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The phenomenon of the Fremantle Arts Centre Press in Western Australia is one of the instructive publishing success stories of the past decade.

It is a frankly regional venture, and by concentrating on the local market and the immediate writing scene it has built up a secure base of interest – and sales. Out of a real or imagined (but widespread) sense of slight, or exclusion, has emerged the one thing most likely to resolve that carping insecurity: direct action aimed at self-sufficiency. It is important to recognise this motivating force. But it is important, also, to look at the consequences of that initial do-it-yourself bravado.

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While the reading of a book has become a solitary matter, its interpretation remains a convivial task which must be performed anew for each new reader, new age, and new country. The business of criticism is to help us in this task, and from a multitude of judgements to further our understanding of an author’s words for our time.  The critic is therefore involved not only with books, but through them with the cultural problems of his society. Critical debates thus become debates about major social issues.

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The greatest area of growth in the writing profession is among the group that used to be scurrilously called ‘hobby writers’.

A recent study of British authors reveals that fifty-nine per cent will write only one book in their writing careers.

Using this figure and extrapolating from the 3500 applicants for Public Lending Right here, there are at least 2100, maybe 3000, people in Australia who have written one book and either have run out of the spirit to write another, or maybe have encountered such frustrations with contracts, editors, and distributors that it is not worth it to write another.

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Nowadays if anyone is lucky enough to be robbed of his good name, he is likely to be rich indeed. But the rules of the game have changed since Iago was inciting Othello to search out a slander where there was none. The libel plaintiff is no longer likely to be another literary character but a real person wearing Othello’s mask of mistaken injury. ... (read more)

Marxists have always been concerned about the relationships of intellectuals to the rest of society, and particularly to change in society. The intellectual, being able to stand aside from immediate social pressures, is able to see the truth of what is happening, and so to correct the false consciousness of those who are involved in the everyday business of production.

Marx and Engels themselves provide the perfect examples of these roles – Engels earned the income, in his role as successful capitalist, while Marx did the thinking. Yet there is a contradiction. The conclusion to which Marx's thinking led him was that ideas themselves are determined by the material forces of production. If this is so, then the words of the intellectual who explains this process are not only irrelevant. but probably untrue, as the consciousness which has generated his ideas has not itself been a part of the productive process.

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Australia has a tradition of brilliant female writers. With this book, her first novel, Sally Morrison has joined them.

It’s a knockout.

If she had used a simple narrative form, I’m sure she’d have made as much money as the lady who wrote The Thorn Birds. Luckily for us, she didn’t. She fashioned a work of art instead.

The characters are marvellous, they are so real, you can smell them, I’d say that if you don’t find yourself, or at least part of yourself, among them, you don’t exist. The story, told in a series of mental flashes from the characters (and some of them are flashes indeed) is of the last three days of the last term in a country high school.

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A Woman of the Future, David Ireland’s sixth novel, is narrated in the first person by a woman, Alethea Hunt. This kind of ‘literary transvestism’ is not new, and in any case is not essentially different from writers who, in third-person narration, inject themselves into the consciousness of a character of the opposite sex. Ireland’s book, however, is remarkable for the way in which a male writer deals obsessively with the sexual thoughts and experiences of a woman. Indeed, it may well incur the ire of feminists that a man should presume, on principle, to understand such experiences. But he handles the role with sensitivity and insight, as he traces a young girl’s awakening sexual consciousness (if it was ever asleep) through to her later contacts with boys and men, most of which are, if not brutalising, at least unsatisfying. Though she claims, even as a small child and much to the satisfaction of her liberated ‘feminist’ parents, that she is without penis envy, she exhibits an extraordinary fascination with the male sexual organ, which is usually described in terms that would make most women want to give up heterosexual intercourse permanently. If these descriptions were meant to be representative of women’s feelings, perhaps one might object, but Alethea Hunt is clearly mad, albeit in the context of a world which is far crazier.

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Conrad Martens in Queensland by J.G. Steele & A few Thoughts and Paintings by Ted Andrew

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June 1979, no. 11


I don’t quite know what to make of J.G. Steele’s dull, parochial catalogue of sketches and watercolours by Conrad Martens. The ‘frontier travels’ of one of our better colonial artists should, you expect, make interesting copy – especially when the artist in question happened to be prolific and the area of his travels the sparsely settled pastoral area of what is now South-eastern Queensland.

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This is a very interesting social document. A Dozen Dopey Yarns is not easily pigeonholed – it consists of the ‘writings’ of the self-proclaimed publicist of the Australian Marijuana Party, J.J. McRoach, part comedian, part media aspirant, part evangelist for pot. As such, the reader can have a good laugh, and sociologists can read a gonzo journalist’s view of the drug culture. ... (read more)

Henry Lawson: Favourite verse edited by Nancy Keesing, illustrated by Walter Stackpool

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June 1979, no. 11

I think it was Judith Wright who once remarked that Lawson as a poet wasn’t important; that he seems, usually to have turned to verse as a journalistic medium or as a weapon for propaganda, and that the few of his better poems were such rather because of the intensity of feeling than through any technical or poetic gift.

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