Tag Archives: Australia

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Do you know a Bunji from a Boorie? Meet our dictionary’s new Indigenous words

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Bruce Moore, Australian National University

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.

The Conversation

Bruce Moore, Visiting Fellow in the School of Literature, Languages, and Linguistics, Australian National University

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

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It’s all about the money, honey

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Jen Webb, University of 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.

The Conversation

Jen Webb, Director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, University of Canberra

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

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Why the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards need an urgent overhaul

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Patrick Allington, Flinders University

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.

As Beth Driscoll put it in 2008,

To appreciate the true scandal of this potentiality, imagine the Queen actually choosing the Governor General!

Steele identifies three separate instances of prime ministerial intervention in the awards. In 2013, he writes, Kevin Rudd overruled the judges’ recommendation for the History Award, Frank Bongiorno’s The Sex Lives of Australians: A History (2012). The Award was then given to Ross McMullin’s collection of World War I personal histories, Farewell, Dear People: Biographies of Australia’s Lost Generation (2012).

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.

In the meantime, I, for one, look forward to the 2017 judges of the PM’s Literary Awards perhaps choosing Niki Savva’s The Road to Ruin: how Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin destroyed their own government (2016) as the winner of the non-fiction award.

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.

The Conversation

Patrick Allington, Lecturer in English & Creative Writing, Flinders University

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

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Political tracts: the good, the bad and the badly written

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Christopher Kremmer, UNSW Australia

If it’s an election, you can bet that our cash-strapped publishing industry is preparing to unleash another volley of those hardy perennials known as the election campaign diaries. Penned by seasoned political observers who tail our leaders on their madcap journey to the ultimate opinion poll, you can expect several of these to be appearing soon in bookshops near you.

Political writing encompasses many different types of books. There are histories of governments, biographies and memoirs of politicians (John Howard’s 2013 Lazarus Rising), scholarly studies of the political process (Ian McAllister’s 2011 The Australian Voter: 50 years of change) and diaries.

This last category may be written by practitioners (The Latham Diaries (2005) and Bob Carr’s Diary of a Foreign Minister (2014)) or observers, usually journalists, and of these, the election diary has been a growing niche.

For publishers, I suspect, not much thought goes into them. The logic is, “If we don’t publish a campaign book, someone else will. Let’s be proactive. Somebody call Laurie Oakes”.

The popularity of the campaign diary owes much to the prevalence of tragic intrigues and power plays in recent Australian politics. The opinion poll-driven cutting down of leaders by their colleagues, inextricably linked as it is to the election cycle, personalises political discourse, thereby accentuating the gladiatorial, or perhaps Shakespearean aspects of the campaigns that follow.

From the journalist’s point of view, it’s money for nothing. Keeping a diary is just another form of taking notes, very useful when checking your facts down the track. The advance will cover drinks and won’t need to be repaid if the thing doesn’t sell.

For the public, campaign diaries are a godsend for spouses and relatives of impossible-to-buy-for men who are expected to be (but aren’t) interested in that kind of thing. It’s a slightly upmarket version of getting Dad a pair of his favourite socks.

Within the sub-genre of campaign books there are a variety of approaches to telling us what happened, or analysing what it means, or both.

At one end of the spectrum lie books that discern and expand on a theme, like Christine Jackman’s 2008 Inside Kevin 07: The people, the plan, and to a lesser extent Barrie Cassidy’s The Party Thieves: The story of the 2010 election (2011). At the other end, lie documentary-style first person accounts like Mungo MacCallum’s The Mad Marathon: The story of the 2013 election (2013).

The irony of political books generally is that, while publishers are fixated on them, they are usually the first to be remaindered, a sure sign of having over-estimated the market.

Despite, or perhaps because of, his chronic intake of massive doses of dangerous drugs, the American “Gonzo” journalist Hunter S. Thompson found politics compelling. But as he confessed in Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 (1973), most political reporting disappointed him.

The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists – in Washington or anywhere else where they meet on a day-to-day basis. When professional antagonists become after-hours drinking buddies, they are not likely to turn each other in.

My sense is that we have less to fear on that front in Australia, where competition for stories between news organisations remains vigorous. When it comes to campaign diaries the problem is not timidity, but a lack of ambition when it comes to the writing itself.

