Archive

Here we have one brand new literary journal, Etchings, and one which, by comparison, is practically geriatric: Famous Reporter. There is now a proliferation of literary journals, and SPUNC (Small Press Underground Networking Community) has emerged to advance their cause. We know that mainstream publishing is producing less diverse material, and that it is increasingly not Australian. The vast majority of publishing in Australia, as Michael Wilding has highlighted, is now done by local branches of big transnational corporations. Malcolm Knox has revealed the ‘governing management principles’ of such organisations. These include ‘segmentation and internal competition’: whereas in the past a publisher subsidised ‘book sections’, now a publisher will say ‘each of these books is a discrete unit and is at war with each other unit, and if the CSIRO Diet Book does well, we will reward the diet books section with the money to repeat that success. And if the poets continue to languish, we’ll have no more poetry.’ Poetry, of course, was effectively given the flick by mainstream publishers Penguin and OUP in the 1990s. As Mark Davis says, publishers are now akin to gamblers who ‘back winners’. This may always have been true, but now they’re putting more money on the favourites and none on the roughies. In this environment, literary journals that publish poetry are crucial to maintaining a diverse local literary culture.

The writer Meg Stewart remembers, with affection and an abiding sense of privilege, growing up as witness to the friendship that flourished between two passionate Australian poets. One of these was her father, the New Zealand-born Douglas Stewart, for many years literary editor of the Bulletin. The other was the glamorous David Campbell, who served with distinction in the wartime RAAF and wrote his poetry while grazing his country acres on holdings around the Canberra region of New South Wales. Their friendship was sustained over thirty-five years, from just before the end of World War II until Campbell’s premature death in 1979. From the outset, Stewart especially had warmed to the Campbell charisma, always widely admired amongst both men and women, and amongst the young. In a letter to Norman Lindsay describing their first meeting, Stewart described Campbell as a ‘[m]ost likeable, vigorous bloke who believes that the artist & man-of-action are kinsmen’.

France’s hypersensitivity about its culture is not infrequently derided, but it produces a salutary vigilance for which we can all be grateful. Such has been the case with the French-led defence of cultural specificities in the various ‘free trade’ meetings (GATT and WTO) of the past two decades. And such is this book by Jean-Noël Jeanneney. Deceptively slight in size – Jeanneney himself refers to it modestly as his ‘little book’ – it is a work that not only addresses a critical issue but articulates practical proposals that can, and should, command the attention of cultural policy-makers and decision-makers everywhere. It is also essential reading for the wider public. The issue is about which principles, in the already strongly globalised world of the Internet, should guide the processes of digitising the world’s literary heritage. Keenly critical of the plan launched by Google in late 2004 to create a universal online library, Jeanneney proposes a pluralist alternative posited on a quite different philosophy from that of the profit-based ideology underpinning the Google initiative.