Category Archives: Australia

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True Blue? Crime fiction and Australia

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Stewart King, Monash University

Australian Michael Robotham has taken home one of the most prestigious crime fiction awards around, the British Crime Writers’ Association Golden Dagger with Life or Death, beating out an impressive international field.


http://www.michaelrowbotham.com

Predictably, much has been made of Robotham’s nationality. The Guardian’s headline reads “Australian ghostwriter beats Stephen King and J.K. Rowling to top UK crime writing award” .

The Age’s Literary Editor Jason Steger notes that Robotham “is only the second Australian to win after Peter Temple in 2007 for The Broken Shore” .

While these writers take Robotham’s nationality for granted, I wonder whether
this is the best way to describe him or his fiction. As the winning novel is set in Texas and his earlier psychological thriller/crime fiction takes place in England, an interesting question is raised about the identity of his books.

Born and raised in country New South Wales, Robotham, spent a decade in England and returned in 2002. His literary peers consider him an Australian crime
writer, electing him chairman of the Australian Crime Writers’ Association.

He’s also won three Ned Kelly awards, a prize limited to Australians by birth, citizenship or long-term residency.

Robotham then is clearly Australian and he writes crime stories. So, what’s the problem with calling him an Australian crime writer? The answer depends on
whether we attribute nationality to the author or his work. In other words, does
Robotham write Australian crime fiction?

Locale and crime fiction

The crime genre is one of the most widespread literary genres. It has crossed
borders and languages to become a form of world literature. Its mobility and its
popularity are due to a combination of universal themes, portable conventions
and local settings.

Everywhere it has settled, writers have adapted it to reflect on
local issues. To some degree the local has become so important that it is
suggested that nationality be ascribed not to the author, but to the locus criminis of the novel itself.

Eva Erdmann argues that in the later half of the twentieth century, crime fiction has been used to interrogate increasingly specific national or regional identities:

Surprisingly, the crime novel of the last decades is distinguished by
the fact that the main focus is not on the crime itself, but on the
setting, the place where the detective and the victims live and to which
they are bound by ties of attachment.

Understood in this way, Robotham writes English and now American crime fiction. The late American author Alan Cheuse certainly embraced Robotham as one of his own, writing that Life or Death reads like a native Texan had written it.

Edgar Allen Poe.
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Assigning nationality to where novels are set raises all sorts of complications,
however. Is Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) an example of French crime fiction because the story is set in Paris and features a French detective? Erdmann would say yes, but this is perhaps more due to his influence on French fiction through the translations of poet Charles Baudelaire.

Robotham is clearly good at offering readers convincing settings. His highly successful career as a ghost writer has perhaps prepared him to adopt alternative points of view with compelling strength. Not every writer has this talent. Returning to Australia, in Continent of Mystery (1997), Stephen Knight takes issue with:

English visitors who glimpsed a capital city, took a compulsory trip to the bush, and then dashed off a shallow thriller with sturdy stiff-jawed bush heroes and bush heroines as warm-hearted as the sun was hot.

If an author’s nationality or a novel’s setting are not satisfactory markers of
identity, then perhaps we should look at the author’s intended readership.

Although set in Texas, Life or Death has an Australian origin. It owes its existence to the true story of a career criminal who escaped from Sydney’s Long Bay jail the day before he was due to be released.

Robotham took the story and transposed it to Texas.

An 1852 illustration for The Mystery of Marie Roget.
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

There is a long tradition of this in crime writing. In The Mystery of Marie Rogêt
Poe took a famous New York murder case and set it in Paris. Given Life or Death’s Australian origins, it’s fair to say Robotham had the opportunity to set the novel here, but he chose not to do so.

I don’t want to suggest that Australian crime writers have to write about
Australia, set their novels in Australia, treat Australian issues or have Australian characters.

The Miles Franklin Award has courted enough controversy in that area. Writers should be free to tackle any topic or to set their works wherever they want.

An example of the pitfalls of strict definitions of “Australian” is the exclusion of JM Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus (2013) from the Miles Franklin 2013 shortlist. This has been attributed to its imaginary Spanish-language setting, although the book was received as, among other things, an allegory for Australian attitudes to “boat-people”.

However, unlike Coetzee, Robotham does not engage with Australian national imaginary, its issues and identity. They address a different – international – audience.

If Robotham is an Australian writer who doesn’t write Australian crime fiction,
then how do we situate him and his novels? Google perhaps provides us with an
answer. Search “Michael Robotham” and Google adds “International Crime
Writer” to his name before taking you to his home page. In this globalised world,
that’s not such a bad category to belong to.

The Conversation

Stewart King, Senior Lecturer, School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, Monash University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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The Book Council of Australia? Well, it’s better than nothing

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Stuart Glover, The University of Queensland

Late last week, in what turned out to be the dying days of the Abbott administration, and perhaps the last sands of George Brandis’s time in the arts portfolio, the government’s new Book Council of Australia (BCA) finally arrived. Trailing behind it were some controversies about its structure and membership – controversies seemingly as small as its A$6 million (over three years) budget, but in fact real thorns for the literary sector.

