At last, books about Such is Life and its endearingly attractive, quixotically sophisticated author, Joseph Furphy, are coming out. Three in the last few months is a welcome harvest, certainly a happier response than Furphy got during the prolonged Wilcannia showers of his life.

The history of Furphy’s reputation is well known, and yet its rough outlines will bear repetition. His dauntingly intelligent, high-spirited, and regional masterpiece was published, thanks to the responsiveness of A.G. Stephens, in 1903. It fell into an Australia that was unlikely to understand its feints and dodges, for various reasons, and had no impact on an overseas world that would have failed to grasp it for another swag of reasons. ‘Civilisation north of Torres Straits’ might have been ready in 1903 to cope with The Ambassadors, but hardly to cope with a Riverina novel teetering somewhere between Sterne, Gide, and Pynchon. For the next four decades, responses to the book emphasised its lovable, formless nationalism and the gutsy radicalism of an undifferentiated Collins–Furphy. Between 1943 and 1946, Furphy was reinstated by the newborn university critics as a modernist. Modernist-humanist readings of Such is Life continued through the 1950s, followed by closer, more scholarly readings until the book became the pre-postmodernist comedy of Riverina epistemology that we read today.

Henry Lawson’s death prompted a torrent of lamentation and, despite the distaste of academics and critics, the poet was soon enshrined as a National Treasure. Colin Roderick’s biography is a monument of dedication to the poet.

Harry Peckman, veteran coachman and poet of the scenic wonders of the Blue Mountains, publicly farewelled his friend Henry Lawson in practised balladic strains on 22 September 1922:

‘Tis only two short months ago,
Since last you clasped my hand,
 Recalled sweet memories of the past,
And future meetings planned.

But wiser Counsel has decreed
That we no more shall meet,
On this our native golden soil
That smiled beneath your feet.

Alas! your gifted pen lies still,
And hushed your mortal frame,
Australia’s lost a singer sweet,
A poet crowned with fame.

On 27 May, 1991, Manning Clark, Australian historian extraordinary, was buried from Canberra’s Roman Catholic cathedral by his friend the Jesuit Dr John Eddy, assisted by Professor Clark’s brother, an Anglican canon, and with the participation of his sons. After his death on 23 May, ABC national television had broadcast an interview of 1989 in which Clark had responded to the question of whether he believed in an afterlife with a firm no – to which he added that he saw merit in the response of a Mexican academic encountered twenty years before. On that matter, he harboured ‘a shy hope’. It is a smiling happy phrase, contrasting with the dark fear of future judgement that bedevils so many of the Protestant characters with which he populates his histories. And it was a qualification in harmony, not only with his occasional visits to the church that farewelled him, and earlier St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney and a multitude of European churches, but also with the ambivalence and perplexity at the heart of the man and his work. Some would call it contradiction or even evasion, but the native Australian sense of having a bob each way is sound policy, and Manning was not one for some pointless cremated affirmation of the kingdom of nothingness when he could have a touch of Catholic ritual and grandeur.

The run of banal humanist obituaries that sought to create a Clark in their own superficial image and likeness raises the question of how much the standard public figures had either encountered or understood Clark the writer. Fame has its price. Such patently mindless veneration also raises the question of the distinction between Clark the performer, the public man, the guru, the once fiery prophet of doom (more recently of happier times), and Clark as serious historian. A cynical ABC commentator observed he had never encountered anybody with a full set of the Histories. I overheard at a Clark launch a beard explaining that he had invested in a signed set to give to his infant (Aaron or Sarah – something Clarkian biblical) on his/her twenty-first birthday – history as antique value-gathering artefact.

All of this is common and predictable with living legends and national treasures; Manning Clark himself became a collectable to be sighted as much as to be cited. And there can be no doubt he was very well aware of – to put the situation at its most inert – that kind of attention.

But anybody who has actually read Clark must be struck not only by the brooding darkness and ambiguity of the vision but, even more basically, by its puzzlement and uncertainty. This is squarely declared in the very titles of his autobiographies, The Puzzles of Childhood and The Quest for Grace, not to mention In Search of Henry Lawson.

