The Australian book industry is in a state of considerable agitation as it waits to see if the federal government will scrap the parallel import restrictions of the Copyright Act.
Lifting the restrictions has been recommended by the Harper Committee and the Productivity Commission, and a decision could come next week, next month, or never.
These regulations restrict the importation of commercial quantities of books without the permission of the copyright holder. There is a strong sense of déjà vu in the current situation. Every few years since the 1980s a recommendation for repeal of these import restrictions has been put to the government of the day and every time the government, whether Coalition or Labor, has rejected it.
The arguments for doing away with them are based on simple economics. The restrictions provide some protection for authors and publishers in the face of international competition. The overall effect is to raise, at least temporarily, the price of books to Australian consumers, though the directly attributable cost increase is uncertain.
Nevertheless, any form of protection is anathema to economists as it distorts markets, creates inefficiencies in the allocation of our national resources, and restricts the access of consumers to cheaper supplies of products from abroad.
The cultural exception
So should books be treated differently from anything else? Books are a cultural product, and can be defined as such for the purposes of international trade. Ever since the structure of the world trading system was set up in the 1940s with the establishment of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the forerunner of the present-day World Trade Organisation, a special case for cultural goods and services has been recognised: the so-called “cultural exception”.
The principle behind this concept is the proposition that cultural products are not just commercial merchandise, but embody cultural values that are separate from and additional to their economic value. These cultural values, it is argued, can be shown to be important to society, especially when they represent something about the national culture from which they are derived.
Some hardline economists – including in the Productivity Commission – acknowledge the significance of Australian books to our culture. They’re willing to accept a role for the public sector in ensuring that the cultural contribution of the book industry is maintained, provided that the community agrees that such a role is worth paying for.
The argument here is that if Australian books generate a sufficient level of public-good benefit through their contribution to our collective cultural life – a contribution that cannot be purchased overseas, by the way – this may constitute a case of market failure. Government intervention to correct for it may be justified if the benefits from intervention outweigh the costs.
So far so good, you might think. But it is one thing to agree that some level of support for an industry is justified – and quite another to determine how such support might be provided.
Economists are likely to argue that instead of the blunt instrument of parallel import restrictions, whose beneficiaries may well include many of the “wrong” people, direct fiscal support would be more appropriate because it can be targeted at those who generate the public benefit, such as Australian authors.
Protection through fiscal channels?
If we accept this line of argument, and if the existence of public-good benefits from the Australian book industry is assumed, it can be argued that the best policy action in the present circumstances would be to remove the import restrictions, and replace them with an equivalent level of protection provided through fiscal channels, for example by increasing the levels of financial support provided to writers and publishers of Australian books.
Such a recommendation may have merit in principle, but in the realpolitik of the Australian government today it simply doesn’t stand up. Federal funding for the arts and culture sector has been under considerable pressure in recent years. Even more pointedly, the government last year signalled its attitude to supporting the book industry by abolishing the newly-established Book Council before it had even held its first meeting.
The possibility that the Government would approve a new budget allocation of any significance to compensate authors or publishers following removal of the import restrictions must be regarded as very remote indeed.
Some commentators have argued that import restrictions are a relatively minor issue, particularly when set against other more far-reaching copyright proposals such as the possible introduction of US-style fair dealing – a prospect that would have much more serious implications for the book industry. Nevertheless the recommendation is there, and needs a response.
What to do? To avoid a confrontation with an entire industry and to demonstrate a concern for the health of Australian cultural life, the government could either abolish parallel import restrictions and provide compensatory support for the production, distribution and consumption of Australian books, or it could leave things as they are.
As we have noted, successive Australian governments have in previous years accepted the latter as the appropriate practical and principled strategy. In its own interests, the present government would be well advised to do the same.
Children who do not learn to read in the first few years of schooling are typically destined to a school career of educational failure, because reading underpins almost all subsequent learning.
Even when exemplary reading instruction is available, there will always be some children who take longer than others to catch on to what reading is all about. It is important to identify these low-progress readers as early as possible so that they do not fall too far behind their peers.
We need a clear plan in place to ensure that no child falls through the net. Such a plan needs to be both effective and cost-effective.
A three tier model of reading instruction, known as Response to Intervention (or RtI) has become known in recent years as the best way of achieving this.
Kindergarten
The three tier RtI model is based on the first tier of exemplary, quality initial instruction in reading for all students during their first year of schooling.
The instruction offered to all children beginning school should be based on what internationally conducted scientific research has shown to be most effective.
To the layman, this sounds patently obvious but this is not what is currently the case in many Australian schools. For the last few decades an implicit model of reading instruction has held sway.
Most of this implicit approach to reading instruction makes a good bedrock to build effective reading instruction on. But it is not enough for every child to learn to read.
The majority of children will need direct, explicit and systematic instruction in the five pillars or “five big ideas” of reading instruction: phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.
What is often lacking in initial reading instruction, in particular, is effective instruction in what is known as synthetic phonics: specific instruction in how to relate letters to sounds and to blend letter sounds into words.
In New South Wales and some other states, many schools typically screen students at the beginning of year one for possible placement in Reading Recovery, one of the most well known and most widely utilised remedial reading program in the world.
Whatever the debate about the efficacy of Reading Recovery, it is necessarily very expensive. It is based on a daily, half hour, one-to-one session with a highly trained Reading Recovery teacher, for two or more terms.
The bottom 25 per cent
The RtI model recommends that struggling readers should be offered more intensive Tier 2 intervention in small groups of three to four students.
Again the instruction provided to these students is based on what the scientific research evidence has shown to be most effective.
In effect, this is essentially the same emphasis on the same five big ideas of reading instruction but it is both more intensive and more individualised. Teachers also need to be more responsive to the specific idiosyncratic needs of the students with whom they are working.
Research suggests that good small group instruction can be just as effective as one-to-one instruction.
However, even with a solid Tier 2 small group reading intervention in place for young low-progress readers, there will still be a very small number of students who “fail to thrive”, perhaps about 3 to 5 per cent of the total population of Year 1 students.
Intensive instruction
The small number of students whose reading problems seem to be more entrenched and who are resistant even to specialised intensive small group instruction are the ones who should receive Tier 3 one-to-one intensive reading instruction.