A suffering publishing industry first mooted the idea of a book council with the Labor government in 2010. The industry was gulping air in turbulent seas as waves of globalisation and digitisation crashed. New business paradigms were attacking the old; traditional bookstores, publishers, and authors were at risk – with potential downstream costs for the rest of us in the form of damage to our literary and reading culture.

After a slew of reports and recommendations for action by the Rudd and Gillard governments, and some stalling under the current one, the Book Council was finally announced by Tony Abbott in December 2014.

Most of the industry was on board – in fact the Council is made up of representatives of the industry associations. But its limited aims and role, its modest funds, the source of these funds, the Chair who has been appointed, and the absence of Indigenous voices and voices from the emerging writer and emerging digital literary sector have tainted the initiative for some.

Without surprise, the President of the Australian Publishers Association, Louise Adler, has been invited by Minister Brandis to chair the new council. Adler, whose day job is as CEO of Melbourne University Press, was the key player in the chain of reports and working parties that led to the BCA’s establishment. And usually, while Adler is seen as a figure of the left (ex-Radio National, ex-The Age, ex-Australian Book Review, once student of Edward Said), she also seems to have the confidence of the right.

Australian prime minister Julia Gillard with former prime minister Bob Hawke and publisher Louise Adler at the launch of the biography Hawke: The Prime Minister by his wife Blanche D’Alpuget (centre right) in 2010.
AAP ONE

Mostly this reflects Adler’s standing within the publishing industry and her persuasiveness on committees (see disclosure), but it may have helped in this instance that she is Tony Abbott’s publisher. Indeed, Adler even seems to have a soft spot for Abbott personally or politically (see Q&A footage from 47:45), which I presume Abbott reciprocates, perhaps making it easy enough for him, at the time, to give her the gig.

As for the rest of the committee, the Ministerial media release states that:

Ms Adler will be joined on the Council by representatives appointed from a wide range of literary and industry organisations including the Australian Society of Authors, the Australian Publishers Association, the Australian Booksellers Association, the Australian Literary Agents’ Association and the Australian Library and Information Association.

In fact they are not all: The National Library, the Copyright Agency, the Small Press Network, and the Children’s Book Council also get guernseys.

The BCA drew fire a week before it was announced, with an open letter from 39 organisations concerned at the delay at its arrival and a lack of clarity about its purpose and operations. There was particular concern about whether the BCA would recognise “the breadth of Australia’s literary sector”:

The National Writers’ Centre Network, writers’ festivals across the country, prize-giving organisations, bookstores, critics, schools and universities, literary journals, libraries, digital-only initiatives et al – and that many of these organisations and publications not only feed directly into the wider publishing industry, but are critical to sustaining it for both creators and consumers: developing the capacity of writers, publishers and readers; offering skills and professional development programs; and many publication and employment opportunities.

The small and the new players were pitching themselves against the top-end of town (the old model of publishing).

Two related issues seemed to be at stake. The first question is around the purpose of the BCA and the second around the question of how representative the BCA is of new forms of literary activity and new voices.

Elsewhere, I have written on the question of whether the BCA is about industry or about culture. Inevitably books, writers, our literary culture, and the publishing industry come as a matched set. It is hard to have a literary culture without an industry – even if that sometimes means sharing turf with a globalised publishing industry whose goals are as much financial as cultural.

Policy responses then become a question of emphasis: will government emphasise industry sustainability (no matter what the cultural utility of the material produced) or will government emphasise literature’s work of telling our stories, debating our issues, helping people form themselves and enrich their lives through it?

Decisions by both the last Labour Government and this current LNP one have impacted on the balance between these not-wholly-opposed goals. As the BCA comes into being it assumes an unexpected role as the apparatus of government with the most magisterial view of policy in the literary domain.

This follows the ALP’s shuttering of the Literature Board of the Australia Council in 2014 – a shuttering that looks increasingly misguided in the wake of Minister Brandis’s raid on the Australia Council budget to form the National Program for Excellence in the Arts (NPEA).

For 40 years the Literature Board provided writing, publishing and other literary grants based on decisions made by a committee and sub-committees of writers and the very occasional publisher. It provided a writer-led view of literary development. It was often finely tuned to aesthetic questions, but less so to industrial ones.

But still, the Board was effective in supplementing writers’ incomes and ensuring the publication of hundreds of new voices, including many of nation’s most famous names. It was remarkably effective on a A$4m or so annual budget, and its 2014 shuttering removed fundamental policy capacity and leadership in the literary and book industry domains – even if its policy focus was perhaps too often just on the writer.

The Book Council was intended to augment the Board’s writerly focus with a industry-wide one. But now, in a real sense, it replaces the Literature Board as the senior policy agency in the literary space. Unfortunately, the BCA’s modest budget of A$2m a year (over three years) (gouged out of the Australia Council last December) means that the resources for literary and book industry development are split between the BCA and the Australia Council (whose own budget has been further depleted by Minister Brandis’s A$104m raid to create his new NPEA).

Because of the BCA’s elevation to policy prominence the question of its industry versus literary or writerly focus has become a hot one. The BCA certainly professes literary aims:

The Council will provide advice to the government on strategies to raise and strengthen the profile of Australian literature and literary non-fiction nationally and internationally, including priorities for funding through targeted initiatives, and to foster a culture of reading among the Australian public.