Another angle to unsettlement is proclaimed in the short stories, Disquiet (1956). Swings of ideological enthusiasms and allegiances were evident in not only books but also hats and dress. Meeting Soviet Man (1960) was accompanied by a phase in which the author appeared in Russian hat and peasant shirt. To apply the interpretative documentary scrutiny the author himself devoted to painted historical portraits, what is the meaning (if any) of the dust-jacket author photographs on the Histories? All bare-headed and chronologically aged; looking modestly down on Vol. 1, challengingly up on Vol. 3, pleasantly to the side on Vol. 4, changing by Vol. 6 to the Kahan line drawing in which timeless art thereafter prevails. And the volume titles; plainly descriptive (‘From the Earliest Times ...’) up to Vol. 3, then the full biblical fortissimo of Vol. 4, ‘The Earth Abideth Forever 1851–1888’, as the work took on its full character as an Australian religion-secular bible and book of common person’s prayer, with prefatory quotes swinging from Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky in Vol. 1, to the Bulletin and Cardinal Moran (‘it is an age of ruins’) in Vol. 4. (The succession of broad-rimmed hats was not, strangely, R. M. Williams Akubra, the style more a blend of fundamentalist American preacher with a touch of historical off-to-the-diggings. Reliable authority has it that at least one was made for him personally in Texas by John Wayne’s hatter.)

At the same time the volumes were tending from the very personal to the extremely idiosyncratic, so that the last (Vol. 6) covered the unusual period 1916–1935, with a six-page epilogue to 1945, and explains in its preface, ‘Like its predecessors this volume does not pretend to be a general history of the period’ – a disclaimer that appears to openly contradict the title A History of Australia Volume VI. Or does it?

The Preface continues, ‘it concentrates on those events which have helped to make Australians what they are, and aware of what they might be’. What they are? Or does he mean what they were? For, in a last television interview, with Maggie Tabberer of the ABC Home Show, Professor Clark explained his decision not to extend his history past 1945 by saying that he did not understand that recent period. He was, he said, a man of an older Australia. While the latter is true, the implications of the whole remark are disconcerting. Was Clark, the gnomic public commentator on current affairs, making contentious observations on a world he did not profess to understand?

All of this is bewildering, not to say confusing, as is the whole matter of the interaction between Clark the historian and Clark the public figure. Was the confusion real, or his shield against the world and his language to deal with it? The atmosphere of puzzlement and blurring, of generalisation (the straighteners, the measurers), of uncertainty, sustained in unlikely equipoise with dispositions of strong commitment, moral judgement, and passion, was one of the keys to his immense attractive powers. He offered a non-threatening leadership, indeed a sharing, in a strange blend of commitment and non-commitment, proudly old-Australian, humanitarian, radical, ritualistic. He offered, also, a sharing in the hero and villain worship around which his Histories are structured: Parkes and Lawson, Curtin and Menzies, saints or rogues, boozers or wowsers – hard to tell which merits the greater fascination. Or puzzlement. Is this why, in addition to his Labor preference, he, academic and consummate intellectual, became the hero of an anti-intellectual government? Uncertain and questing himself, he could hardly tell them where to go, make them less than comfortable. With Manning Clark one could face the great and serious questions of life in the context of the evolution of one’s own society, and yet step aside from answering them. The questions were enough. Indeed the language of the questions might suffice. At times Clark seems bound and constricted by his own sombre, powerful, Old Testament semantics, driven into a bizarre caricature of himself.

And yet, for all the apparent confusion, the centre so obviously held; that dimension of stability was also part of his attraction. In the age of marital ruins and casual transience which was Canberra’s, here was a local patriot and identity, a man of close wife and family, permanently and obviously loving, secure, warm, hospitable, open to students (I speak from direct experience and observation since 1956). But again, the tensions between life and art. So willing was he to see the good qualities and potential in those whose careers he advanced that his references eventually generated caution, as the fatal flaws and weaknesses in the potter’s clay that he could so readily discern in his parade of historical characters became evident in the living clay he had warranted enthusiastically without defect. The printed fulminations of his Old Testament historical wrath against the past contrasted strangely with the spidery scrawl of his New Testament charity towards this present person or that book.

Some have represented the death of Manning Clark as the end of an era, the passing of both a symbol and major voice of an old Australia which has vanished. Many of those who wept for him were weeping for themselves, perhaps also for the crumbling of the old networks of profession and patronage that operated out of Melbourne and Canberra: the geography of Australian culture decreed that his harshest reviewers were centred around Sydney and its University. This sense of a time at an end, a structure on the wane, is true to the facts of change and mortality, but its friends can be consoled that the size and nature of Clark’s contribution has insured that in vanishing it will not vanish.

