As with most writers’ festivals, the questions arise relating to cost benefit analysis. Who profits from them? Depends what sort of festival you’re speaking of: some are local affairs, designed to focus on building a sense of community; others are massive beanos, trade-fairs by another name, or bait for cultural tourism dollars. So writers don’t always seem to be cherished just because they write. It’s true that festivals provide a platform for sales-pitches, but many writers attend at some financial cost to themselves. Of course there are fees for featured readers, and subsidised fares and accommodation: the out-of-town contingent at Hawthorn was billeted (at Healesville: just up the road, really). The flip-side is that the writers hand on their subsidies to local restaurant and bar-owners, and taxi-companies. We’re a philanthropic lot: giving up the comfort of writing at home, in order to come to the aid of the flagging Victorian economy. Who’d want to make a few extra bob writing when the fate of Victorian culture is in the balance?

In Victoria, the talk among journalists, teachers, novelists, poets, teachers, and audience at the Hawthorn festival put me in mind of Queensland in 1993. Jeff Kennett appears to be the 1990s Bjelke-Petersen: a populist demonised by liberal intellectuals. Who actually supports the man? Are the literati out of touch with the grass-roots? Victoria has snatched the ‘State of Excitement’ label from Western Australia, but the current excitement’s like that of WA Inc.

Hawthorn Council, now merged into Boroondara City, looks like terminating the Hawthorn Writers’ Week: a pity for writers and artists, but a windfall for bureaucrats who have lusted after cars and portable phones. That the local councils see arts festivals as business is self-evident – until the real priorities emerge when the salary packages of senior officers are at stake. Bureaucrats (formerly, clerks) must have parity with their privatised peers (read: office-boys, temps, and secretaries). And if they can’t have them under an older award, privatise the government. Look, I know that’s absurd, but don’t let on in arts ­funding circles. The organisers of the Hawthorn Writers’ Week were exercised by the possibility of privatising the event, and I wish them luck. The Council’s dilemma is one which is Australia-wide, and crudely reduced in their PR to: more car parks for ratepayers (breathe not a word about cell-phones for managers), or another statue of a fat poet in a park? Trust us, they say; we really do love culture. Corporate culture.

As for the Hawthorn festival, locals come along to this or that session. Few of the audience (mostly other writers?) find it thrilling to be present at every session. That’s the way of festivals: it isn’t any different at wine, jazz, beer, and banana festivals. Something like burnout occurs after a few sessions: but it’s fun, isn’t it? And most of the fun occurs outside timetabled readings, book-launches, debates, and seminars. Usually in the handiest pub or wine-bar, and often running parallel with the advertised performances of well-known rivals, enemies, and bores (tarmac professors, second-division story­tellers, arts-editors, syllabus-poets, cultural commentators, and the ragtag and bobtail of small and large press operatives who make up the conference chatshow circuit). Thankfully, there were few enough bores at Hawthorn, and Jordie Albiston and Alex Skovron set a smart tone in highlighted readings.

The launch of the third issue of the small magazine the bystander was the occasion for homilies on the need for small magazines and for readers to subscribe to them. The chorus is familiar to everyone who supports literary journals, and it’s given particular piquancy on account of the bystander’s exceptional editorial standards and its coincidental appearance with an inquiry into federal funding of literary magazines. The fate of Scripsi, and the vulnerability of many others was in the minds of the supporters of the bystander.

How many small magazines is enough? May they all expect to receive state assistance after the regulation three ‘successful’ issues (a glossy format, audited sales of 500 copies, a subscription-list of 1000, and whatever the relevant Ministry think is a fair thing)? No, they may not. The various ministries for the arts could exhaust the literary-journals’ coffers at a blow if they chose to support the lot. Not that any bureaucrat would be so silly. Nor, I think, should the ministries be expected to support the lot. Small magazines have always taken their chances in the open market, and they have been by definition ‘small’ in respect to general appeal as well as circulation. The older and the newer professionally got-up magazines have sometimes managed to capture institutional support and their competition for a state subsidy has provided entertainment for those who watch from the fringes. How many have set up, with private funding for three or four issues, and succeeded in making the golden cow?

The trick with a new journal seems to be to claim that it will be unlike anything else in the country, and then to replicate the contents of every other journal which gets state cash. Pity, really: exciting stuff still comes from the ones which take a chance Which is why the bystander is interesting: the contributors are not too Melbourne, not too famous. Mal Morgan and Morris Lurie may be the exceptions. For the rest, it’s Queenslanders and anyone else you fancy: Jordie Albiston among them: nice sequence on Freida Kahlo. I have no idea who’ll pick up the tab for future issues, but it runs rings around a lot of the older and newer competitors, for stylishness and variety of contents. On that happy note, I look forward to meeting more editors of small magazines, next time I tumble into a literary festival.