first ‘Miegunyah’ title was a biography of Russell by John Poynter, released in 1967. However, a second work (Return to Tahiti: Bligh’s second Breadfruit Voyage, by Douglas Oliver) did not appear until 1988. Both books were actually underwritten by MUP, and although Russell died in 1955 and his wife Lady Mabel (Mab) in 1973, it was not till 1990 that the resolution of issues with their wills enabled the broad fulfilment of their intention to support MUP. Peter Ryan, Director of MUP between 1962 and 1988, had long waited in fruitless frustration for the promised Grimwade financial cavalry to arrive.

It proved impracticable for the University to retain the Grimwade family home; an application to the Supreme Court that this be allowed to be sold was approved; University Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequests were established with rules governing the amount of funds to be made available for MUP each year, and on what terms; and an initial, numbered series of highly specialised, collectible publications was initiated.  

This first series of eighteen titles, funded by and acknowledging the Miegunyah Bequests, was published under the MUP name. The second series, with a broader publishing remit and the Miegunyah Press imprint, commenced in 1995.  

The particular flavour of the Press since then has derived primarily from the publication of books that reflect the interests of Russell’s enquiring mind: history, literature, art, botany and nature – above all ‘Australiana’ – and from the high design and production values of Miegunyah Press books that the bequest made possible.

Numerous Miegunyah Press publications have won major awards; among them An Eye for Eternity: The life of Manning Clark, by Mark McKenna, Journeyings: The biography of a middle-class generation 1920–1990, by Janet McCalman, Jim Davidson’s biography of Louise Hanson-Dyer, Lyrebird Rising, Ken Inglis’s Sacred Places: War memorials in the Australian landscape, and Jennifer Isaacs’s Tiwi: Art / History / Culture.

Melbourne University Publishing is extremely fortunate to be the recipient of funds from this bequest, the only one of its kind in Australia. (A model for Russell may have been the Clarendon Fund, of Oxford University.)

I personally am looking forward with excitement to further, signature Miegunyah Press titles coming through later this year: William Cooper: An Aboriginal life story, by Bain Attwood, and works by writers who are already very much part of the Miegunyah Press story: The Architecture of Devotion: James Goold and his legacies in colonial Melbourne, by Jaynie Anderson, Max Vodola, and Shane Carmody; and Vandemonians: The repressed history of colonial Victoria, by Janet McCalman.

Our aim in creating the Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship was to honour Hazel Rowley, who died unexpectedly in March 2011, and to support the writing of high-quality biography. Hazel was a world-class biographer who wrote four critically acclaimed books: about Christina Stead, Richard Wright, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, and Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt. Her subjects were all courageous people who were willing to take risks to live their lives authentically and meaningfully. These were qualities Hazel shared.

When we launched the Fellowship in 2011, we had no idea whether it would be successful or not. What we have discovered is how much can be achieved with small amounts of money, lots of goodwill, and enthusiastic supporters. Recently, we opened applications for the 2022 Fellowship. This year we’ve been able to increase the Fellowship amount to $20,000, thanks to continuing donations and excellent funds management from Australian Communities Foundation (ACF). (Until 2017 the Fellowship was worth $10,000; then it rose to $15,000.)

The Fellowship supports a writer who is working on a biographical project. To us it seems more important than ever to support the arts in whatever way we can.

In July 2021, Melbourne University Press published Life as Art: The biographical writing of Hazel Rowley (edited by Della Rowley and Lynn Buchanan), a collection of Hazel’s essays, talks, and journal entries, some previously unpublished. It is a fascinating insight into her craft of biography. (Brenda Walker reviewed the collection in the August 2021 issue of ABR.)

We believe in the importance of a strong arts sector as one of the foundations of a strong and inclusive society. We want to promote discussion of ideas through the publication of biography and memoir about interesting, thought-provoking subjects. It has been wonderful for us personally to make a small contribution to this. Books matter. Writers matter.

The Fellowship began modestly, with $20,000 in capital. We were able to build this up with donations from family and friends. In 2011 we invested our money with ACF and partnered with Writers Victoria to administer the Fellowship. We chose to create a Fellowship because we knew from Hazel’s experience how hard it is for writers who are between publications and trying to decide whom to write about next and to fund their research.

We have been privileged to work with wonderful and distinguished Fellowship judges: Alex Miller, Jim Davidson, Janine Burke, Arnold Zable, Jenny Hocking, Jeff Sparrow, and Clare Wright.

As well as the Fellowship, each year we celebrate the announcement with a memorial lecture or panel discussion. Our speakers have included Alex Miller, David Marr, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Jenny Hocking, and Maria Tumarkin.