 However changed or overlaid, its permanence as a legacy is ensured, at least in part, by his recording of his vision of it. That recording lies not only in the History but in those earlier most influential works, the Select Documents in Australian History (2 Vols., 1950, 1955). These were Clark’s first major service to Australian history, a service that opened doors to rooms in the past that many Australians had never before known of, let alone visited. It was in Vol. 2 of the Documents in 1955 that he first used the Dostoyevsky quotation that he repeated for the rest of his life: I want to be there when everyone suddenly understands what it has all been for.’ This is a curious wish; in one sense the expression of the historical observer’s ultimate ambition, in another, a personal identification with commonality in puzzlement. Clark’s usage seems to have been the latter.

Clark’s vision was partial, even of that panorama of old Australia which he had mastered. Nothing untoward in that; it is the historian’s predicament. Elsewhere I have argued that, Australia being an English colony, its historians took – still take – an English view of appearances, accept English priorities, and reflect Protestant value-judgements. The sub-world, for instance, of Irish Catholics had no real existence for historians who wrote from and about the walled gardens of the establishment. The questions they asked, the issues they addressed, the troubles that concerned them have been those of a dying British colonialism, matters of importance certainly, but, despite much of what has been claimed for the Clark approach, at a tangent to the positive issues that have stirred ordinary Australians. And so it was with the publication in 1987 of the final, sixth, volume of C. M. H. Clark’s A History of Australia. Prodigious achievement that it was, this masterwork remains a highly idiosyncratic testament from a once dominant Protestant elite, lamenting its own demise, and taken up with its own present confusions and torments. Professor Clark conceded the shortcomings of his History in relation to Aborigines and women. Its personal idiosyncrasies (as above) are evident from any reading of The Puzzles of Childhood. Indeed, the relationship with the History is openly acknowledged, with his customary ambivalence, in the Preface to the autobiography.

But masterwork it is, no question. We shall not see its like again. Who would have the ambition, the self-confidence, the hubris, the staying power (through a heart bypass), the luck, the sheer intellectual power and historical ability, to sustain six volumes over thirty years? What publisher would back such an enterprise? The new large testaments tend to be cooperative ventures. Let us now praise famous cooperatives? I think not.

More, Clark gave old Australia the epic history it deserves. Like it or hate it, and whatever its shortcomings, it is a treatment on the grand scale which fits the land. So what if at times it is overblown; better that than some prosaic pygmy shrinkage from which we emerge ordinary, diminished.

All this was evident at the beginning, indeed more evident then, given both the conventional narrowness and sterilities characteristic of Australian history in 1962, the tendency in later volumes to dramatise beyond what the material might bear, the author’s repetition of favoured phrases and devices that invited ridicule – and the remarkable revolution in the range and quality of Australian history which paralleled the appearance of Clark’s successive volumes 1962-89. Paralleled yes, but also drew on the new atmosphere and models of approach, the new imaginative and literary freedom, which Clark had demonstrated was possible.

But then, in 1962, it was the shock of the new, to which reactions are always diverse. My own, in Irish Historical Studies, still represent my view of those first volumes:

‘With Professor Clark’s book, Australian history in this, its most extensively studied period, gains a new dimension and stature. The affairs of this tiny convict settlement have at last yielded a meaning and significance beyond the trivial and parochial. In seeing these years of discovery, foundation and early settlement in terms of the clash of great and pervasive ideologies, views of man and the world, in terms of Catholicism, Protestantism and the vision of the enlightenment, Professor Clark, far from enshrining abstractions, has offered an interpretation of Australian history which is absorbingly human and compellingly intelligible. This is immediate, full-sized, thinking and feeling human history, a re-creation of the past.’

My appraisal of Vol. 2 (1968), again in Irish Historical Studies, was that it was even better, greater, but on that occasion I raised some questions which I pursued further with the author in correspondence, questions as to whether later times could carry the vision and style so luminous and dramatic in the ‘Darkness’ which was the first chapter. To quote – and the illustration is famous – the great campaign for the rounding up of Aborigines in 1830 is introduced thus:

‘At that very moment when [Governor] Arthur was brimful with his God, and his yearning that all men might be granted a vision of God’s throne, great madness and folly seized men’s hearts in Van Diemen’s Land.’

Will this approach fit the arid ages of getting and spending that lie ahead? Manning replied that he accepted the point, a response which I think was genuine, not a polite kindness. Whatever, perhaps caught up in the impetus of the paretic semi-religious rhetoric which was to become his stylistic trademark, the ‘great madness and folly’ syndrome, together with the focus on great men, were to obtrude in later volumes where they were far less happy and came under cruel review.

