Letters - February 2006

The greengrocer’s strategy Dear Editor, Nicholas Jose’s elegant essay ‘A Shelf of Our Own: Creative Writing and Australian Literature’ (ABR, November 2005) makes some astute points about the difficulties of keeping an anthology of Australian literature in print. Basically, the problem is that publishers worldwide have adopted the greengrocer’s marketing strategy. The idea is to sell as much of the product in the shortest possible time and then think about discounting or remaindering. Trying to buy a book published six months ago is like trying to buy a Bowen mango out of season. It is thought to be bad business to publish in the hope of meeting a steady or a seasonal demand. And publishers have lost their nerve about meeting any overseas demand for Australian literature. But progress is being made. Andrew Thomson’s school anthology of poetry, as Jose points out, set Australian poems alongside British poems. Living Verse was enormously popular. It had in fact been preceded by two volumes edited by Professor J.J. Stable, head of the Department of English at the University of Queensland. It is indeed in the preface to The Second Bond of Poetry that Stable enunciates his policy of beginning each section with Australian poems. My guess is that Thomson compiled his volumes when Stable’s went out of print, perhaps because Oxford London had lost its Australian market during the war. At the tertiary level, Jose speaks kindly of The Macmillan Anthology of Australian Literature (1990), edited by Alan Lawson and myself; it had two impressions, each of 5000 copies. Each impression cost several thousand dollars for permissions at ASA rates (much of it paid by the Australia Council), even though several items were out of copyright. As soon as the second impression was exhausted, Alan and I were besieged by lecturers in Australia, America and India anxious to know where copies might be obtained. An Indian publisher even sought to produce an Indian edition. Alan and I were concerned that this was a ploy to avoid paying permissions fees, and in a way it was, because the publisher proposed excising every item in copyright. Ever since some two hundred university students turned out on a hot, steamy Saturday afternoon in Kolcata to hear me talk about Australian literature, I have had a particular respect for the widespread and intelligent interest of Indians in Australian literature, but obviously Alan and I could not acquiesce in the virtual gutting of a book we had carefully balanced. The long-term solution to the problem is probably to think of an Australian anthology as something like the Australian Opera or Ballet – a continuing cultural expression that will be supported through good times (or sales) and bad. Ken Goodwin, Indooroopilly, Qld Not so fugitive Dear Editor, As the current president of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL), I was surprised to learn from Nicholas Jose’s essay, ‘A Shelf of Our Own’ (ABR, November 2005) that ‘Australian literature remains a fugitive phenomenon’. Not so fugitive. ASAL holds two conferences each year to discuss it. Mr Jose himself hosted a writers’ evening at ASAL’s Adelaide conference in July 2005. Since 1978 ASAL has added its grace notes to what Mr Jose has called ‘the vociferous efforts of past generations’ in establishing a forum for the discussion of Australian writing. ASAL’s members are all passionately involved in the study and teaching of our literary culture, and the Association also welcomes writers and teachers of writing. The fortunes of ‘Australian literature’ as a distinct category have always been changeable, and that they continue to shift isn’t necessarily a matter of immediate and grave concern. ‘Australian literature’ can be a problem, a challenge, a question – in a postmodern world it may even appear ‘under erasure’ – but it allows a rallying point for those of us who believe that writing and written culture matter to the ways in which we live in this country. ASAL will host a mini-conference on ‘The Government of Writing’ at the Victorian Writers’ Centre on 17–18 February 2006, and its annual conference – on ‘Spectres, Screens, Shadows, Mirrors’ – will be held at the University of Western Australia, 3–5 July 2006. For more information go to ASAL’s website: http://www.asc.uq.edu.au/asal/index.php. Peter Kirkpatrick, ASAL, Sydney, NSW Ironic tributes Dear Editor, In his wonderful essay on Australian writing, Nicholas Jose refers to the ‘ironic tribute’ we pay (a few and long dead) authors by putting them on our currency. But we don’t put them on our stamps: other than Henry Lawson, Banjo Patterson, Henry Richardson and a group of