By now it will come as no surprise that the general nature of the instruction provided in a one-to-one Tier 3 intervention is exactly the same as offered at Tier 1 and Tier 2.
What is different is the intensity of instruction provided to this very small minority of students.
Because we have successfully taught the vast majority of Year 1 students the basics of learning to read by Tier 1 and where necessary, Tier 2 teaching, we can afford to provide these remaining students with the individual support they need.
Some of these students may need this support for some time, but this is a far more manageable proposition with a smaller number of students.
Monitoring progress
With this three tier Response to Intervention model in place, most, if not all, children will learn to read, given the necessary time and resources.
The RtI model does not stop at the end of Year 1. It’s important to monitor all students’ reading progress closely, especially for the first three years of schooling.
By following these models, it’s not too much to ask to expect all of our children to learn to read.
Teenagers with low reading levels, who went on to further education, don’t find it any harder to get a job at the age of 25, research shows.
At age 25, young Australians whose reading proficiency at age 15 was ranked low in the international literacy and numeracy test were employed at the same rates as those with higher levels of achievement.
For both the low (below level 3) and medium (level 3 and 4) reading proficiency groups, 58% were employed full-time, with a further 13-14% employed part-time.
Around one-third of Australian 15 year olds had low reading proficiency levels, with just over one half were in the medium proficiency group.
The study also found that low school achievers work in jobs that have similar expected lifetime earnings as the medium reading proficiency group.
The results are particularly surprising because it is well known from other research that poor reading skills in adulthood are associated with poorer employment prospects and work in low-paid jobs.
It seems that not every teenager with low reading proficiency necessarily becomes an adult with poor reading skills.
Investment in VET is the key
These results can be explained by high rates of participation in, and good outcomes from, Vocational Education and Training (VET) by those with low reading proficiency.
Around 58% undertook VET study, 15% higher education study and 14% both.
In contrast, those from the medium group focused more on higher education — 42% higher education, 36% VET and 15% both.
Those from the low proficiency group compensate for studying below bachelor-level VET qualifications by choosing courses that have good labour market prospects.
Compared to the medium group which did not complete a university degree, the low group chose initial VET courses that had 6% higher graduate earnings.
It is thought that those with low reading proficiency at age 15 explore VET options from an early age.
Given the large number of VET courses available – and the fact that most are designed to prepare students for specific occupations – early career exploration may mean the low proficiency group is better prepared to make course choices.
Our approach
Australia is one of only a handful of countries with the capacity to track outcomes of PISA participants through its Longitudinal Survey of Australian Youth (LSAY).
In comparing outcomes, we also controlled for a range of differences between the student groups that may confound the analysis, such as family socioeconomic and demographic background and grade level at age 15.
The results rely on the survey respondents at age 25 being representative of those first surveyed at age 15, which can be problematic if attrition rates are high, as they are here at around 75%.
In the paper, we report a number of supplementary analyses that indicate that the results are unlikely to be affected by non-random attrition. The results also do not appear to reflect particularly high levels of motivation or ambition among the low skill group members who remain in the survey.
Implications for schools and policy
Further education and training plays a role in up-grading the skills of individuals.
A study of a Canadian PISA cohort reported that when respondents were re-tested at age 24, the reading levels among those who had undertaken post-school studies had increased from their age 15 levels.
The findings in our research underlines the role that VET plays in providing opportunities for low-achieving school students to engage further in study and participate fully in a modern economy.
It also demonstrates the importance of course choice in shaping outcomes.
For schools and education departments, the message is to not only ensure access to VET, but also to support young people in making good course choices. Early career counselling is a step in this direction.
We stress that these results do not mean that academic achievement is unimportant. On the contrary, we find more marked differences in labour market outcomes at 25 between those with high reading proficiency (levels 5 and above), suggesting substantial returns to achievement among the most skilled.
There’s a new arrival on the dictionary scene – the much-anticipated second edition of the Australian National Dictionary, known fondly as AND.
As I recently wrote, these beautiful two volumes should certainly put to rest any fears people might have about the continued place of “tree-dictionaries” in an age of e-books and digital libraries.
These more than 16,000 Australianisms have generated lots of excitement – and not surprisingly. Words are the most observable part of any language and English-speakers seem fascinated by the ins and outs of expressions.
Look at the media attention when dictionaries announce the winner of their Word of the Year competition. There’s nowhere near the same excitement with other aspects of the language.
There were no breaking news stories when linguists announced developments affecting the conjunction “because” (for example, “I’ve been missing out on sleep because binge-watching Game of Thrones” or “I missed the ending because fell asleep”).
Dictionary editors are among the new celebrities, answering questions like: what is the longest word in the language? Is there a word to describe those who drink their own bathwater? How many words do speakers know? And, perhaps the thorniest question of all – when should new expressions enter the dictionary?
Vocabulary changes more than other aspects of language and lexicographers are constantly redrawing the exclusion boundary for marginal vocabulary items. “Yeah-no” has been around since the 1990s, but is only now appearing in dictionaries.
And while many original misspellings now have entries, such as “miniscule” (with its erroneous “i”) and even “nucular”, an entry for “accomodation” (with one “m”) seems a long way off.
It’s not easy for dictionary-makers. They are seen as the guardians of the language and when they take on board expressions like “yeah-no” and “nucular”, we hear howls about declining standards. Yet people will usually discard dictionaries if they don’t keep up-to-date.
Dictionary-making was more straightforward for early lexicographers, who sourced words almost exclusively from books. So, it was formal written language that typically made it into dictionaries.
Words were written on cards each time they were used and, when there was a substantial collection of cards, it could be established that a word was in general usage. So, they were largely respectable expressions, and anything that snuck under the radar would be well and truly branded (originally with symbols like asterisks or daggers, and later with more precise usage labels like “low”, “barbarous”, “vulgar”, as appeared in Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary).
These days it’s all very different. Lexicographers consider an array of different language forms, including newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, menus, memos, TV and radio broadcasts and, of course, emails, chat-room discussions and blogs.
So it’s not surprising to find that the informal aspect has been significantly boosted in the new-look AND. Of course, this reflects the strong attachment to the vernacular in Australia, but it’s also in keeping with the marked shift towards informal ways of speaking and writing generally – even public language is becoming progressively more casual and everyday.