Whatever the professional view of it, and that was, and is, diverse, Manning Clark’s contribution to Australian history is immense. He took it back into the realms of literature, from which it had departed, he resurrected for it a popularity which it had long lost, and he made for it a public reputation, gave it place and significance in the everyday affairs of men and women, a media role, even a brief theatrical exposure. Clark, more than any other person, gave history, as a story, as a communal concern, national meaning and stature. In tone, his gift was uncertain, ambivalent, mixing despair and hope. In a country that had enjoyed its history vacantly, by merely going along for the ride, Manning Clark took serious, often tormented pause. With Dostoyevsky, he did not seem to know what it had all been for, or, if there was indeed a puzzle, what it was. But, to his enduring renown, he asked those questions.

Outside there is a row of walnut trees. On one of them seven white wolves are sitting. They are staring at him. From a high and supple branch, looking like a wolf, his sister Anna is swinging. Behind them, the city is on fire.

Wolves and goats. The goats represent the ego. They control time, represent culture, continuity, the status quo. They live in the grandfather clock that is at once history and the records of the psychoanalyst. The wolves are the id, the unconscious, desire. They are also reason, and they triumph over time. The Wolf-Man led Freud to his understanding of the war of the id on the ego. Freud identified as neurotics those who, unable to live with the war, regress to the instinctive, the primitive, the animal.

We meet Tannenbaum in his ‘cosy Anne Frankish semi-hidden nook’. These writerly Jewish recluses have very little else in common; Tannenbaum is separated from his wife and two children. His friend/lover Anise is trying to drink her way out of a nervous breakdown. For further solace he resorts to ‘horizontal unravelling’ or ‘psychiatric horizontality’.

Tannenbaum also may or may not have met William Burroughs and S.J. Perelman. Each time he leaves his ‘post-marriage’ flat, Tannenbaum says goodbye to the two hundred copies of his novel Madness, which he had received in lieu of royalties. These Madnesses are the best friends he has.

Dear Manning,

I’m writing you this letter for want of better ways of continuing the conversation we’ve been having for the past eight years, sustained by weekly letters while I was in Japan. We began to walk and talk in 1983 as you were preparing for heart surgery and I wasn’t coping with a broken heart. You wanted someone to walk with, and I needed company.

When you died at 4pm on a Thursday, I couldn’t stop myself thinking that that hour on that day of the week was when I most often called around for tea with you and Dymphna before we set out for a stroll through Forrest, some days going for more than a kilometre, others barely making three hundred metres before your breath gave out.

In the opening pages of Jewels and Ashes a man of eighty stands on a chair, his arms outstretched, describing the tree he remembers from his childhood. How beautiful and tall and wide it was, as it stood in the forest called Zwierziniec, on the outskirts of Bialystok, Poland. How strong his family was, how it branched and grew and prospered, in those years before 1939!

Arnold Zable is the transplant, the sapling that grew from a seed, cast aside, driven to the other end of the earth. Part of him was in a place that was distant from the streets of Carlton where he grew up, went to the football, taught school, lived an Aussie life. Zable needed to find some roots.

Tolerance and passion might seem, at first thought, to be peculiar bedfellows. Charmian Clift, in this series of essays first published in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Herald, Melbourne, combines the two in a dazzling and compellingly readable collection.

Whether tackling political issues head-on, or writing on domestic crises, her free flowing, sometimes eccentric prose sweeps the reader along. Her gift for communication was such that there is an intimacy with the writer, as if the essay was written especially for the reader.

Is there a difference between the word ‘multiculturalism’ and the practice? Jan Mahyuddin, who has been involved with multicultural literary projects, writes in response to some of the questions raised by Robert Dessaix about the definition and functions of multiculturalism.

For the past year I have been engaged in one of the activities that Robert Dessaix charges (ABR No. 129) are not only unnecessary but ‘harmful’ to the many writers briefly involved. I have been working as a Research Fellow at Deakin University with Sneja Gunew as the last in a line of bibliographers which has included Lolo Houbein and Alexandra Karakostas-Seda, updating and extending a bibliography of first and second generation Australian writers from non-English­speaking backgrounds. I have also been working on acquiring books by these writers to include in the collection of ‘Australian Literature’ at the Deakin University Library.