writers from the 1890s, no significant Australian writer has been honoured. There have been tributes to The Sentimental Bloke, The Man from Snowy River and children’s books, but it remains the case that Sweden, not Australia, has issued a stamp commemorating Patrick White. Not surprisingly, royalty and sports figures far outnumber writers, but so too do scientists and rock singers. Now that the twentieth century is behind us, it might be time for Australia to recognise at least a few literary figures from the hundred years or so of our existence as a country. I’m not sure, but I suspect White is the only Australian Nobel laureate not to have been given a stamp, which is an honour now automatically accorded to every winner of an Olympic gold medal. Dennis Altman, Bundoora, Vic. A misleading approach Dear Editor, In his review of Margaret Pont’s book, Arthur Boyd and Saint Francis of Assisi, Luke Morgan states that the work is based on a thesis supervised by ‘the medievalist Margaret Manion’ (ABR, December 2005–January 2006). This is incorrect. The thesis was supervised by Dr Christopher Marshall, an art historian whose wide-ranging interests include sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian art, museum studies, and contemporary Australian art, both secular and religious. I was pleased to write the introduction to Margaret Pont’s book, since I was privileged to know the artist personally and have long been interested in his work. This detail is worth correcting since Dr Morgan’s thoughtful review refers to the problematic place and status of religion in modern art. Pont is a scientist of many years’ standing. She is an independent thinker, with a special interest in the influence of St Francis of Assisi on the life and work of Arthur Boyd. It would be misleading to deduce that her interpretation is based on a ‘medievalist’ approach, whatever that might be. Margaret Manion, Carlton, Vic. Text misses the point Dear Editor, I am grateful to Michael Williams for his response to my concern about the presentation by Text Publishing of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (Letters, ABR, December 2005–January 2006). He seems, however, to have missed the point of my query. I did not set out to review the novel, and I fully agree with him about the excellence of the dust-jacket design and the endpaper map; the black linson/cloth of the case is also an admirable quality, but without identification of the contents it might as well be the kind of sturdy memo-book one keeps in the kitchen to jot down recipes. If the paper jacket goes missing, the book will disappear on the shelf. Bold and unconventional this design may be, but it is at the expense of the author and the buyer. I went early to buy Kate Grenville’s new book in its first edition in keen anticipation of a first-class reading experience, and was not disappointed. I shall keep the volume and attempt to maintain its condition, not as monetary investment but as a novel I certainly intend to revisit. It is also an artefact of distinctive oddity. Jack Bradstreet, Hawthorn, Vic. Light years apart Dear Editor, Daniel Flitton’s review of the books about Australia’s position vis-à-vis the UN and the US made many useful points but misled readers with its suggestion that the UN charter of 1945 and the ANZUS treaty of 1951–52 came ‘from almost the same era’ (ABR, December 2005–January 2006). In political terms, these two events in Australia’s political history were light years apart. When the UN charter was being drafted in San Francisco, Australia’s Department of External Affairs, led by its minister, Dr. H.V. Evatt, was a prime mover in representing the interests of the middle-ranking nations. Evatt was recognised by the New York Times as being one of the world’s most influential peacemakers. He was elected president of the UN. The Department of External Affairs was a leading player in the settlement of the Dutch–Indonesian dispute. Australia was well on its way to becoming an important influence in regional Asian affairs. Then came the 1949 general election. The election of the Menzies–Fadden coalition government saw a retreat from Asia and a consolidation of our friendship with our great and powerful friends. The coalition government supported the old colonial powers and opposed Egypt’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal. There was never any thought given to the possibility of becoming a leader of the middle-ranking nations with no alliances with the existing power blocks. True, the Liberals, Nationals and ALP have long since changed their tune, but I think it is useful to recall that there was a time when Australia stood on its own