So dictionaries are now much faster to take up “slanguage”. In the Collins Official Scrabble Words, even “innit” (“isn’t it”), “grrl” (“feisty female”) and “thang” (“thing”) have the stamp of approval. Once it could take years and years for such colloquialisms to appear in print, perhaps then to be picked up by lexicographers and placed in some dictionary — or perhaps never.
So like many other dictionaries these days, AND shows an assortment of distinguished entries and boisterous slang. Additions from the world of economics and politics, for example, include sedate terms-of-art (“aspirational voter”, “economic rationalism”, “negative gearing”, “scrutineer”) as well as colloquialisms (“keep the bastards honest”, “Hawkespeak”, “hip-pocket nerve”, “wombat trail”).
And the current editorial team has continued the AND tradition and not tagged these entries with labels like “colloquial” or “slang” (though “-ist” language is occasionally labelled derogatory).
So don’t believe the concerned hype that accompanied the 2014 edition of Tony Thorne’s Dictionary of Contemporary Slang. It added only three new Australianisms (“tockley” for “penis”, “ort” for “buttocks” and “unit” for “bogan”), prompting a frenzy of headlines like:
The rise and fall of Australian slang.
I’m not sure how Thorne missed “selfie”, Australia’s contribution to the international lexicon – after all, it was the Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year in 2013.
Articles expressed the fear that the glory days of Australian slang were over. AND should help to quell such fears – “hornbag”, “budgie smugglers”, “grey nomad”, “chateau cardboard” are among the many treasures you will find there.
Some of these entries appear so scruffy that you might wonder at the wisdom of the editors including them at all (“snot block”, “ranga”, “reg grundies”, “ambo”, “rurosexual”, “seppo”, “trackie daks”, “spunk rat”, “goon of fortune” come to mind). Of course, slang is in the eye of the beholder – even Samuel Johnson included a few (unbranded) personal favourites, like “belly timber” for “food”.
But in this case, you can take comfort in the fact that these expressions will have been tracked and meticulously analysed. They aren’t newly minted coinages and wouldn’t be there unless they “had legs”.
It seems to me almost impossible for printed dictionaries to keep up with the changing nature of vocabulary these days. People just love creating words.
In fact, scientists have recently discovered that learning the meaning of new words can stimulate exactly those same pleasure circuits in our brain as sex, gambling, drugs and eating, the pleasure-associated region called the ventral striatum.
The surge of excitement when we encounter a new word is the recently coined “neologasm”. And that really says it all.
A few years ago, I saw a series of Aboriginal paintings on a sandstone cliff face in the Northern Territory. There were characteristic crosshatched images of fat barramundi and turtles, as well as sprayed handprints and several human figures with spears. Next to them was a long gun, painted with white ochre, an unmistakable image of the colonisers. Was this an Indigenous rendering of contact? A work of history, no less?
I research historiography, the study of history writing. And just like that shaky rifle, painted onto a cave in northern Australia, each piece of history has a message and context that depends on who wrote it and when. As the US historian, Carl Becker, explained in his 1932 Presidential address to the American Historical Association, history
cannot be precisely the same for all at any given time, or the same for one generation as another.
You don’t need to go far to see Becker’s comments play out. Just think how Australian history has swirled and contorted over the years. The discipline continues to be hotly disputed, as historians, politicians and pundits of various persuasions stake a claim on the national narrative.
Should Australia Day be observed as a moment of celebration or survival? Should the Australian War Memorial include commemoration of the frontier wars? Should “invasion” be used to describe British colonisation? Taken together, these so-called “history wars” confirm the contested politics of collective memory.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten attend a Last Post ceremony at the Australian War Memorial earlier this year. Should the Memorial commemorate the frontier wars? AAP/Mick Tsikas
Such disputes also hint at powerful historiographical shifts across generations. Debates over Australian history aren’t simply ideological, but also disciplinary, and reflect the historical challenges wrought by changing approaches to the past. Take this passage from Ernest Favenc’s 1888 history of Australian exploration:
The white man, when he came, looked upon the country as he would upon uninhabited land.
Or this, from GV Portus, in his ubiquitous text for Australian schoolchildren, Australia Since 1606, first published in 1932:
From 1644 to 1770 the story of Australian discovery is dark night, broken only by one faint gleam.
History isn’t just about understanding what happened and why. It’s also a powerful discipline that reflects the persuasions, politics and prejudices of its authors.
Challenging the silence
Each iteration of Australia’s national story reveals not only the past in question, but also the guiding concerns and perceptions of each generation of history makers.
Historiography reveals the historical process as a “hermeneutic and dialogic enterprise”, writes Bain Attwood, an interpretative relationship that is up for review with each historical reading. That constant urge of historical revision is “an attempt to find a deeper contemporary meaning in the past”, adds Don Watson.
Favenc and Portus’s early historical readings can be clearly dated by the era of their writing and publication. While the idea that Australia was effectively without history prior to European “discovery” has been well and truly replaced, the sense that history-writing should document a nation’s inexorable progress was dominant from the mid-19th century until about the 1960s.
An illustration titled ‘Native Habitation’ in the 1846 book Discoveries in Australia. wikimedia commons
In fact, that period of Australian historiography has come to be defined by its lens of national advancement, where Australia was located in an affirming arc of British Imperialism. That narrative content was further bolstered by the methods and infrastructure of the history discipline, which privileged the written record and were consequently located in archives, libraries and universities (themselves imperial institutions).
For a settler-colonial society founded on the dispossession of Indigenous people, their omission was a telling oversight. Dispossessed from their country, Indigenous people were in turn dispossessed from Australian historiography. It was, in the words of the anthropologist, W.E.H. Stanner, our “Great Australian Silence”, and his phrase has come to characterise the nation’s own historiographical “dark ages”.
Since Stanner’s famous 1968 Boyer Lectures, the question of how to respond to that infamous historical silence has been approached in various ways. Historians such as Henry Reynolds tried to see the Other Side of the Frontier (1981).
Others, such as Peter Read, Lyndall Ryan and Raymond Evans wrote histories confirming what Indigenous people already understood, that settler-colonialism was far from the simple story of progress and advancement. And part of their historical method – the recognition of Indigenous testimony and oral history sources – was a challenge to traditional historical research methods, which depended on written primary sources.