And so does Ms Adler in an op-ed which can be read an assurance about the ultimately cultural purposes of the BCA and of literature:

If we collectively believe in the principle that telling our stories to ourselves and to the international market matters as much as it ever did, then fresh thinking is required. The Book Council, with representatives from all the lead organisations involved in the business of reading and writing, has a new opportunity to ensure the community’s collective imagination is fuelled by Australian writing … [Australian writers offer us] the chance to contemplate who we are and how we live. Reading, thankfully, is not yet obsolete, nor is it odd or quaint or deviant. There is every reason to ensure it continues to flourish as both a private pleasure and a public good.

Yet many of the smaller literary organisations feel as though, no matter what the stated aims of the BCA, its composition suggests that it is defending an old literary model rather than embracing the new.

And there certainly are “new” forms of literary life following digitisation and the arrival of a Gen-Ys on the literary space. As well as e-books and online bookshops, the capital cities, particularly Melbourne, are awash with new kinds of literary entities and activity: small digital publications, real and virtual festivals, and literary podcasters. These ventures are often helmed by a generation of emerging writers – often creative writing graduates.

This new digital belletrism often forsakes books entirely for smaller and more mobile forms of literary production and consumption. It is the players in this group that seem to feel most at the margins of what has been sketched out by the BCA – and not represented in its membership.

Sam Twyford-Moore
Adrian Wiggins/flickr, CC BY

Sam Twyford-Moore, former director of Melbourne’s Emerging Writers’ Festival, and a key drafter of the Open Letter of September 3, has been particularly active in questioning the focus of the BCA and also Ms Adler’s role in it. While the publishing industry happily accepts Ms Adler as its representative – or mostly so (she has enemies as well as supporters) – Twyford-Moore sees Adler as compromised by the broad range of positions she holds, including her propinquity to Tony Abbott.

Adler certainly plays hardball in most things, but on balance it is much better to have Adler, in all her effectiveness, inside the tent. Twyford-Moore, playing the role of tyro, is keen to challenge Adler to a public debate – which would bring out the younger members of the Melbourne literary community in large numbers.

But the faster way forward here is for the minister and the BCA to recognise the literary sector’s fundamental point that the future of small digital publishing, event and socially based literary activity, and Indigenous literary activity, need to be represented on the BCA – even if they have been outside the discussion until this point.

Until included, the BCA risks being rejected by some of the communities that should welcome it. It will suffer sniping from the very generation that will inherit caretakership of the industry from Adler and others in the coming decade.

In the background to all this is Minister Brandis’s partial reclamation of decision-making about policy and funding from the realm of the Australia Council – where arm’s-length mechanisms have prevailed for four decades.

Brandis has ushered in a new type of ministerial activism or interventionism in the arts space. But having entered a space that was previously the province of the artists and writers themselves, he needs to ensure that there is policy and funding contiguity between the old Australia Council and his new Ministerial mechanisms: the NPEA and BCA.

This is just good government. It will require greater dexterity than has been shown to date.

The Conversation

Stuart Glover, Senior Lecturer, Creative Writing, The University of Queensland

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Australia: Victoria – Melbourne State Library Restoration

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Australia is awash with political memoir, but only some will survive the flood

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Jane Messer

Last year more than a dozen political memoirs were published in Australia. From Bob Carr’s Diary of a Foreign Minister to Greg Combet’s The Fights of My Life, from Rob Oakeshott’s The Independent Member for Lyne to Bob Brown’s Optimism, one could be forgiven for thinking Australia is a nation of political junkies.

Or that we’re fascinated by the personalities, policies and procedures that shape our political landscape. But are we really, and if not, why so many books?

The deluge shows no signs of abating, with a similar number of titles expected this year. Already we’ve seen the release of Shadow Minister Chris Bowen’s The Money Men, reflections by Federal Labour members Mark Butler and Andrew Leigh, with former Victorian Labour leader John Brumby’s practical “lessons”, The Long Haul, in press.

Liberals, once laggards in this genre, are stepping up in growing numbers. Federal Minister Christopher Pyne’s “hilarious” A Letter To My Children is out, and Peter Reith’s The Reith Papers is underway. Also in press is the genuinely unauthorised Born to Rule: the Unauthorised Biography of Malcolm Turnbull.

First nurtured by John Iremonger of Hale & Iremonger, Melbourne University Press now leads the way with the genre. MUP Director, Louise Adler, is notorious for her enthusiasm and her efforts to contract politicians of all parties and persuasions. But even Adler has reservations, writing in September’s Meanjin that “the political memoir is unabashedly myopic, subjective and reflexively partisan”.

Tony Abbott, then Federal Oppositon MP, signs copies of his book during the launch Battlelines in Sydney in 2009.
Dean Lewins/AAP, CC BY-ND

One argument for the proliferation of political memoirs is that they enable the public to engage with politicians outside the frenzy of the 24/7 news cycle. Certainly the popularity of Annabel Crabb’s ABC show Kitchen Cabinet suggests there’s some weight to this “getting to know the person beyond the sound-bite” theory.