Publicity concerning the project has used the term ‘multicultural’, which didn’t prevent hundreds and hundreds of writers from responding. There are between nine hundred and a thousand entries for writers, both living and dead, in the bibliography. Eighty percent are first generation immigrants from a language and cultural background other than English. From the almost seven hundred responses from living authors, only one writer has asked not to be listed. A few took issue with the terms and suggested changes, but sent information anyway and wished us well. The overwhelming majority of writers and community groups with whom I have communicated has so swamped us with information that I’ve been amazed at the volume of the response.

Robert Dessaix argues that the bibliography and consequent library collection shouldn’t exist because many hundreds of these writers simply don’t exist. They don’t exist because they don’t fit the single regulation ‘identity’ Dessaix prescribes for all writers in Australia. They don’t exist ‘in English’, so they don’t exist as ‘Australian’. He writes, ‘To be “an Australian writer” (as opposed to just writing in Australia) you have to have a native’s knowledge of English – or your translator does’. Since these writers don’t exist ‘in English’, they don’t, in Dessaix’s terms, exist as ‘Australian’. What fate for them? Where if not in Dessaix’s ‘Australia’ is their place in the production of creative writing? Somewhere else? Nowhere?

Dessaix argues directly from the premise that Australia is ‘an English-speaking country’, but his premise is false. Australia’s official, national and undeniably dominant language may be described as ‘English’. Just what is ‘Oz English’ remains debateable, as we all know there are many Englishes in this country. The reality, however, of our linguistic practice is that Australia is a multilingual country whose more than·ninety culturally diverse groups communicate in more than thirty languages that do not originate here. And that does not include those Aboriginal Australian languages that have survived two hundred years of exclusion. So clear is this reality that Australia’s national languages policy delineates English as the primary language of social cohesion and languages other than English as context, these not only to be maintained but also to be developed as part of Australia’s culture.

On one hand Dessaix posits and defends a culturally diverse Australia, which he declares he enjoys. On the other, he denies its multilingual reality, demanding that the cultural expression called creative writing be published, circulated, and judged in one language. The non-monocultural society is to define, produce, and reproduce monolingually?

Dessaix’s argument that ‘if it isn’t in English it isn’t “Australian”’ is dressed up as a lively attack on words. Which words? – those such as ‘multicultural’ which writers and critics have used to describe the ways that have been sought to validate, legitimise, and give authority to our differences which endeavouring not to offend each other. From Dessaix’s pen this word indeed makes new offence. The impact and the usefulness of a word is ever in the intent of the person who uses it, as Dessaix so unwittingly demonstrates. Ania Walwicz may describe herself as a ‘fat writer’, but could you or I, or Robert Dessaix, without her authorisation, use it of her and not give her offence?

Dessaix’s use of ‘foreign’, unexamined and unqualified, in the phrase ‘foreign language’ (foreign to whom, to Dessaix himself, foreign to Australia, foreign outside Australia?) irks me. His insensitive use of ‘native’ in the phrase ‘native English’ offends me greatly. This in an Australia where it could be said non­Aboriginal Australians have been lately learning how not to offend Aboriginal Australians? It is equally difficult to put gracefully aside the extraordinary assumption that there is such a thing as a static, perfect English that some of us have and others can aspire to.

Dessaix would have us believe that ‘It’s the situation of being a writer from a non-English speaking background in an English-speaking country that marginalises writers’ and labelling writers with that background ‘multicultural’ that keeps them chained to the margins.

Indeed, no. The ‘English-speaking country’ does not marginalise the writer from a non-English speaking background. The arrogant ‘Englo’-centrism within a country that converses in English, and many other languages, the refusal (is it also fear?) to admit languages other than English to some of the ‘down on the ground’ business of production, dissemination and valuing of Australian writing marginalises writers from a non-English speaking background.

And it is not the use of the word ‘multicultural’ in any context, but profound ignorance in denying the inseparability of language and identity that imposes chains, and causes inestimable harm. Beneath Dessaix’s conjuring with words lies a simple (and resoundingly ironic) reality. Many of the writers about and to whom he talks won’t hear him question their place in Australian writing because he is discussing it in English.

There is one, perhaps, the least inept, use of the term ‘multicultural’ that I adhere to. It is that which describes a culturally diverse Australian society which is now conceptually and behaviourally ‘large’ enough to allow individuals to define identity in a number of ways. This ‘Australia’ allows the individual to say ‘I am Australian’ in any language and suffer no harm.