To date, six books supported by the Fellowship have been published: An Unconventional Wife: The life of Julia Sorell Arnold by Mary Hoban (winner of the 2019 History Book Award and the Non-Fiction Book Award in Queensland Literary Awards); Interestingly Enough … The life of Tom Keneally by Stephany Steggall; The Hate Race by Maxine Beneba Clarke (2017 Multicultural NSW Award in NSW Premier’s Literary Awards); Vida: A woman for our time by Jacqueline Kent; Into the Loneliness: The unholy alliance of Ernestine Hill and Daisy Bates by Eleanor Hogan; and Only Happiness Here: In search of Elizabeth von Arnim by Gabrielle Carey. Now we look forward to Ann-Marie Priest’s book on Gwen Harwood, due to be published in 2022.

Further details about our Fellows can be found on www.hazelrowley.com

The journalist Nedim Türfent (supplied by PEN International)

In 2016, journalist Nedim Türfent reported on police brutality in Turkey. He subsequently received death threats and was put on trial by the Erdogan government on trumped-up charges. Despite witnesses at his trial confessing that they were tortured into giving false testimony, Türfent was sentenced to eight years and nine months in prison for supposedly ‘spreading terrorist propaganda’. As part of this sentence, he has spent almost two years in solitary confinement, in harrowing conditions.

The PEN Centre in Melbourne is in contact with Nedim, has adopted him as an Honorary Member, and campaigns for his release alongside PEN International and other organisations. ‘PEN joins other organisations around the world calling on the Turkish authorities to release Nedim Türfent immediately and quash his unjust conviction,’ says Chris McKenzie, President of the PEN International, Melbourne Centre.

‘That [Nedim Türfent] has now spent 2,000 days behind bars simply for doing his job beggars belief,’ says Ma Thida, Chair of PEN International’s Writers in Prison Committee. ‘Türfent’s application before the European Court of Human Rights is still pending, almost three years after being lodged, and we trust that the Court can prioritise the case. The PEN Community stands once again by Türfent and all the writers and journalists wrongfully imprisoned in Turkey and will keep advocating for their freedom until every single one of them is released’.

Read more about Nedim Türfent on the PEN Melbourne website.

Life Before Man (LBM), the poetry imprint of Gazebo Books, was founded by artist and publisher Phil Day in 2020. To date, seven books have been published, including works by Subhash Jaireth, Cassandra Atherton, Anthony Lawrence, Gary Catalano, and Alex Selenitsch. Forthcoming is a substantial international anthology of prose poetry, titled Alcatraz.

The books in the series strive for a recognisable, uniform look. Front and back covers feature paintings by Phil Day, and forgo the standard typographic author and title details – these appear on the spines only. Internally, an emphasis has been given to clean design and generous allocation of space, allowing the poems to breathe.

S.K. Kelen’s ‘Love’s Philosophy’ and Alex Selenitsch’s ‘Purgatorio Replaced’, both published by Life Before Man

Day has a long association with both trade publishing and handmade artist books. He originally trained under book artist Petr Herel at the Graphic Investigation Workshop, Canberra School of Art, during the 1990s, and subsequently co-founded the Finlay Press (named after letterpress printer Peter Finlay), which issued more than twenty limited edition letterpress books between 1997 and 2009. The Press later morphed into trade publisher Finlay Lloyd, co-run by Day and Julian Davies, which became known for its strikingly designed books. In 2010, Day founded Mountains Brown Press, producing more than a dozen artist books that displayed a ‘back to basics’ approach to book-making.

LBM’s most recent initiative, the Red Letter series, in part returns Day to the bespoke publishing of his Finlay Press days. The Red-Letter series consists of poetry chapbooks featuring new work by significant Australian poets. Each title, while commercially printed, has been issued in a strictly limited edition of twenty-five numbered and signed copies, featuring original woodcut wrappers printed on Japanese paper, created especially for the series by Day.

The first four titles in the series, issued in December 2021, comprise Laurie Duggan’s The Earlwood Journal (The Fire Season), Jordie Albiston’s Book: 15-Line Sonnets, Ken Bolton’s Three of Them, and Jill Jones’s My Workshop of Filthy Creation. In the pipeline are four further chapbooks featuring new work by Judith Beveridge, Anthony Lawrence, Judith Bishop, and Lindsay Tuggle.

Red Letter series published by Life Before Man (photograph courtesy of Des Cowley)

The Red Letter series takes its inspiration from European presses such as Fata Morgana, and strives to create a tactile reading experience that emphasises the poetry chapbook as a distinctive publishing form.

Newcastle Writers Festival was the first Australian literary festival to cancel due to Covid on March 13, 2020, and the first to transition to an online program three weeks later. It was thus strangely fitting that I appeared at the launch of the festival’s 2022 program via Zoom for the first time. As a household contact – one of the kids contracted Covid – I couldn’t be at Newcastle City Hall in person to speak about the line-up of 110 writers appearing in our first in-person program since 2019. Three years without a festival. It still shocks me.

