Kate Ahearne

By now most of us already know, whether we’ve read it or not, that Peter Carey’s new novel, Oscar and Lucinda, is about God, glass and gambling, and that in the last few pages a glass church floats up the Bellinger river. We know because the book has been reviewed in just about every major newspaper and magazine in the country. There have been speeches and public appearances, extracts, profiles and interviews. This is the sort of literary event that publishers dream of. Carey’s last book, Illywhacker, was short­listed for the Booker Prize and sold sixty thousand copies of the paperback edition in Australia alone– astonishing when you consider that the average new novel by an unknown writer appears in a print run of three thousand. It’s not bad going for a writer who has only five published books to his credit. What’s more, Carey is now in this mid forties, which is mere chickenhood for a writer, so we can reasonably expect him to build a most illus­trious career indeed.

There must be something horribly deformed about a society in which the lowest paid work is often the most demanding and the least dispensable. Why, for instance, is the wellbeing of our elderly not worthwhile enough for people to be paid to deliver Meals on Wheels? Who doesn’t believe that the nurture of children is an enormously responsible job? Does a rubbish tip attendant get better paid than a clerk? Course not.

There’s something very special about the pozzie occupied by small magazines in the immensely complex structure of any modern society. From the surreptitious and dangerous distribution of broadsheets in countries less fortunate than our own, to the high-gloss high-chic and/or High Culture mags that emanate from the ‘top end’ of more comfortable societies, they keep groups of likeminded folks in touch, involved and informed. In a world where all but the merest handful of us live in a state of mental or physical bombardment, where we have given over more and more of our lives to that handful of manipulators and brainwashers, browbeating us to consume or conform, the small mags are unique in that their content is largely derived, in a chicken and egg sort of way, directly from readership. They stimulate creativity and involvement. A drop in the bucket perhaps, a few desperate strokes against the tide, the merest pinch of leaven in an awfully large loaf. But where there is the stirring of response there is hope.