Some argue the 24-hour media cycle has debased politics to such a degree that voters are searching for a depth of focus missing from parliament and mainstream media coverage and finding it through other channels.

Based on the sales figures, a publisher can safely bet that an Australian political memoir or biography is likely to pay its own way, at the very least. Even the slow ones mostly sell more than a few thousand copies.

But do sales say anything meaningful about these books’ impact on our political process or cultural debate? And how to measure the impact of the political memoir on democratic process?

The genre has been trending for a few years now, propelled in no small part by the success of Bob Hawke’s The Hawke Memoirs (1994) which sold 75,000 copies, and John Howard’s Lazarus Rising (2011), which sold upwards of 100,000.

As far back as 2007, David Marr in his analysis of John Howard’s prime ministership, His Master’s Voice: the corruption of public debate under Howard, despaired of the increase in public “chatter” and the sabotage of free speech. Paradoxically, it was during this period, and subsequently, that political memoirs and biographies increased in number.

Thanks to the introduction of Nielsen BookScan in 2002 and its collection of reliable national book sales figures, metrical research into the book industry and reading patterns is now possible.

But what readers make of the content of these books, and how they contribute to Australian culture, is difficult to accurately discern.

Dr Jan Zwar conducted a close analysis of a range of narrative nonfiction books and their contribution to cultural debate during the Howard years 2003-2008. In an essay for the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature she observed that “experiences of the actual readers remain a mystery behind the wall of data”.

Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard launching her book My Story in Sydney, 2014.
Dean Lewins/AAP

Other forms of media mediate the relationship between the memoir, its author and the wider readership. Syndicated publication of extracts, the author’s appearances through radio, television, online and print media to discuss the book, and appearances at writers festivals and festivals of ideas are all channels key to ensuring the possibility of the memoir’s broader ideas being promulgated.

In her 2012 essay More than Michael Moore: Contemporary Australian Book Reading Patterns and the Wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, Zwar proposed that it is through these “longer term, less obvious ways” that these texts have discursive impact.

Former PM, Julia Gillard, by way of example, has appeared at half a dozen writers festivals in Australia and New Zealand alongside her memoir, My Story (2015), although no one I spoke to nominated the memoir as being influential or contributing to the debate. Yet, with large live audiences, Gillard clearly is contributing.

The memoir is the prop for the event, and contributes to an already existing discussion of broader “Gillard” topics such as women in politics and education reform.

Similarly, Anna Bligh, former Premier of Queensland, speaking on the ABC program Q&A in August, firmly linked her memoir, Through the Wall: Reflections on Leadership, Love and Survival (2015), to her key message of encouragement to young women to pursue a career in politics, and not to be fearful of the walls “built of the solid bricks of prejudice” (to quote from the book).

The Latham Diaries by former federal opposition leader Mark Latham go on sale in Sydney in 2005.
Mick Tsikas/AAP

Mark Latham’s Latham’s Diaries, originally published in 2005, eclipses all other political memoirs and autobiographies in my research for impact, in terms of readers recalling and engaging with its dissection of the Labor Party in the post-Keating years, the Australian political system more broadly, and its insistence that there ought to be serious debate about political philosophy.

Whatever one may think of Latham today, this memoir has contributed to debate and critiques of Australian democratic process in the new century. Natalie Mast recently argued on The Conversation that, ten years on from its publication, “the flaws in our political system that Latham highlighted continue to affect us”.

It is both the specialist and the general reader that the politicians are appealing to, with general readers contributing the bulk of sales, and thus the economic viability of the genre. But it is the political analysts and historians, journalists, lobbyists, festival directors, politicians and would-be politicians who are the most critical readers of these books and who enable a memoir’s impact.

Laura Tingle, the Australian Financial Review’s political editor, has possibly read them all. According to Tingle, the “young things” in the current caucus are “hoovering up” Gareth Evans’ Inside the Hawke–Keating Government: A Cabinet Diary (2014) to gain an understanding of how the government worked.

Knowing what happened is not of course equivalent to energetic debate and discourse, but it is a starting point.

Ex-Foreign Minister Bob Carr signs his Diary of a Foreign Minister in Sydney in 2014.
Jesse Matheson/AAP

Tingle nominated three other books of influence from recent years. Tony Abbott’s Battlelines (2013) continues to “reverberate” as readers realise it has not clarified Abbott’s beliefs, but just added to the mix. Malcolm Fraser’s Dangerous Allies (2014), which followed on from his Political Memoirs, is having impact because of the quality of its insights and argument, though strictly speaking it is not a memoir.

Tingle also nominates Bob Carr’s Diary of a Foreign Minister (2014), despite it blowing up across social media over Carr’s love of activated almonds and other personal nonsense about his abs and pyjamas. But from Tingle’s perspective, Carr’s diary holds value for its uniquely positioned observations of the Gillard cabinet.

You effectively had an outsider/ journalist reporting on what he saw in a government that was crumbling. For that reason, I think it is going to be an on-going source for many years on what happened in the Gillard period.

Margaret Simons, Director of the Centre for Advanced Journalism and co-author of Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs, pointed to other works as influential, but again, they’re not wholly memoirs, nor all recent: suggesting the genre does indeed have limitations.