While the program doesn’t have an overarching theme, I wanted the opening and closing night events to capture the tone. The opening night gala is titled What the World Needs Now and centres on love in all its forms. Six writers, including Trent Dalton, Hannah Kent, and Nardi Simpson, will speak about love’s transformative impact. On the final evening, Sarah Wilson will discuss her most recent book, This One Wild and Precious Life: A hopeful path forward in a fractured world, with Beejay Silcox.

Kerry O'Brien, Trent Dalton, Chloe Hooper, and Rosemarie Milsom at the Newcastle Writers Festival 2019

This year’s program also includes journalists Van Badham, Justine Cullen, Kate McClymont, and Amy Remeikis, Aboriginal writers and activists  Chelsea Watego and Thomas Mayor, academic and former Griffith Review editor Julianne Schultz, Clementine Ford, Anne Summers and Wendy McCarthy, as well as Vanessa Berry, Kelli Hutchins, Michael Robotham, Mehreen Faruqi, Jane Caro, Tom Keneally, Amani Haydar, Brendan Cowell, Jessie Stephens, Jen Webb, Laura Elizabeth Woollett, and international guest Simon Winchester, who will be appearing live from the US via video link. There is a strong contingent of Hunter region writers, including Lee Christine, Keri Glastonbury, Jean Kent, and Wendy James.

I realise there is a lot to despair about: the ongoing impact of the pandemic, record-breaking floods, and the war in Ukraine. It is overwhelming. I didn’t want to sugar-coat the hardship or avoid tough conversations with the program, though I also wanted to celebrate the comfort provided by books and powerful writing during the tumultuous past couple of years.

Richard Flanagan said it best during a recent event at Adelaide Writers Week, ‘I feel there is a mood for change in the country that I haven’t seen for a very long time. And I find that hopeful.’

Australia’s first and largest open-access press, ANU Press, has hit the massive milestone of publishing one thousand titles. Reaching this benchmark in just under twenty years is a big goal for such a small press.

The original Australian National University Press was founded in the 1960s, with a traditional publishing model focused on book sales. It published important academic research for more than three decades before it was wound up in the early 1990s.

The new, progressive model of open-access publishing, focusing mainly on free ebook distribution with print-on-demand sales as a sideline, kicked off as an experiment in 2003 – and the Press has since gone from strength to strength. ANU Press now achieves more than five million downloads of its books annually worldwide and publishes more than fifty titles each year.

‘Our readers cover the length and breadth of the world,’ deputy manager Emily Tinker said. ‘To be able to provide access to such important research for free, to people from all around the world, is a real privilege. While our books are accessed by some of the best institutions in the world, they are also read by the people the research is about – Papua New Guinea, for instance, is a significant area of research for our authors and PNG is often in our top ten countries for downloading our books.’

The wide range of disciplines published by ANU Press is also impressive, covering everything from Asia-Pacific studies, Indigenous studies, humanities and social sciences, to law and science.

The thousandth title was Professor John Braithwaite’s Macrocriminology and Freedom, an 800-page ‘magnum opus’ that ‘weaves together all the main themes of [Braithwaite’s] influential work … to produce an elegant and ambitious explanatory normative account of crime as freedom-threatening domination’.

While its core publishing program focuses on academic monographs, ANU Press also prides itself on innovative publishing, incorporating videos, voice recordings, and interactive elements into many of its works. Wiidhaa: An Introduction to Gamilaraay is one such publication, aiming to revive the Gamilaraay language through the use of sound files in the textbook. Fluid Matter(s): Flow and Transformation in the History of the Body is another: a digital humanities publication that relies on the fluidity of electronic publishing to conceptualise its content.

Other key titles published by the Press recently include History Wars by Doug Munro, an analysis of the Peter Ryan–Manning Clark controversy; Honouring a Nation by Dr Karen Fox, the first history of Australia’s honours system; and Sound Citizens by Dr Catherine Fisher, on the history of female broadcasting in Australia and its contribution to the feminist movement at large. Each of which received wide circulation and praise in Australian media, as well as impressive download results.

Through its fully open-access ethos and commitment to publishing works based solely on academic merit rather than potential sales, ANU Press continues to seek and explore new ways to communicate research, history, and stories to inform people and policy and to create a better world.

‘ANU Press proudly celebrates its contribution to increasing knowledge throughout the world with its 1000th volume,’ said University Librarian Roxanne Missingham, who is the division director of ANU Press. ‘With over 5.7 million downloads in 2021, the Press fulfils the University’s vision of communicating scholarship and fostering innovation through its open-access publishing. A recognised world-leading press, it is timely to acknowledge the importance of the transformation made through ANU Press’ leadership in new forms of publishing.’