More recently, Nicholas Clements literally divided his history of the Tasmanian Black War in two, in an ambitious attempt to reconstruct in writing the intractable “contact zone” of the Australian colonial frontier. Such research has been amplified by the work of Indigenous historians, such as Steve Kinnane, Noel Pearson and Larissa Behrendt, who have pressed for the inclusion of new historical lenses to read between the lines of colonial sources.
The influence of these historians’ research cannot be underestimated. Even in the 1950s, Portus’s book for young Australians was still the go-to text for thousands of schoolchildren around the country. There wasn’t an Indigenous perspective in sight.
Yet over the course of barely one generation, Australian history texts went from the casual inclusion of Aboriginal people as “stone age” snapshots to a concerted acknowledgement of Indigenous perspectives. It was a wholesale historiographical reimagining of Australia’s national story.
Different stories
The question I’m increasingly puzzling over, however, is whether that earlier silence extended beyond the academy? Historians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries might have been actively erasing the impact of settler-colonial society on Indigenous people in Australia – but what about different national storytellers? Were there other, metaphorical guns, like that one on the rock face in Kakadu, historians were missing?
Certainly, the sound of colonial violence and Aboriginal dispossession was ringing loud and clear in Judith Wright’s poem Nigger’s Leap, New England. Published in 1945, it’s based on the story of an Aboriginal massacre told to Wright by her father, and is a powerful antidote to Australian historiography of the time. She writes:
Make a cold quilt across the bone and skull/that screamed falling in flesh from the lipped cliff/and then were silent, waiting for the flies.
Did we not know their blood channelled our rivers,/and the black dust our crops ate was their dust?
Her words are a stark contrast to the ebullient nationalist text of Russell Ward’s Australian Legend, published thirteen years later.
Eleanor Dark’s novel, The Timeless Land (1941), is another powerful example. In it, Dark tries to capture the cultural clash between the Eora people and the British colonisers in early Sydney. This is historical fiction to be sure, but as Tom Griffiths has argued in his stunning collection of essays on Australian history The Art of Time Travel, Dark deserves recognition as a historian for the work she did, and her impact on Australians’ historical consciousness.
That doesn’t mean historians should be freewheeling away from the conventions of truth-seeking and critical inquiry. But as Griffiths intimates in his recent book, the relationship between history and fiction is surely more a dance than a clash, despite the heated debate over Kate Grenville’s historical novel, The Secret River. And historians who ignore the potential of fiction to imagine their way into some of those undocumented encounters diminish their own historical imaginations, he concludes.
Cast members in the 2013 Sydney Theatre Company production of The Secret River. AAP/Heidrun Lohr
Consider the Indigenous writer Mudrooroo’s famous inversion of the journals of the Aboriginal Protector, G.A. Robinson. His fictionalised account of colonisation in Tasmania is grounded in the archive, yet written from the perspective of an Aboriginal Tasmanian, Dr Wooreddy. It was an imaginative leap reminiscent of Eleanor Dark’s, made all the more powerful by its Aboriginal authorship.
And if we extend our historical reading beyond the written word, what about the power of protest to mobilise new historical narratives, such as the 1938 Day of Mourning? While the rest of Sydney honoured the sesquicentenary of British colonisation, this dignified demonstration at Australia Hall on Elizabeth Street was a reminder that many Indigenous people had nothing to celebrate.
The last walkers come off the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the 2000 Sorry Walk. AAP/Dave Hunt
These historical “moments” have the capacity to shift the tenor of Australia’s national story, as Paul Keating’s 1992 Redfern Park speech and the Sorry Day Walk across the Harbour Bridge in 2000 attest. I wonder if they can also constitute a kind of history – not written, to be sure – of Australia’s past?
Testing the boundaries
Working outside the cultural economy of the canon opens up new possibilities for historical engagement. This isn’t a new idea, by any means. Feminist and postcolonial scholars have demonstrated that the past can be embodied on its own subjects. Histories of motherhood, the Holocaust, migration, colonisation, sexuality, and slavery play out corporeally. Environmental historians and archeologists have further argued that the archives aren’t simply buildings with microfilm readers, but are all around us.
I will never forget the sight of that painted gun, or the piercing gaze of a Jawoyn figure looking out from a cave across a remote valley near Nitmiluk Gorge. They were historical reminders of the providence of Indigenous stories of those places more affecting than any history text. Yet the question of whether rock art or fiction can enter the corpus of Australian historiography remains hotly contested.
The cave on the Jatbula Trail, near Nitmiluk Gorge. author provided
International studies have increasingly recognised the need to broaden our conception of historiography to reflect the many ways we make history, and consume it. German historian Stefan Berger notes
the importance of other genres to the evolution and shaping of national narratives.
The influential German historical philosopher, Jörn Rüsen, similarly advocates a much wider definition of historical practice: “History is much more than only a matter of historical studies”, he maintains. “It is an essential cultural factor in everybody’s life.”
I argue that there is a similar need in Australia to expand and reconceptualise our understanding of historiography in order to recognise that history is frequently captured and made outside the academy – in fiction, poetry, art and even beyond the public domain altogether, such as local and family histories.
The rock painting, complete with painted gun, in full. Author provided
I think my partner learnt more about Australia’s colonial history watching the ABC mini-series of Grenville’s Secret River than he had ever read in the pages of a history book. Judging by the sales of the book and the reception of its serialisation, I’m sure he’s not alone.
Given that, there is an obligation on historians to try and understand the methods and contexts of these colloquial histories and to contemplate their influence.
The ethical implications for testing the boundaries of the history discipline are also implicit in this project. The act of “silencing” pushed Indigenous perspectives between the lines of Australian history-writing until the second half of the twentieth century, but these narratives were kept alive in Indigenous communities through stories, material culture and oral history.
While the sources of these narratives were frequently humble, intimate and far removed from any written archive, they fundamentally changed Australian history when they finally gained wider scholarly recognition from the 1970s.
If the incorporation of everyday Indigenous narratives into the canon of historiography interrupts the Great Australian Silence invoked by Stanner and others, what other assumptions about Australian history might be broken down by expanding its disciplinary boundaries?
Obviously, not all quotidian historical discourses can be included in this thing we call historiography: as the late US historian Michael Kammen reminds us, not every act of nostalgia or remembrance is an act of history-making.
