Allen & Unwin

Aspiring Australian writers lament the fact that few publishers are accepting unsolicited fiction manuscripts. Those that do accept them lament the fact that they are inundated by around a thousand submissions each year. What’s the solution? Increasingly, it seems, awards for unpublished work with publication as the prize. Writers know their work will at least be looked at; publishers can outsource to judges the culling of what would otherwise be their slush pile. It is no longer just the 24-year-old Vogel Award, with its promise of publication by Allen & Unwin. State-based awards now guarantee publication by UQP, FACP and Wakefield Press.

‘Since the end of the Cold War, foreign policy has become economic policy.’ It was March 1999 when I put this cliché du jour to a British bureaucrat handling policy about cultural industries and trade agreements. The World Trade Organisation was young, the New Economy was everywhere, the NASDAQ still had 3000 points to rise. But we were walking across Trafalgar Square, Nelson was watching and I should have known better. ‘That,’ she said tolerantly, ‘is what they told us in 1948.’ As we spoke, NATO forces were at war. Bill Clinton, who had won the first US election since the Cold War by reminding his predecessor about the economy, had decided that force was now required in the Balkans. He’d already apologised for not using it in Rwanda. Two-and-a-half years later, the mutual defence provisions of Australia’s military alliance with the US would be activated for the first time. The Cold War was over, but there would be plenty for diplomats to talk about besides trade deals and prosperity. Later in 1999, the collapse of the Seattle ministerial meeting of the WTO showed that even economic policy was going to be hard work.

We read for pleasure; perhaps this way we find out more about ourselves. Pleasure comes first, a fact that is often lost when a book is overanalysed, always a danger when questions follow a pattern of interpretation designed to trace a line around a response. Picture books are particularly vulnerable, as their words are few and they are becoming more sophisticated, drawing on traditional, modern and symbolic art. Whether a child will find delight would be my first criterion for the purchase of a picture book. It doesn’t have to be all sweetness and light: a shiver of fear may be just as engrossing as laughter.

According to the conventional wisdom, Australians are not overly fond of official orations. Russel Ward’s so-called ‘typical Australian’ was ‘taciturn rather than talkative’, and John La Nauze, biographer of Alfred Deakin, noted that Australians were ‘inclined to associate sophisticated speaking with condescension or insincerity’. Alfred Deakin’s eloquence, he added, was ‘surpassingly rare’ in Australia. For Robin Boyd, it was probably just as well, for when Australians deigned to open pursed lips it revealed not only bad teeth, but ‘worse words’. The appearance of these two collections of Australian speeches – and another is due for release shortly, from Melbourne University Press – flies in the face of this orthodoxy. And it buries the myth that public cynicism towards political speechmaking – for politicians dominate both collections – has reached such stratospheric heights that we would all prefer a quiet doze than be subject even to an exuberant flight of rhetoric. Clearly, no matter how often speeches are spurned as chronic windbaggery, they retain the capacity to give meaning to the life of the nation and the affairs of state.

Luke Davies is best known as the author of Candy (1997), a novel about love and heroin addiction. His poetry, meanwhile, has attracted attention for its characteristic interest in how we relate to an unknowable universe; it is also unusual in that it draws on a more-than-everyday understanding of theoretical physics. In this latest volume, which comes in two parts – a long meditative poem followed by forty short lyrics, both celebrating love – an awareness of the vast reaches of space remains, although its expression is now less factual and has acquired a new subtlety.

About to present a lecture to medical students, pathologist Dr Anya Crichton notes optimistically, in Kathryn Fox’s new novel, that the word ‘forensic’ in the title will pretty much guarantee her a full house. Sadly, when the overstressed and overambitious students discover that the topic is not going to figure on their exam paper, a significant number depart, therefore missing out on such compelling topics as how to spot the suspicious death of a diabetic, or when to accuse the family pet of snacking on the deceased.

All too often, so-called manuals for screenwriters, novelists and poets begin by letting the reader know how unlikely it is that they will ever get published, let alone make a living. Fortunately, journalist and RMIT journalism lecturer Matthew Ricketson avoids this private-club view of the journalism profession. He points out that there are about 370 newspapers, ranging from dailies and suburban weeklies to regional and multicultural newspapers. There are also more than 3000 magazines in the Australian market.

Several years ago, I was privy to a breakfast conversation with one of our venerable literary critics, in which he lamented the proliferation of novels in Australia by young women. Of particular concern, he announced, was the tendency of said young women to construct ‘itsy-bitsy sentences from itsy-bitsy words’. And he smiled around the table warmly, secure in venerable male polysyllabic verbosity. As a young woman myself of vague literary urges, I felt thoroughly rebuffed. The only words I could think to form were both too itsy-bitsy and obscene to constitute effective rebuttal, and they remained unsaid.

‘White’ and ‘earth’ are not words that sit easily together in an Australian context, so much so that placing them thus seems almost deliberately unsettling. Juxtaposed, they only serve to remind us of things that are mostly too hard for us to look at directly, a claim to a possession all know to be ill-founded ...

Book covers are just expensive hints, and the jacket adorning Philip Jones’s memoir of Heide and beyond is suitably suggestive. Jones may not be especially literary, but he looms at us – first youthful, now in his early seventies – as a kind of antipodean Auden: languid, floppy-tied and with searching eyes. That direct, if hooded, gaze introduces us to a soi-disant minor figure in our cultural history, but one who had an intimate place at Heide in the 1960s and 1970s, and who has known some of the authentic characters and creators in Australian art and letters.