Commentary

Amazon is a company that seeks to carefully control its messaging. This is not surprising, since careful messaging is exactly what its ethical record suggests the company needs. Amazon has also, since its inception thirty years ago, embraced automation as a central component of its business model and workflow and sought to avoid any possibly unnecessary, which is to say open-ended or human, correspondence with business partners or customers. Thus, when a representative of Amazon declaims publicly, one can be assured that what is said has been considered.

From the outside, publishing might look like an industry invested in words, ideas, and the work of authors, and editors. But, as with other centres of cultural production such as universities, the neo-liberal ideologies of increased efficiency, deregulation, and higher returns have increasingly determined how books are made.

Last year, the European and International Book Federation revealed that Australia had lower reading and book buying rates than nineteen other countries. Only sixty-four per cent of Australians had purchased a book in the past twelve months, compared to an average of seventy-two per cent of people in the other countries.

How might we measure the value of a locally produced book? Or, in a more collective sense, how might we put a value on a local books and literary sector, one that is distinct from the larger English-language markets of the Northern Hemisphere and attentive to our own regional and cultural ways of being, doing, and belonging? What does value mean in the context of the local book? And on whose terms might it be expressed?

This week, on The ABR Podcast, we feature Sean Scalmer’s commentary ‘Albanese’s “Australian Way”: The rise of “progressive patriotism” and its complex past’. Scalmer investigates Albanese’s definition of the ‘Australian Way’, which ‘served as a touchstone on the campaign trail’, and asks what this ethos represents for the Labor government, particularly in the context of Australia’s complex history of labour reform.

Zoom in. The most unusual detail in this painting is the left hand, with tattooed dots carefully spaced across its back and knuckles. The fingers themselves are poorly done. The thumb and pointer are folded into the figure’s thick cloth folds, but the other three digits lie on the material like tapered slugs. Today they might be held up as evidence of AI image generation – bad hands are the quickest tell. In the eighteenth century, to the initiated, bad hands were a sign that the work came from the studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds.

This week, on The ABR Podcast, we feature ‘Deeper into darkness: Iran after the twelve-day war’. Australian journalist Zoe Holman writes on life in Iran after the recent twelve-day war, investigating whether conflict brought Iranians closer to democracy or further away from it.

‘To the victor belongs the spoils.’ The adage is attributed to William Macy, New York senator and defender of Jacksonian democracy. The aftermath of victory allows one to frame significance, settle scores, and proclaim lessons that will justify and guide a new government.

On the steps of Federal Parliament, a scrum assembled. Reporters jostled for position, enraged members of the public shouted over one another, advisers stood with faces drained of composure – even a comedian was caught in the fray. At the centre stood the tall and imposing figure of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, listening as the governor-general’s official secretary read the proclamation dissolving Parliament. The moment, instantly mythic, would be remembered as ‘the dismissal’ – the most audacious constitutional rupture in Australian history, one that continues to haunt democratic life half a century on.

This week, on The ABR Podcast, we feature Nathan Hollier’s commentary ‘“Come nearer to Asia”: Australia’s place at Bandung, 1955.’ Seventy years after the 1955 Asian-African Conference, Hollier reflects on Australia’s official absence from this historic ‘postcolonial moment’, as well as its unofficial presence.