Commentary

Mary Cunnane, who has worked in the publishing industry since 1976, laments the laziness and irritation of those publishers who resent and underestimate unsolicited submissions from authors

White Papers are falling on Australia like confetti. We had two on foreign affairs and one on terrorism in the seven years to 2004; the third one on defence in four years will appear this year, and in October 2012 Ken Henry delivered Australia in the Asian Century. Defence White Papers are perennially concerned with Australia’s need for the material and money to protect us against certain countries, which are rarely named. The Asian Century paper, on the other hand, explicitly names China among the five ‘key regional nations’ to be given priority in order to bring ‘a stronger national purpose and cohesion’ to the relationship with Australia. The Defence White Paper will be sober in tone, as Menzies was when announcing his ‘melancholy duty’ in 1939, or resolute, as was Curtin in declaring Australia’s shift of dependence to the United States in 1941. In contrast, The Asian Century adopts cheerful, forward-looking slogans. Australia’s success ‘will be based on choice, not chance’, it says; ‘the tyranny of distance is being replaced by the prospects of proximity’; and Australia is ‘located in the right place at the right time’. Asia is so important, says Dr Henry, that it is going to be ‘the main game not only economically but in almost any sense of national significance’.

When Gore Vidal died a few weeks ago, his publisher issued a statement calling him the last survivor of a postwar crop of American literary giants. ‘It is hard to think of another … who cut as dashing and visible a figure in various public realms,’ said Vidal’s Doubleday editor, Gerald Howard. Less than a week later the obituary columns were taken over by just such another figure – except that Robert Hughes was an Australian. Malcolm Turnbull made a pronouncement on the floor of the Australian parliament: ‘This titan of arts and letters will never leave us.’

I first discovered Australian literature in Argentina. While I was there studying Argentinian literature at the University of Buenos Aires in 2009–10, I spent many nights hunched over the table in our dingy kitchen with one of my housemates, Teresa. We would pick over the politically infused vernacular of the short stories ...

We are on the verge of another revolution in dictionary-making. Since the seventeenth century there have been three major revolutions in lexicographic practice. In 1604 Robert Cawdrey produced the first monolingual English dictionary, which was – radically – arranged alphabetically. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson employed literary citations to illustrate the meaning of the words in his dictionary. And in the nineteenth century, James Murray began to produce the first great historical dictionary, tracking the use of a word over time, and extended the making of dictionaries beyond his Scriptorium of lexicographers working in Oxford by calling on contributions from around the globe. This was an enormous undertaking, and the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), begun in 1859, was not completed until 1928 (the second edition followed in 1989, and the third edition, published quarterly online, was begun in 2000).

My husband is proud to claim that in the 1950s, when they were both employed at Covent Garden, he was paid a larger salary than Joan Sutherland was. Fresh from Sydney, she had joined the company in 1952, and was soon appearing in small roles, including Clotilde, opposite Maria Callas’s Norma. This was followed by several years of steady progress and major roles (Agathe, Antonia, Micaela), but no great public success. My husband watched Joan’s progress from the beginning of her time and realised, as did others, that here was a great singer in the making. Then, in February 1959, Sutherland, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, made her triumphant début as Lucia di Lammermoor, and everything changed dramatically, including her fees.

Twenty years ago, when I was at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, I heard of an Arthur Boyd exhibition in SoHo. Recklessly, without seeing the show, I urged my American friends to see one of Australia’s foremost contemporary painters. The gallery, unknown to me, turned out to be small and unimpressive. There were five or six late paintings, including one of those large, multi-figured bathers, with that disconcerting quality of Boyd at the end of his career, both slapdash and commercial at the same moment. ‘So this is what contemporary Australian painting looks like?’ my companion asked ironically, just within the bounds of good manners.