Commentary

This book is about the role played by ministerial staff in Australian federal government. It is particularly concerned with the potential influence on policy making that this group may have through their capacity to advise ministers. It is, then, about the nature of the relations between personal advisers and their principals – a general issue that can be explored through history, and in countries other than Australia (see chapter 2). From the outset, however, it is important to differentiate between advice to ministers and advice to government, and the term ‘adviser’ does not sufficiently alert us to that differentiation. Indeed, the term ‘adviser’ is traditionally used to signify public servants, who are formally charged with the responsibility of advice to government. I have therefore elected to borrow the term ‘minder’, a term that is creeping into journalism and into the vernacular to refer to a member of a minister’s staff. We can thus distinguish at once between minders (personal advisers) and mandarins (public servants).

Phoenix Publications literally sprang from an ardent belief that there is place in Australian publishing for a small press representing a wide literary culture and achieving a high standard of design and production.

Phoenix Publications arose in Brisbane, when Manfred Jurgensen, Professor of German at the University of Queensland, was asked to assemble a collection of writing by Australians whose native tongue was other than English. The anthology, Ethnic Australia, appeared in 1980 and met with such interest that it was set in many high schools and tertiary institutions and went into a second edition the following year. Jurgensen decided that the best way to achieve the standard of production he wanted for Ethnic Australia was to publish it himself, and Phoenix Publications was established.

The usual incumbent of this space is, as it were, being spelled. Meanwhile, the view from the other side of the bookshop counter is cheery. The debate about whether too much is being published and whether women writers are getting more of the discrimination than they are positively entitled to has flitted across the pages of the Bulletin and the National Times, with John Hanrahan, formerly an assistant editor and acting editor of this magazine, providing insight and balance.

When the Writers’ Week organisers asked me to come and talk on a panel of literary agents, I naturally asked what they wanted me to talk about. (I knew that jokey anecdotes about publishers, writers, and agents would be just the thing; I also knew that my delivery would fall horribly flat, even if I could remember any.)

It was suggested that I might talk about pitfalls for writers – a subject on which literary agents can wax lyrical for hours – but that seemed slightly arrogant from where I sit, and I began to think of pitfalls for agents. And from there I started to think about what agents can and can’t do, how useful we are or aren’t, and by the time I’d thought all that through, I had the bones of what I wanted to talk about.

It is Sunday and that is all it is. I have just read the Australian. It is not Australian. It is The Cringe. I have struggled to like Phillip Adams for years; I liked him when he was Phillip Adams – I guess he did too. He worships Mammon when he once seemed to worship cries in the street and whispers from above. No God in him.

Are we in Sydney or Singapore this January? Tinsel Town gives off the same driving ram, the same steamy conditions as the city-state shaking on its financial foundations. Some days of course the sun shines, the beaches are bright with bikinied or semi-bikinied naiads and the surf patrols strut. However, it is Tinsel Town as described by its literati that has kicked the year off with a bang.

New York snow storms may blow outside his window, but Sumner Locke Elliott is feverishly busy indoors writing a novel set in Australia between the wars. He hopes to complete it by late spring.

Dhvanyaloka, the Literary Criterion Centre at Mysore, derives its names from a classic Indian work of literary criticism and, by way of Cambridge, from T.S. Eliot’s journal of the 1920s. The Indian work saw literature as a spreading of the light, Eliot saw it as the maintenance and renewal of tradition. Mysore, Professor C.D. Narasimhaiah applies these two principles to the study of Commonwealth literature.