Nevertheless, recognising the potential of those historical readings to bridge some of the gaps in our historical canon is surely a conversation that historians need to have. To do so requires recognition of the complex relationship between scholarship, public histories and vernacular history-making in any historiographical analysis.
The question is how? How to extend Australian historiography into the fields of public memory and popular histories alongside academic and official public narratives? How to include sites of silence and absence with the historical record? How to recognise the impact of local and family narratives on the national narrative?
These questions might shake up our understandings of how Australian history is made and consumed, but they don’t mean foregoing the practice of scholarly, archival research. I’m not advocating that we need to make stuff up to fill in the gaps. That would only add unhelpful fuel to an already unhelpful history war. Instead, I’m interested in what vernacular epistemologies of history can add both to our understanding of the past and the discipline itself.
The literary calendar is marked by big public events: writers festivals, book fairs, and the announcements first of shortlists and then of winners of major literary awards. For Australian writers and readers, the Miles Franklin is a lodestone, our Big Award – the one that celebrates not just writing, not just fiction, but particularly and peculiarly Australian writing.
Since 2013 that award has been accompanied by the second literary award to be named for Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin: the Stella Prize, established to recognise women’s contribution to Australian literature.
This year, it seems to me, the Miles Franklin shortlist entirely honours the founder of the award, not only because four of the five novelists are women, but also because each of the novels, in their own idiosyncratic and nuanced ways, reflects and represents Australian life, presenting as that “indigenous literature” (Franklin’s term) that prevents people from being “alien in their own soil”.
The novels do not, though, offer a comfortable or consoling rendition of Australian life: if anything, they turn their lenses on alienation, and on the weight of the ordinary occasions of everyday life, as well as the larger scale complexities of, say, the socio-political landscape, that bear down on individuals.
This makes them sound a bit “worthy” and “serious”: novels that take as their task the imperative to instruct readers about The Human Condition. But in fact each is remarkably readable; each writer has a wonderful sense of story and its elements: character, pacing, setting and yes, even plot. Any would be a worthy recipient of this prestigious award, to be announced Friday night.
Let me tiptoe through them in alphabetical order.
Hope Farm by Peggy Frew
Hope Farm (2015) by Peggy Frew. Scribe
Peggy Frew’s Hope Farm is set in 1985 Gippsland. It is narrated by Silver, daughter of Ishtar who – pregnant as a teenager – fled the petit bourgeois morality of 1970s Queensland that would have forcibly removed her baby from her, for the uncertain support of a local ashram. The story unfolds on the ironically misnamed Hope Farm, a communal property occupied mainly by feckless incompetents. Ishtar and Silver may be misfits, but they are neither feckless nor incompetent; and their arrival, along with that of Ishtar’s new man Miller, initiates an unravelling of that decaying place, that compromised community.
There are the expected conflicts – children vs adults; bullies vs bullied; male vs female; parent vs child – but they are delivered with a clarity and tenderness that takes readers beyond the surface impression of, say, snotty child, or slovenly adult, to the fullness, the complexity, of any individual, or group of individuals. I wouldn’t dream of saying “redemption” in relation to this novel – and indeed this is not a redemptive story in the classical sense – but it does offer a stage on which Silver, and her equally misplaced friend Ian, and her shining, glorious, damaged mother Ishtar, can begin to feel their way beyond mere survival, and toward a more endurable life
Leap by Myfanwy Jones
Leap (2015) by Myfanwy Jones. Allen & Unwin
With Leap Myfanwy Jones has crafted a lyrical account of mourning, and the long, lonely, difficult work of building sufficient scar tissue over the wounds of bereavement to allow mourners the possibility of moving on. Much of this work is couched in terms of physical being: the parkour through which Joe, muted by the death of his girlfriend Jen, is feeling his way back into the world; or the stillness and compulsive observation, that Jen’s mother, Elsie uses as her connection to memories of her daughter, to the idea of being alive.
Cats are important metaphors in this novel: the cat leap that Joe is learning to perform; the tigers that have captured Elsie’s imagination; the “catlike containment” of the mysterious nurse who moves into the spare room in Joe’s share house; Jen’s intention to have tiger stripes tattooed on her leg. Cats as a way of thinking about being: it worked for me. The novel is moving; the language poetic; the morphology of grief very believable.
Black Rock White City by AS Patric
Black Rock White City (2015) by AS Patric. Transit Lounge Australia
With Black Rock White City we are again in the company of grief: loss, bereavement, trauma. Of the central characters, AS Patric’s narrator says, “Neither of them is sure about the present but this is some sort of afterlife”. Jovan and Suzana, refugees from the war in Sarajevo, have left their lives behind, along with the bodies of their little children: “Their names were Dejan and Ana. And there’s nothing more that can be said about the dead that doesn’t make them small, lost and forgotten”.
They are living now in the sort of afterlife you find in mythology: grey, and sad, and haunted by the shades of all they have lost. Even Jovan’s name has been lost in this new country (“Jo … Ja … Joh-von. Ja-Va. Ah fuck it, we’ll call you Joe”). But of course we never entirely lose, or escape, our past. The idea of war has come with them; Dr Graffito, who defaces the walls of the hospital with violent phrases, is a metaphor as well as an actuality of violence and death. But Patric does not leave Suzana and Jovan there; slowly, tenderly, they begin to emerge into this new country and all its possibilities.
Salt Creek by Lucy Treloar
Salt Creek (2015) by Lucy Treloar. Pan Macmillan Australia
Lucy Treloar’s Salt Creek treads the sort of ground broken a few years ago by Kate Grenville and her Secret River. Set in the Coorong in South Australia, peopled by the Finches – a large and ever-expanding family whose father cannot find the balance between ideal and action – it’s narrated by Hester, the eldest daughter and the one who is required to provide the through line for the family: including cooking and cleaning and supporting her depressed mother and caring for the little children.
What I found compelling was not the story of Hester’s endurance, but rather the way Treloar depicts the relationship between the local people and the Finches: the stupidity and carelessness, the casual brutality, with which the settlers treat the Indigenous owners of land to which they have laid claim; and the way some of the Finch children begin to connect, however inadequately, with some of the local people. One of the rare sunny spots in the novel is provided by Tully, a local youth, who is adored both by Addie, Hester’s lighthearted sister, and Fred, her artist brother. And yes, it ends in tears. Indeed, this particular colonial adventure generally ends in betrayal, brokenness and disappointment; but to say this so bluntly is to ignore the beauty of the language, the lightness with which the historical context is carried by the story, and the vivid presence of the physical environment, which is as fully realised as are the central characters.