Deakin’s bibliography and the library collection projects have certainly hit the ‘identity’ nerve in Australian writers. Many of the letters we’ve received have offered personal examinations of the writers’ sense of place, of belonging. Cumulatively they provide evidence of goodwill towards the project. They also offer a record of the pain so rarely confronted or dealt with in the genteel world of writing about writing and writers.

Most disturbing to me have been the number of grateful responses. This ‘gratitude’ may be a reaction to interest shown, notice taken, respect paid. Perhaps I am discomfited because we have not been the focus for a righteous anger from writers whose cultural contribution after so many years of exclusion has been recognised and included by the still Englo-centric academic structure.

As a document the bibliography constitutes a series of records. The autobiographical information offers a sociological record of lives committed to writing in spite of oppression, catastrophe, displacement, alienation, and waste. How should a bibliographer respond to apologies that no further information can be given because past work, past records have been bombed in Lebanon or Vietnam, seized in Chile or Poland? Biographical material has also captured more than one hundred years of literary activity in languages other than English in this country: literary groups and societies, newspapers and small presses, theatre groups and film cooperatives, libraries and archive collections. Most of this activity occurred without Englo-Australia knowing or showing interest.

If the writing such activities sought to encourage, support and record has had a place in a larger Australia (or indeed outside Australia) it has been by virtue of being adopted into language departments in tertiary institutions where it has also struggled to fit. The Australian writer who writes in a language other than English must respond to publishers demands to write in a language that has not ossified from a different use nor become too tainted by ‘Australianisms’. This in order to please not only readers in Australia but also readers in the country of origin. Damned either way, not only may your English not do, neither may your Italian or Greek, Arabic or Vietnamese. It isn’t only the Australian world of books and writing that has shown limited imagination in treating the products of biculturalism.

Dessaix concludes his article with a revamped prescription for Australian writers who write in languages other than English – get yourself translated only this time do it ‘professionally’. From the beginning of his article he has been cavalier about the difficulties and costs individual writers have faced in getting anything translated into any language. But the major problem with this view of the uses of translation is that it remains arrogantly Englo-centric. We are to translate non-English writing into English so that readers such as he can make judgements on whether this really is writing worthy of being called ‘Australian’ and ‘good’ – still a one-way traffic in which, once again, the non-English is considered unable to offer anything to the English.

There is indeed much work to be done in translation of Australian writing, from English into many other languages, from many other languages into English. And there is much to be done in supporting and promoting translators specialising in creative writing. But we need the promotion of an Australian readership o0f Australian writing that reads multilingually and that assumes that to talk about Australian writing is to talk about wiring in more than one language. Why can’t we promote an environment from childhood that validates Australia’s many languages? Why can’t we so engender curiosity about all of our languages that their learning becomes entrenched in Australia’s schooling, tertiary education and the production of books and writing? These are not new thoughts, language teachers in Australia have been urging similar approaches for decades.

Dessaix cites with approval a comment from George Papaellinas that ‘multiculturalism’ in the produc­tion of books and writing has been nothing other than a ‘creation of the marketplace’. Unfortunately, the marketplace for such writing has not yet been developed, but if it were, wouldn’t it be a truly splendid thing and a boost to Australian publishing?

The skills that the market requires exist already in the pool of publishers and printers who have produced newspapers and author­published books in languages other than English for many years. The new, computer-driven technology exists to reduce the costs of printing in more than one language. If we consider only the existing readership of those many newspapers and books, we know that there is a demand. Recent projects undertaken by the NSW State Library and the Victorian Ministry of the Arts in order to determine what and how much people read in languages other than English have found, for example, that Australian readers in Vietnamese acquire and circulate large numbers of books written and published not here, but in the USA or Canada, where migrants have also settled.

Why aren’t these and translations and bilingual editions being published here? Do we lack the entrepreneurial skills, or does our Englo-centrism continue to stifle any possibility that a bold, imaginative multilingual publishing company (or many) might evolve to really test the multicultural market in books and writing? It troubles me to see, for example, the Gould Bird League of Victoria publish material in seven or eight languages or to see Choice magazine offer an information hotline in more than one language and yet to see so very little occurring with creative writing. Are the economics of the creative writing publishing industry so prohibitively different?

History has long taught us that the imposition of monolingualism in a multilingual society is the most expedient road to enforced monoculturalism (imperialism? totalitarianism?). If we wish not to be history’s captives then Robert Dessaix and you and I still have much to do to ensure that what we have to say in one of our languages will be heard in all of them.