two feet and declared bravely its support of self-determination, even at the expense of its own safety. As Barry Jones hinted in his letter published in the same issue, it is a shame that Australia can’t recover some of its lost spirit and find an honourable path that supports our own belief in ourselves and where we want to go. Val Wake, Port Macquarie, NSW (Dis)missing the point Dear Editor, If poetry is a ‘marginal’ area of reading in this country (Judith Bishop, Letters, ABR, May 2005), the situation seems unlikely to be reversed by reviews such as that of Yve Louis’ collection The Yellow Dress, by Michael Sariban (ABR, November 2005). Writing short poetry reviews is exacting. Slave away at getting your reading ‘right’, and the peculiar openness of poetry to divergent interpretations still leaves your review open to attributions of ‘wrong’-ness. It’s not such a painful state of affairs; on the contrary, it’s stimulating – pluralism rules, okay. However, when a poetry review comes across as predominantly lazy and perfunctory, the fun can go sour. My principal objection to Sariban’s review is to his use of the phrase ‘an exercise in archaism’ to dismiss the poem sequence ‘The Green Hood’, which is the centrepiece of The Yellow Dress. Tonally, ‘an exercise in archaism’ sounds like a judgment, yet it’s basically descriptive. The word ‘exercise’ gives it a judgmental colouring, but could equally be interpreted as a kind of flag, signalling the reviewer’s indifference – or inertia. Applied as critique to, say, Brenda Walker’s new novel (ABR, December 2005–January 2006) or to Shekar Kapur’s recent film of A.E.W. Mason’s early twentieth-century novel, The Four Feathers, the phrase ‘an exercise in archaism’ merely discloses its own emptiness. Yve Louis’ poem ‘The Green Hood’ deserves better than the nothing such ‘critical judgment’ leaves us with. Set in the Mogul courts of Agra, India, in the seventeenth century, ‘The Green Hood’ explores a relationship between a falcon and a falconer. Such a relationship has some inherent interest, if for no other reason than that it has a famous poetic ancestor in W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’, with its insistence that ‘the falcon cannot hear the falconer’. Contra Yeats, Louis’ poem tells us that falcon and falconer are in communication, and convincingly and movingly shows us how the power relationship involved entails power shifts; and further suggests that exercising power always includes the possibility of abject dependence on the object. Moreover, ‘The Green Hood’ raises the question as to how love might become part of and change such a relationship – but not necessarily resolve its difficulties. Louis makes a cogent, emotionally literate, persuasive and resonant poem out of this material, one that uses silence as effectively as it uses tightly evocative, prosodically musical lines. ‘The Green Hood’ is very much more than ‘an exercise in archaism’. Given poetry’s much-lamented marginality, I wish that Sariban had reviewed Louis’ collection, and particularly this fine poem, with a bit more attention, a bit more imagination, and, perhaps, with a few more readings of history under his belt. Kerry Leves, Katoomba, NSW Whipping boy Dear Editor, Could I seek the use of your correspondence column to correct an egregious error of attribution? In my editing of the poems of Sir John Medley, in Geoffrey Serle’s excellent memoir (1993), I wrongly credited a verse to Medley that was actually by Professor John Poynter. The quatrain goes: Percy Grainger’s lot is hard –Running dog of the avant garde,He’d rather be, if truth were said,Music’s whipping boy instead. Ray Marginson, Hawthorn, Vic. Noni Durack’s first novel Dear Editor, Christina Hill’s review of my novel Beyond the Legend: A Kimberley Story (ABR, November 2005) refers to it as my first novel. It is in fact my second. My first was The Interloper (Heinemann, London), set in the Gulf Country of north-west Queensland. It sold more than 4500 copies, and is now available in large print. Noni Durack, Toowoomba, Qld ABR welcomes letters from our readers. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. Letters and e-mails must reach us by the middle of the current month, and must include a telephone number for verification.

The greengrocer’s strategy

From the New Issue

The End of the Morning by Charmian Clift

‘Defeat Device’, a new poem by Lachlan Brown

Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets by Clair Wills

Crimes of the Cross: The Anglican paedophile network of Newcastle, its protectors and the man who fought for justice by Anne Manne

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