The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood
The Natural Way of Things (2015) by Charlotte Wood. Allen & Unwin
Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things, in equal parts captivated and appalled me. Built out of the actuality of the Hay Institution for Girls, an institution established for the punitive constraint of adolescent “offenders”, this novel operates as a dystopic fable of the control of women and women’s sexuality. The ten young women who suffer “the natural way of things” have all been the subjects of very public sexual scandals. They have been kidnapped and enslaved and brutalised by the agents of a vaguely identified corporation, Harding International.
Their heads shaved, their clothes exchanged for heavy boots and rough dresses, and their eyes and arms under constraints, the women find themselves “abducted right into the middle of the nineteen fucking fifties”. The necessarily “bald and frightened girls” and their dull abusive captors gradually adapt to this bizarre life, in a Waiting for Godot situation where day after day Harding International fails to arrive. But how does anyone adapt to the impossible: to authorised misogyny, to absent rights? They don’t, of course; they simply find ways to accommodate themselves to it.
In those accommodations we see the crippling of selves; the ambiguous comfort of friendship; the giving over of personal values for tiny physical ease. While there are fleeting gestures toward a sense of sisterhood, only two characters really come out of it with any honour: Yolanda, betrayed by her beloved brother, named “lunatic”, but able to hunt and kill, and thus to keep everyone alive, for a time; and Verla, who is able to use her brain, and thus to some extent keep them comparatively functional. It is gruelling to read, shattering. It is important.
Novels build in their readers a capacity for empathy, we are told. These five novels do precisely that, and besides are lovely to read – each writer has a feeling for sentences and phrases, and has built in such narrative traction that I read them at a gulp, emerging only at the end, blinking, before returning to the everyday. These novels are scored through by sensitivity, clarity, and a ruthless generosity of voice, and feel their way into character, into ethical complexities, and into the small and large ways our society creaks on.
For a prime example of Australia’s innovation economy in action, look no further than the humble picture book. Staple of bedtime reading, offering textual delights beyond the verbal, picture books are a hidden treasure.
Australian picture books sell around the world, and are translated into many languages — take for instance, Jackie French’s iconic Diary of a Wombat (2002), which appears in French, German, Korean, and many more. But though the words need translating, the images, (in French’s book by Bruce Whatley), communicate across language barriers.
The interplay between words and images is one of the magic ingredients in a show-stopping picture book. Achieving that magic requires serious innovation. Writers, illustrators and editors work hard to balance word with image, and to carry the story or message through both.
It takes time, dedication, and care to make a picture book, and though some may be flipped through in minutes, others repay repeated reading and looking. Next time you pick one up in a bookshop or library, look at its design, the way the pictures engage with character, or setting, or contribute to mood, theme, and the controlling idea.
Dirty Dinsoaur by Janeen Brian Viking
Ann James’s illustration of I’m a Dirty Dinosaur (2013) (text Janeen Brian) is a recent example. James’s lively dinosaur invites children in to the story, acting out the rhymes:
I’m a dirty dinosaur
with a dirty snout.
I never wipe it clean
I just sniff and snuff about.
Simple but evocative line drawings of this muddy dinosaur (made using Victorian mud!) connect beautifully with the energy of the rhymes, and provide young readers with visually engaging and memorable ideas.
Kevin Burgemeestre’s wonderful handmade dioramas on the cover of the recent Hush Treasure Book (2015) show that illustrations don’t have to be drawn to be lively and vivid. Indeed, in another of his books, B is for Bravo (2003), they provide a realistic but imaginative romp through an excitingly three-dimensional alphabet of Australian Aviation.
Illustrators conduct specific research to find just the right images for particular stories. Anne Spudvilas’s illustrations for the picture book version of Li Cunxin’s Mao’s Last Dancer (2003) use traditional watercolour, and collage from old newspapers, to convey the wealth and variety of Chinese culture.
Experimentation, consultation, imagination, teamwork and individual interpretation are the name of the game. And they demonstrate the incredible care writers and illustrators take to make books that speak to the text, and to the reader. You can see Ann James talk here about how she conveys emotion in collaboration with the author:
Jeannie Baker, meanwhile, takes collage to its highest level in her carefully crafted books. Her Window (1991), and Where the Forest Meets the Sea (1987) use layered and detailed images and to convey a powerful environmental message.
Sometimes words are unnecessary. Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2007) tells a moving story about immigration through sepia pictures arranged as if in an old photo album. Any words would break the spell cast by these pictures, which call for a slow and thoughtful reading. Indeed, the only words that appear in the book are in a made-up font. Their unrecognisability symbolises the challenges facing new immigrants who have yet to learn the local language.
Gregory Rogers’s comic wordless story The Boy, the Bear, the Baron, the Bard (2004) is a wonderful contrast. Full of pace, fun, and historical detail, in company with the boy, bear and baron of the title, it takes us through the streets and theatres of Elizabethan London, pursued by the bard.
The Arrival by Shaun Tan Hodder & Stoughton
And Nick Bland challenges the form of the picture book altogether, with The Wrong Book (2009), in which monsters, pirates, royalty and animals intrude on the protagonist’s attempts to tell a story. (It’s available as a lovely app)
I’ve only touched on a few of the many wonderful Australian creators of picture books for young (and not so young) readers. Next time you read one (to yourself or to others), you could think about the innovation economy that is the illustration industry. But hopefully, and more likely, you could settle back and enjoy the story – words, images, and all.
This week is Children’s Book Week. And the Children’s Book Council of Australia will announce a swag of prizes in various award categories, including picture books.
The University of New England has hosted many illustrators over the years through a Copyright Agency Cultural Fund supported residency program. The work they did is on display at the University Library.
A new edition of the Australian National Dictionary has just been published. It contains 16,000 words and while the first edition (published in 1988) included about 250 words from 60 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages, the latest has more than 500 words from 100 languages.
Conventional wisdom has it that borrowings of this kind usually occur in the initial “contact” period. In 1770, for instance, James Cook and Joseph Banks collected the word kangaroo from the Guugu Yimithirr language in the area now known as Cooktown in Queensland, and it immediately came into use in English.