Simons identified the Latham Diaries, the late John Button’s 2002 Quarterly Essay, Beyond Belief: what future for Labour (part memoir, part critique), and thirdly, Clare O’Neil and Tim Watts’ 2015 Two Futures: Australia at a Critical Moment.

Too young to be documenting their political lives through memoir, this pair are not looking back, but forwards.

The Conversation

Jane Messer, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Australia’s Top 100 Books

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The links below are to articles reporting on what has been decided as Australia’s top 100 books by Better Reading. What do you think of the list?

For more visit:
– http://www.theguardian.com/books/australia-books-blog/2015/sep/08/better-reading-names-australias-top-100-books-not-all-great-novels-but-good-reads
– http://www.betterreading.com.au/book_list/better-reading-presents-australias-top-100-books/

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Huffington Post success will rely on fresh voices

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Alexandra Wake, RMIT University

The doomsayers of Australian journalism will have to hold their tongues this week as the Huffington Post breathes some fresh life into the local media scene.

Launched in Australia today, HuffPo, as it’s affectionately called by journalists, joins a growing number of international news organisations which have found a new audience – and it hopes advertisers – in Australia.

The opening of HuffPo Australia’s doors (temporarily in the old Fox offices at Darling Harbour) is indeed welcome news for the 28 or so local staff who have been hired by the global journalism player which has already extended its reach to 13 countries.

The global takeover isn’t a bad effort from the team behind editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington who only established the online site in 2005 as an alternative left wing (Americans would say “liberal”) outlet and alternative to news aggregators.

The Huffington Post deal in Australia is interesting, with a 49% stake in the venture held by Fairfax Media. The commercial details of the arrangement haven’t been publicised, but some have suggested Fairfax fought hard for the deal as a way of “keeping its friends close and its enemies even closer”.

There are however fears from a few media watchers that HuffPo will cut Fairfax’s audiences which are already feeling the pinch from locally grown digital sites such as Crikey, The Conversation, New Matilda and Mumbrella as well as the relatively new international players, The Guardian, the Daily Mail, and BuzzFeed.

The Huffington Post’s chief executive in the US Jimmy Maymann however is buoyant about the deal, which mirrors that in other international ventures.

He told the Australian Financial Review earlier in the year:

“Our ability to partner with established local players has been critical to the success of our rapid international expansion over the past two years. We have created a very effective repeatable model that has enabled us to enter new markets and establish strong positions very quickly.”

HuffPo can credibly claim to be an international news organisation, having won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012. It boasts 214 million unique visitors each month, and there is no reason to believe it will not achieve its stated target of becoming a top-five publisher in Australia in three to five years.

HuffPo Australia boasts a strong team with good local connections. The chief executive Chris Janz comes lately from blog publisher Allure Media, which was bought by Fairfax in 2012, and the editor-in-chief Tory Maguire brings a long News Corp pedigree.

Also in the news crew is Canberra-based political editor Karen Barlow, one of the many talented journalists axed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in its cull of international services, a former executive producer of video at AAP Tom Compagnoni, and a former assistant Daily Mail editor Chris Paine. The list of highly regarded journalism hires goes on, but features many who have either jumped or been pushed out by the seismic change in the country’s newspaper landscape.

So while the local industry is no doubt delighted that high calibre journalists are finding work with the Australian edition of HuffPo – the one question readers should be asking is will the Huffington Post bring them anything different to the already established media outlets.

Getting writers to blog for free has been a critical part of the Huffington Post’s strategy in each market.
Neville Hobson/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

Point of difference?

Certainly HuffPo gains much by linking its brand to the high standard of journalism that many Fairfax reporters demonstrate. Look for example at the coverage of tax avoidance by multinationals operating in Australia, or the revelations and reporting of Australia’s scandal ridden financial services sector.

If HuffPo Australia champions more of this reporting, and helps grow advertising revenue for both it and Fairfax, then that will auger well for all. But The Huffington Post has built much of its reputation on providing a space for bloggers, for insiders, to write about their passions.

HuffPo does not restrict itself to the normal crew of footy commentators, political analysts and think tank spruikers. HuffPo asks everyone to write. And it is this network of real-time bloggers in Australia that could be the making of the site, even if it is the use of such unpaid writers that has caused the organisation the most criticism at home and abroad. Although to be truthful, there are many sites in Australia and internationally who do not pay writers, however good they maybe, including The Conversation.

What really matters is whether or not HuffPo can attract new and emerging thinkers who can write, or if they will lean on the same-old crew who pop up on QandA on a Monday night.

It’s a now a truism that the internet provides us with what it thinks we want to know, not what we need to know. As readers, we hope the paid Australian curators at HuffPo can help change that adage. If they can, it might be enough to save Fairfax.

The Conversation

Alexandra Wake is Lecturer at RMIT University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Huffington Post is coming – but will Australians care?

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Axel Bruns, Queensland University of Technology

The past few years have been positively revolutionary for the Australian news landscape. From a static and highly concentrated media market, dominated by News Corporation, Fairfax, and the ABC, new players have gradually entered the market, and the next new entry lumbering up to the starting blocks is the Australian version of The Huffington Post.