ANU Press is holding an exhibition at The Australian National University’s Menzies Library from now through to the end of May 2022. It showcases the past, present, and future of the Press. Find out more about ANU Press or download any of their titles free on their website here: https://press.anu.edu.au/

I don’t know why some people seem to think voting is a great imposition. I love lining up and watching the person behind the table pick up the ruler and find my name. There’s a little warm glow of being one tiny thread in the great muddled ball of string that is the democratic process. Always, in the queue there’s a particular feeling: pleased, proud, everyone hugging to ourselves the little secret of how we’re going to vote. When my kids were at primary school, I loved helping to person the stall churning out the Democracy Sausages.

If you don’t count the doling-out of snags – sauce or mustard? – I’ve never been involved. But this time is different. A few weeks ago I sent an email to six writer friends, to see if they’d be interested in joining a group I hastily named Writers for Climate Action. Five of the six said yes straight away. The sixth said she thought it was a good idea but that it would be preaching to the converted, so she wouldn’t, but good luck.

Writers for Climate Action now has an impressive list of members, including Di Morrissey, Helen Garner, John Coetzee, and Mem Fox. There are about seventy writers on the list, and every day more writers ask to join us.

This time is different because we’re running out of time. The last two years of unprecedented fires and floods are the first flicker of our future. Looking back, those floods and fires will seem like just the gentlest hints of what was to come.

Standing in that little cardboard booth with the little pencil in our hands, we’ve got a lot of urgent issues swirling in our minds.  The cost of living, employment, refugees, taxes, corruption, defence, Indigenous justice ... They’re all important and they’ll all shape our future. But the writers who have come together believe that one issue underlies all the others: the need for a reliable climate. Without that, all those other issues – no matter how important they are – are only going to get much worse.

Writers for Climate Change isn’t pushing any particular candidate or party. We’re just hoping that people will do a bit of googling about the candidates in their area to find out which is the most likely to be part of real action on climate change. Most of them can see there are votes in climate action and are talking the talk. Let’s hope enough of them are prepared to walk the walk as we head into the next last-chance few years.

For more information, visit: https://www.writersforclimateaction.com/

In 2024, Melbourne Rare Book Week celebrates its tenth anniversary. The brainchild of antiquarian bookseller Kay Craddock, it was founded in 2012, in part to evolve and educate a new generation of book lovers; but also to support Melbourne’s then recent designation as a City of Literature.

The idea was simple but effective: to harness Melbourne’s many institutions – libraries, galleries, museums, universities – which house collections of rare books, and to partner with them to create a dedicated ten-day program of events in the lead-up to the Melbourne’s annual Rare Book Fair.

In its earliest incarnation, Rare Book Week comprised ten partners, who presented eighteen events in various venues throughout Melbourne. Since that first year – and discounting a two-year hiatus due to the Covid pandemic – Rare Book Week has grown considerably, with this year’s program the largest to date, offering more than forty events hosted by thirty-two partnering institutions and associated societies.

The 2024 program, which runs from 18 to 27 July, reflects the breadth of this city’s book culture. Offerings include:

• Dr Lauen Samuelsson speaking on the influence on Australian Women’s Weekly cookbooks on Australian food culture
• Curators Cathy Leahy and Maggie Finch on early twentieth-century avant-garde artist books held by the National Gallery of Victoria
• Mark Rubbo in conversation with literary journalist Jane Sullivan, discussing his nearly half-century career managing Readings bookshops
• Museum Victoria curators offering a viewing of rare and illustrated bird books held in the Museum’s collection
• A panel discussion, including Gideon Haigh, Cheryl Critchley, and Kasey Symons, looking at highlights from the Melbourne Cricket Club library
• Honorary Associate Professor Frances Devlin-Glass speaking on the impact of censorship and the obscenity trial on Joyce’s revisions of Ulysses
• Shane Carmody talking about the State Library Victoria’s significant collection of printings by England’s first printer William Caxton, to mark the 550th anniversary of the first book in English printed with moveable type
• A panel discussion on the collaborative artist book Foirades/Fizzles, created by Samuel Beckett and Jasper Johns, a copy of which is held in the Baillieu Library collection, University of Melbourne
• Self-professed cultural archaeologist Sean Reynold’s unveiling his long-running project to tell the hidden stories behind the ghost signs of North Melbourne

From the outset, a key founding principle of Melbourne Rare Book Week was that all events were to be offered free to the public, a principle adhered to during its first ten years.

While founded as a uniquely Melbourne event, the concept of a Rare Book Week has since been emulated in other cities, most notably with the Sydney Rare Book Week, established in 2019.

Above all, Melbourne Rare Book Week seeks to celebrate the rich and diverse collections held in this city, unlocking their potential for stories and storytelling.

The full program for Melbourne Rare Book Week 2024 can be found at: www.rarebookweek.com