Soon after the initial batches of convicts arrived in Sydney from 1788 onwards, words from local languages were taken up, especially for new flora and flora and for things associated with the Indigenous people: koala, wallaby, kurrajong, waratah, woomera, corroboree. Later, the language of the Perth area provided jarrah, kylie (a word for “boomerang”), numbat, and quokka. The language of the Geelong area provided the mythical monster the bunyip.
The Indigenous word waratah was quickly adopted. Internet archive book image/flickr
Some Aboriginal words, although noted in the early period, were not used widely in Australian English until much later. Perhaps the most startling example of this is the word quoll, which comes from the Guugu Yimithirr language, and was also collected by Cook and Banks in 1770.
When the Europeans arrived in 1788, they did not use quoll or other Indigenous names for these marsupials. Instead, they used the term native cat, preferring to construct terms based on superficial resemblances to things of their “known” world. It wasn’t until the 1960s that quoll was reintroduced, and eventually replaced native cat, largely due to the efforts of the naturalist David Fleay, who highlighted the absurdity of some of the vernacular names for Australian animals.
It took nearly 200 years for the word quoll to be widely used. WA Department of Parks and Wildlife/AAP
Many of the new Aboriginal words in this edition refer to flora and fauna, and many of these result from an interest in using Indigenous names rather than imposed English descriptive ones.
Thus, the southern and northern forms of the marsupial mole are now referred to by their Western Desert language names itjaritjari and kakarratul. The rodent once called the heath mouse is now known by its indigenous name dayang, from the Woiwurrung language of the Melbourne area. The amphibious rodent formerly known as water rat, is now more commonly referred to in southern Australia as the rakali, from the Ngarrindjeri language.
Other additions to the dictionary include (from the Noongar language of the Perth area) balga for the grass tree, coojong for the golden wreath wattle, moitch for the flooded gum and moort for Eucalyptus platypus.
Coojong, formerly known as golden wreath wattle. liesvanrompaey/flickr, CC BY
The increasing interest in bush tucker has meant the inclusion of akudjura for the bush tomato, from the Alyawarr language of the southern region of the Northern Territory, and gubinge, from Nyul Nyul and Yawuru of northern Western Australia, for an edible plum-like fruit.
Other new terms reflect a renewed interest in aspects of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture and various kinds of activism on the part of Indigenous peoples.
They include bunji, “a mate, a close friend a kinsman” (from Warlpiri and other languages of the Northern Territory and northern Queensland), boorie, “a boy, a child” (from Wiradjuri), jarjum, “a child” (from Bundjalung), kumanjayi, “a substitute name for a dead person” (from Western Desert language), pukamani “a funeral rite” (from Tiwi), rarrk “a cross-hatching design in art” (from Yolngu languages), tjukurpa, “the Dreaming; traditional law” (from Western Desert language) and yidaki, “a didgeridoo” (from Yolngu languages).
Performance of a Yidaki Didg and Dance at Sydney Opera House in 2000. Adam Pretty/AAP
The word migaloo – “a white person” – comes from Biri and other northern Queensland languages, where it originally meant “a ghost, a spirit”; many Australians are familiar with this word as a name for the albino humpback whale that migrates along the east coast of Australia.
Author provided
Many of these terms begin their transition to mainstream Australian English in forms of Aboriginal English, and some of them are primarily used in Aboriginal English.
In addition to the words from Indigenous languages, there are numerous terms new to the dictionary that render Indigenous concepts and aspects of traditional culture, formed from the resources of English.
These include such terms as: carved tree, dreamtime being, freshwater people, keeping place, law woman, paint up, saltwater people, secret women’s business, smoking ceremony, songline, sorry business, welcome to country.
A smoking ceremony at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra earlier this year. Mick Tsikas/AAP
Others derive from more specific political contexts and political activism: Day of Mourning, great Australian silence, Invasion Day, Mabo, tent embassy, traditional ownership and white blindfold (“a view of Australian history that emphasises the achievements of white society and ignores Aboriginal society”).
This is a dictionary based on historical principles. This means that each entry maps the full history of a word, establishing its origin, and documenting its use over time with illustrative quotations from books, newspapers, and the like. Words and meanings are included if they are exclusively Australian, or used in Australia in special or significant ways.
The dictionary, edited at the Australian National Dictionary Centre at the Australian National University, and published by Oxford University Press, will be launched today at Parliament House in Canberra.
On 8 June, with less than a month before the 2016 election, the arts advocacy group ArtsPeak staged a national debate on the topic of arts policy. Minister for Communications and the Arts Mitch Fifield, Shadow Minister for the Arts and Shadow Attorney General Mark Dreyfus, and the Greens’ spokesperson for the arts, Adam Bandt, spoke to the question: “What’s your vision for Australia’s arts and culture and what’s your plan for making this happen?”
As each took the stage, he expressed the conventional encomiums about the arts (it’s good for you, it’s good for the economy, it’s good for the country). There is some validity to this view. The Australia Council for the Arts shows that this sector contributes four per cent of our GDP: more than agriculture, forestry and fishing combined.
When it comes to social and cultural wellbeing, the data is also convincing. The majority of Australians (85%) report that art provides them with a richer and more meaningful life; and a majority of Australians report that they read literature (87%).
This supports the politicians’ comments about the value of art to the community and the economy. However, very few individual creators get much economic benefit from their contribution to the arts sector; and this brings us to the second focus of the politicians’ comments: which was to affirm the inherent value of art.
This is a view that sails close to the 19th century doctrine of “l‘art pour l’art” —that art must be without purpose if it is to have purpose.
These two lines of thought bring to light the complexity of art, and the contradictory roles it plays. On the one hand, art is a space of autonomous practice, where creators make their work free from political or economic or other imperatives.
On the other hand, it is an important site for the making and selling of commodities, for the representation of national identity, and for contributions to employment and GDP and social wellbeing. We must make art, for art’s sake; we must contribute to the society in which we find ourselves.
And, to add a degree of difficulty, writers and other artists must support themselves financially. But, as David Throsby and colleagues have demonstrated, Australian writers earn less than $13,000 a year from their creative work, which doesn’t cover even basic living expenses.