Emerging from founder Arianna Huffington’s earlier forays into political blogging in the mid-2000s, HuffPo has become a major political voice in the United States, and has recently expanded into a number of global markets, with over a dozen localised editions now available. Huffington Post Australia, in partnership with Fairfax Media, is slated to launch on Wednesday, August 19.

Does Huffington Post Australia stand a chance of gaining a foothold in the increasingly crowded Australian news and commentary market? The fate of some of the other recent additions to the media mix may provide a useful guide here.

Comprehensive data on site visits collected by Experian Hitwise shows a range of crucial trends: first, with the general shift towards online news consumption, the total number of site visits to the leading news sites has been trending strongly upwards – from an average of just under 6 million visits per week during 2013, leader news.com.au has grown to over 13 million weekly visits since June 2015, for example.

Total visits to selected Australian news and opinion sites, 2013-15.
Data courtesy of Experian Marketing Services’ Hitwise.

Second, while the shape of the market has long remained stable, with news.com.au, the Sydney Morning Herald, and nineMSN (now 9 News) fairly evenly matched, since early 2014 the fortunes of the market leaders have diverged. Having embraced a more populist, tabloid content strategy, news.com.au has established itself as the clear market leader, while the SMH’s growth has merely followed the overall trend, and 9 News has stagnated both before and after its rebranding.

Meanwhile, the entrance of two UK-based news organisations into the local market has affected the status quo considerably. The Guardian and the Daily Mail had already been reasonably popular with Australian audiences well before their local spin-offs were announced and launched, but their dedicated domestic coverage has been able to boost their appeal considerably.

Total visits to selected Australian news and opinion sites, 2013-15 – Daily Mail Australia and Guardian Australia highlighted.
Data courtesy of Experian Marketing Services’ Hitwise.

Growth in visits to Daily Mail Australia has been especially pronounced, from a weekly average of just over 2 million in 2013 to nearly 8 million visits per week since June 2015 – well above the average growth trend. The trajectory shows a clear bump in readership since the transition to dedicated Australian content in May 2014, and since the start of 2015 Daily Mail Australia has been clearly established as the third most popular Australian news site.

Even before its Australian launch, in fact, Daily Mail was easily more popular with Australian internet users than local tabloids Herald-Sun or Daily Telegraph.

Guardian Australia’s progress has been somewhat slower, building from a lower base. Even after its official launch in May 2013, the site struggled to break through the barrier of 1 million visits per week, until the 2013 federal election campaign provided it with the opportunity to establish a stronger profile as a new space for quality political coverage; since June 2015, the site has averaged some 3.7 million visits per week, and sits comfortably in the top ten of Australian news sites.

Buzzfeed’s official launch on 31 January 2014 did cause at least a momentary spike in visits, and marks the point at which the site becomes more strongly competitive in the Australian media landscape. Long running neck-and-neck with Guardian Australia and the international edition of Huffington Post, during the remainder of 2014 Buzzfeed Australia gradually pulls ahead of both sites. It is now established as a popular site in Australia, rivalling 9 News, The Age, and ABC News: it has attracted an average of nearly 5 million visits per week since June 2015.

Total visits to selected Australian news and opinion sites, 2013-15 – Buzzfeed and Huffington Post highlighted.
Data courtesy of Experian Marketing Services’ Hitwise.

Ahead of its Australian launch, the international edition of the Huffington Post remains a considerably more niche publication – yet still ranking ahead of more established Australian titles such as The Australian (whose partial paywall may affect visitor numbers, however) or the Canberra Times. Notably, HuffPo’s Australian visitor numbers have been trending downwards over the past year, averaging some 1.7 million visits per week since June 2015.

It will be interesting to see whether the launch of an Australian edition of the Huffington Post can arrest or even reverse this decline. The performance of other recent entrants into the Australian online news and commentary market has clearly shown that such sites can establish themselves as viable and even leading players in the media landscape. However, the greatest successes have been reserved for comparatively populist and tabloid outlets like Daily Mail Australia and Buzzfeed Australia.

By contrast, Guardian Australia’s achievements to date have been more limited. Its parent organisation is recognised as a globally leading, quality news brand, whose closest Australian equivalents are perhaps the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. However, in spite of its undoubted contributions to Australian political journalism, Guardian Australia has yet to even come close to rivalling the visitor numbers attracted by these Fairfax titles’ sites.

Huffington Post, in turn, caters to a considerably more narrow audience. By boosting its coverage of Australian politics and current affairs, it should be able to at least maintain the established Australian audience for its international edition, which would leave it placed above titles such as The Australian in total weekly visits.

It seems unlikely, though, that it could catch up again with a site like Guardian Australia – whose numbers it matched, one year ago – in the immediate future.

The Conversation

Axel Bruns is Professor, Creative Industries at Queensland University of Technology

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Politics podcast: Chris Bowen

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Michelle Grattan, University of Canberra

Shadow Treasurer Chris Bowen and Michelle Grattan step away from the day-to-day politics to talk about Bowen’s new book, The Money Men, in which he writes about twelve of Australia’s most notable treasurers.