The best way to fund yourself is to ensure you have wealthy parents; or try to win the Lotto. More practically, it is possible to make a living as a generalist, producing advertising copy, politicians’ speeches, didactic panels for cultural institutions et al. But this sort of portfolio career is characterised by precarity and deep economic insecurity. Selling a story here, picking up a short-term contract there: it’s not a good option for anyone wanting to support themselves.
It is possible to make a living, too, writing marketable genre fiction — or more than a living. A truism attributed to James Michener is:
A writer can make a fortune in America, but he can’t make a living.
Ian Rankin, an extremely successful crime novelist, says that it took 14 years of writing and publishing before he began to see financial returns. JK Rowling did indeed make a fortune, but her experience is akin to winning the Lotto: that is, not likely (the chance of winning was recently estimated at one in 8,145,060).
If neither the precarious life nor the genre fiction life appeal, a further alternative is to find a steady job doing … well, almost anything.
If this is your choice, you will enter what Bernard Lahire calls “the double life of writers”. In one of those lives you will enjoy stability and continuity, along with freedom from economic want and precarity. But in your other life — your writing life — your daily job spent working as teacher or public servant or taxi driver will eat into the time, and the emotional and intellectual energy required, to write literary works.
Of course there may be little in the matter. Even Richard Flanagan, one of our top literary authors, contemplated taking a job in the mines just to make ends meet; and his earnings from the much-awarded The Narrow Road to the Deep North are unlikely to sustain him for the rest of his life.
This is a bleak picture for anyone eager to build a life as a writer. But the impossible contradiction at the heart of writing, between the imperative to make art and the counter-imperative to make a living, is one that many writers tackle, successfully.
Australia has an impressive list of writers, both experienced and emerging, who maintain a commitment to their creative practice. It’s not for everyone; but if you must write, you will find a way to do it.
Odd rules can help shape a writing prize’s long-term character in wonderful ways. But that’s not the case with the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, set up by the Rudd government and first awarded in 2008. (In 2012, they also took in the PM’s Prize for Australian History, which John Howard had begun.)
The expanded awards — with separate categories for fiction, non-fiction, Australian history, poetry, YA and children’s books and a winner’s prize money of A$80,000 tax free — should be well-placed to be our pre-eminent national literary awards. Instead, they bob on the vast sea of daily politics, occasionally getting dumped by a breaker.
As Colin Steele, a former judge of the non-fiction award recently suggested, the issues facing the Awards include Prime Ministerial interventions in deciding winners, the appointment and treatment of judges, and the quality and focus of publicity and marketing.
I’d add that the name doesn’t help: almost anything — from the silly (The Oi Oi Oi’s?) to the prosaic (National Book Awards?) — would be preferable to the current one.
But the key flaw in the Awards’ guidelines is this:
The Prime Minister makes the final decision on the awarding of the Awards, taking into account the recommendations of the judges.
In 2014, meanwhile, the fiction judges chose Steven Carroll’s A World of Other People (2013), a novel about TS Eliot and London during the blitz, as the winner. But then PM Tony Abbott intervened to make Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013) a joint winner. Years earlier, in 2006 (before the wider PM’s Literary Awards existed), John Howard had intervened to make Les Carlyon’s The Great War (2006) a co-winner of the History Prize.
Tony Abbott awarding Richard Flanagan the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2014. Mr Abbott intervened to make Mr Flanagan a joint winner. AAP Image/Joe Castro
The lack of transparency around these awards is palpable. Should a Prime Minister intercede for purely literary reasons? Or are political reasons fine? Or “history war” reasons? Or local constituency reasons? Or personal reasons?
Can a PM reject a winner because of a cover image or an epigraph? Is a PM who wishes to intercede obliged to read all the shortlisted books? Can a PM “call in” a book that hasn’t made the shortlist or isn’t in competition?
In the meantime, judges engage in delicate debate and compromise amongst themselves, without knowing if they are actually choosing the winner. This is no clearly-defined two-tiered process – with one panel choosing a shortlist and another panel the winning book, as happens with the Pulitzer Prize. This is arbitrary.
Other complaints about the judging process have dogged the Awards. Senator George Brandis claimed in 2014 that the Labor-chosen panels lacked balance, as no judges were “conservative or even liberal democratic”. He suggested that that his government instead aimed for “balanced panels”, citing as examples Gerard Henderson as chair of the non-fiction and history panel (“conservative”) and Louise Adler as chair of the fiction and poetry panel (“a woman of the left”).
At around the same time as Brandis was complaining about past judges, Morry Schwartz and Chris Feik from Black Inc. protested the choice of Henderson as a judge:
Henderson has a history of incessant and obsessive criticism of leading Australian writers and commentators with whom he disagrees politically … His appointment politicises what has until now been an apolitical award based on merit.
I happen to disapprove of Gerard Henderson’s politics, to the limited extent that I understand them. But any isolated scrutiny of a single judge mainly demonstrates the susceptibility of the awards to the politics of the moment, including the more tedious elements of the culture wars.
In any writing competition, a judge arrives with personal, political and literary baggage, preoccupations and biases. But judges also, ideally, bring a commitment to identifying and rewarding excellence that transcends their personal politics and previous public statements.
In turn, the judges’ collective decisions should provoke productive and passionate disagreement on literary, cultural and political grounds. In other words, in calling for changes to the PM’s Literary Awards, I am not seeking a saccharine or apolitical outcome. A prize’s idiosyncrasies can help define it.
For example, the flawed but magnificent legacy of the Miles Franklin Literary Award stems in large part from Franklin’s inspired stipulation that the winning novel (or play, if no novel measures up) should not only be of the “highest literary merit” but “must present Australian Life in any of its phases”.
The stipulation within the PM’s Literary Awards that a Prime Minister has the final say about winners is equally defining: it compromises the Awards’ credibility, purpose and depth.
That stipulation must go, without delay. To function effectively, the Awards need entrenched breathing space from the government that funds them. They need an unambiguous mandate: what are these Awards for?
And they need transparency. In the context of questioning Henderson as judge, Schwartz and Feik called for a published list of all entries received. In the spirit of critically celebrating the breadth of Australian writing, the PM’s Literary Awards – indeed, all major Australian book prizes – should embrace this suggestion.
If this eventuates, what happens next may well depend on whether the Prime Minister is Malcolm Turnbull or Bill Shorten … or perhaps even, by then, a reawakened Tony Abbott.
At the BookShelf 
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