Bowen talks about the legacies of Treasurers such as Keating, Costello, Cairns and Swan, his research process, writing on the job he hopes to hold, and much, much more.

The Conversation

Michelle Grattan is Professorial Fellow at University of Canberra.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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How Australian dystopian young adult fiction differs from its US counterparts

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Diana Hodge, University of South Australia

For children and adolescents, the tyranny of adults can make any world dystopian. Real or fictional – no apocalypse required. But how does our Australian young adult fiction (of the dystopian variety) differ from that being produced in the US? And why do teenagers love dystopia so much?

In recent years, we have seen quite a few blockbuster novels produced for adolescents in this genre. You will no doubt have heard of at least one of these dystopian trilogies from the US: The Hunger Games (2008-2010) by Suzanne Collins, Divergent (2011-2013) by Veronica Roth and the Uglies (2005-2006) by Scott Westerfeld.

Australia has a strong tradition of dystopian fiction for young adults as well. Tomorrow, When the War Began and the accompanying six books in the Tomorrow series (1993–99) by John Marsden is, of course, one of the favourites, although it isn’t set in a post-apocalyptic world – rather, we see teenagers fighting and surviving in a current war.

Lesser known dystopian Australian novels – although no less noteworthy – include Taronga by Victor Kelleher (1986), The Obernewtyn Chronicles by Isobelle Carmody (1987-2015) and, more recently, The Tribe: The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (2012) and The Disappearance of Ember Crow (2013), both by Aboriginal author Ambelin Kwaymullina.

Disasters in the US and Australia

There are many similarities between the Australian and US novels. All of those mentioned above are post-apocalyptic and all indicate a man-made disaster involving war, environmental destruction or nuclear disaster.

The Obernewtyn Chronicles are post-nuclear-holocaust and Taronga is post-war, probably nuclear. The events of The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf play out after a man-made environmental disaster.

The US novels cover similar ground: events in The Hunger Games follow an environmental disaster and war, while Uglies has an original disaster – a virus that infects petroleum products and causes them to explode, resulting in widespread environmental degradation. In Divergent, it’s a bit harder to tell which disaster struck, but it was probably a war.

Other commonalities between the US and Australian dystopian novels are feisty heroines, persecution of individuals because of special abilities and a primitive future that looks like our past – that is, communities living basic agrarian lifestyles, whether openly or in hiding.

All of these novels depict oppressive regimes that persecute the young protagonists – the burden of creating a more inclusive, fairer and more tolerant society is carried by the younger generation.

With so much in common between the Australian and American novels, is there anything that sets our home-grown dystopias apart from their US counterparts?

There are two main points of difference: the role of the natural environment, and the use of technology or “the fantastic” to fight battles and change society.

A healthy relationship with nature

In Obernewtyn, The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf and Taronga, the stories are set almost exclusively in a natural – rather than an urban – landscape. Those natural worlds are not distinctly Australian. Obernewtyn feels far more like a European landscape.

The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf seems to be set against a hybrid of the two, with some local elements, such as a forest of tuarts and peppermint gums, but with some unfamiliar wildlife such as “saurs” – giant lizard- or crocodile-like carnivorous reptiles. Taronga is split between a very recognisable Australian bush and Taronga Zoo, Sydney.

But it’s not just the use of the natural world that distinguishes the Australian texts – it’s also the relationship the young characters have with the environment and animals.

In all three Australian novels, there are characters who have the ability to communicate with animals via telepathic means. There are differences in the role of animals in these stories, but animals are always characters, not just companions, pets or beasts of burden.

Both Taronga and The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf include elements of Australian Aboriginal legend and connection with the natural world. In the Australian novels, the characters are at home in the wild, at one with nature and find support in the natural world. The environment can be harsh in these novels, but it also provides comfort and sustenance.

Of course, Uglies and The Hunger Games are not devoid of nature. The rebels in the Uglies series are referred to as “Smokies” and live a rustic and somewhat precarious life in the wild; while protagonist Tally Youngblood admires the beauty of this natural setting. Her time with the Smokies is spent trying to bring order to the natural world. The Hunger Games protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, has to survive in the simulated “natural” world of the arena – using skills to hunt for food.

These relationships with the environment and the animal world are one area in which the Australian novels make use of the fantastic as a plot element.

Weilding technology or magic

In The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf, most of the young characters (including the protagonist, Ashala Wolf) have special abilities that are the cause of their persecution. This is the same literary device used in The Obernewtyn Chronicles. Abilities include telepathy (with people and animals), control of the environment, healing powers and superhuman physical abilities.

In Taronga, both of the young protagonists (Ben and Ellie) communicate with animals – Ben through a telepathic link and Ellie through strongly developed empathy. In all three books of this trilogy those shamanic abilities allow the youngsters to succeed against adult adversaries.

The US teen characters have well-above-average physical and mental abilities, but these are less intrinsic qualities and more the result of training or surgery (Uglies) – they are technical skills of fighting, knife throwing or shooting, and are not linked with anything mystical or with the greater natural world.

All of these stories are set in worlds rich with technology, surveillance equipment, advanced computers and a blurring of the man/ machine interface, with the exception of Taronga, which was written before our current computer age. But Taronga is themed on a spiritual return to nature and an escape from the urban world.

Perhaps Australian authors cling to a romantic ideal of childhood and see that the solution to environmental degradation and war can only come about through a return to nature. Maybe their US peers envisage technical skill as the attribute most needed in the young to save the human race from annihilation.

Given the huge success of the American novels, it appears that this picture of themselves is the one contemporary adolescents prefer.

The Conversation

Diana Hodge is Manager Academic Library Services, Casual Lecturer in the School of Communication, International Studies and Languages at University of South Australia.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
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Sofie Laguna's Miles Franklin win helps keep half the world visible

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Camilla Nelson, University of Notre Dame Australia

The Miles Franklin Award may have been named after one of Australia’s great women writers, but it has long been synonymous in the literary world for novels that are invariably historical, set in rugged rural landscapes, and written by men.

Last night, Sofie Laguna became the fourth woman to win what is Australia’s most prestigious fiction prize in as many years, for her book The Eye of the Sheep (2014). Just as significantly, Laguna’s work marks a departure from the usual sorts of books that become Miles Franklin novels.

The Eye of the Sheep is a story about family dysfunction, social disadvantage and a mother’s love. It tells the story of young Jimmy Flick, whose world is shattered by alcoholism and domestic violence.

If a society should be judged by the way it treats its children, and those who are struggling on the margins, then Laguna’s work once again proves that the novel is a crucial means for drawing attention to the burning problems of our times.

The judges said:

The power of this finely crafted novel lies in its coruscating language, inventive and imaginative, reflecting Jimmy’s vivid inner world of light and connections and pulsing energy.

Laguna has a true ear for the rhythms of everyday dialogue, and her compassionate rendering of the frustrations – and compensations – of dealing with a child of sideways abilities, makes this novel an impressively eloquent achievement.

In another refreshing turn for the Miles Franklin, four out of the five novels shortlisted in 2015 were also by women writers, including Joan London, Sonya Hartnett, and debut novelist Christine Piper. The fifth shortlisted work was by Craig Sherborne.

Three out of the five shortlisted novels also deal with themes of family and childhood – themes that are so often marginalised as “women’s writing”; as domestic, interior, “feminine” and personal, as opposed to the so called “masculine” themes of history and national identity which have traditionally won the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Two of the shortlisted authors, Laguna and Sonya Hartnett, originally made their name writing for children and young adults. They are brilliant literary writers in a genre whose authors have all too often been under-recognised.

Perhaps this change is partly due to the work done in recent years by the Stella and VIDA counts, which have charted the gender bias that governs the literary establishment both here and in the United States.

This bias is not only due to the very real and ongoing under-representation of women on awards lists and in the books pages, but shapes the way we think about literary merit – a whole complicated fabric of assumptions about seriousness, significance, authority and gender in writing.

It is embedded in deeply held beliefs about what constitutes a work of serious literary intent and a conviction that certain kinds of subject matter are more significant, worthy, and therefore literary than others.

As Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, infamously responded to the 2011 VIDA study:

[…] while women are heavy readers, we know they are heavy readers of the kind of fiction that is not likely to be reviewed in the pages of the TLS.

More recently, the NSW Board of Studies responded to criticisms of gender bias in the school literature curriculum by stating that the exclusion of women’s writing was a product of decisions related to “quality”.

Yet names such as Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing – and indeed Sofie Laguna – testify to the fact that there is no absence of “quality” in the work of woman authors.

What is wrong?

Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin abandoned the name Stella in order to be taken seriously as a writer. The name Miles was adopted in the hope that her work would be better received as the work of a man.

In adopting a male pseudonym Miles Franklin joined writers such as Henry Handel Richardson, George Eliot and George Sand who all published under male pen names in an attempt to conceal their true gender.

Even the Brontes published under male pseudonyms in their lifetime. Charlotte became Currer Bell, Anne became Acton Bell and Emily became Ellis Bell.

But in a world forged through a history of sexism, the adoption of a male pen name did not spare Miles Franklin. Henry Lawson wrote about My Brilliant Career:

I hadn’t read three pages when I saw what you will no doubt see at once – that the story had been written by a girl […] I don’t know about the girlishly emotional parts of the book – I leave that to girl readers to judge.

Sofie Laguna joins 11 of Australia’s most distinguished female authors who have been recipients of the Miles Franklin Literary Award across its 50-year history. These include Evie Wild, Michelle de Kretser, Anna Funder, Alexis Wright, Shirley Hazzard, Thea Astley (four times), Jessica Anderson (twice), Glenda Adams, Elizabeth Jolley, Elizabeth O’Connor and Ruth Park.

There are many criticisms that could justifiably be made of the culture of literary prizes. But awards do make a difference to the kinds of conversations that go on around and about writers and writing, the kinds of books that get reviewed, that go on display at the front rather than the back of the bookshop, and ultimately the kinds of books that get read.

I may be a hapless romantic, but I continue to think that literature has the capacity to shape much of what we think and feel about the world. It would be a sad thing if half of that world stayed invisible.

The Conversation

Camilla Nelson is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at University of Notre Dame Australia.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.