Political journalists place great weight on the quality of their information, but are less prone to crafting beautiful sentences. Because their books are produced in a hurry, they fail generally to take full advantage of the techniques of Longform journalism. They also assume there is intense, widespread interest in election campaigns.

This is a courageous assumption that leads to an even more toxic presumption; that the significance of the outcome of an election necessarily makes every detail of the campaign gripping. Not so.

It is 40 years this year since Laurie Oakes published a quickie that is arguably the finest work of book-length narrative non-fiction ever written about Australian politics, Crash through or crash: The unmaking of a Prime Minister (1976).

As anniversaries go, this one is passing quietly, but amid the cacophony of a federal election campaign it’s worth noting. Crash was the third in a trilogy of books Oakes wrote about the rise and fall of Labor leader Gough Whitlam, who died in 2014.

Whitlam’s victory at the 1972 polls ended a 23-year drought for his party, and ushered in an era of unprecedented reform and upheaval in Australian politics which ended with his dismissal by the Governor-General. Oakes, who was already regarded by many as the country’s leading political journalist, published his book the following year. From its opening sentence there is a sense of a writer in full command of the literary form.

The study at Government House is an imposing room. The mushroom colored walls provide a suitably muted background for the Governor-General’s collection of aboriginal bark paintings and for a beaten copper plaque presented to him during an official visit to Papua New Guinea. There are bookshelves on two sides. One wall is dominated by a large window overlooking the spacious grounds and Lake Burley Griffen beyond. The window forms an alcove, furnished with comfortable lounge chairs upholstered in brown fabric, for informal conversation. At the end of the room furthest from the door there is a carved desk where Sir John Kerr conducts formal business.

There had been no shortage of tumultuous moments in Whitlam’s career. Any of them might have made an arresting opening for the book. But Oakes’ chose instead to set the scene by juxtaposing the stillness and quietude of the room against the savage political act that would take place there, when an Australian prime minister was trapped, deceived and disposed of by the unelected representative of our foreign head of state.

It is exactly the right place and moment to begin the book, as the journalist-author uses the authority of his material, and the research and reporting skills that gathered it, to best advantage.

Even Oakes doesn’t write books like this anymore. The reason? We are all in a terrible rush, and in our increasingly fast, complex world, we are taking refuge in commentary and opinion, as opposed to reporting and analysis.

It’s 13 years since another literary landmark. Don Watson’s erudite and majestic Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A portrait of Paul Keating PM (2002) set the bar for quality in political writing so high. But not all the quickies are bad.

Bob Ellis is an acquired taste, which many of us have never acquired, and I came to his book about the 2010 federal election Suddenly, Last Winter: An election diary (2010) with deep foreboding.

The rather lengthy author bio that precedes it informs readers that Lord Bob has written “twenty-one books, fifty-five screenplays, two hundred poems, five-hundred political speeches (including one for Kamahl), a hundred songs and two thousand film reviews”. But, hey, who’s counting? We’re into quality, right?

Okay, so he’s a character, and part of his character is a Promethean capacity for name dropping which does tend to intrude upon the job at hand, that is, writing about the election that pitted Australia’s first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard against Tony Abbott.

9.40 a.m – A call from Denny Lawrence in New York. The play we co-wrote, Intimate Strangers, has just been given a public reading at the Vaudeville Theatre in London…

11.40 a.m. – A phone call from George Miller (for whom I’m writing spare dialogue in Fury Road) eager to know how Canberra was

4.40 p.m. I begin a journal-letter to John Ralston Saul (the world’s greatest thinker)…

Diaries, by their very nature, include much minutiae, such as when Ellis’s beloved northern beaches retreat is invaded by a bush turkey that knocks over chairs, plates, DVDs and bookshelves, “banging his fool head against closed windows, and with shrill cries beseeching whatever deity he worships to help him”.

But the book survives all its author’s efforts to ruin it, mainly due to a bravura 40-page preface, or as Lord Bob prefers to call it a “curtain-raiser” (written by a Hell-raiser), that hurls the reader into the world it describes.

Bob’s world is one in which politics still matters, and Australia is a country in which politics is still imbued with sectarian passion. However, those who practice politics as opposed to observing it are, shall we say, distracted, a “generation of drongos”, as Ellis describes them, “seizing their preselections and bringing us to ruin.”

A typical drongo leader may be

in make-up for the Today show at six-thirty. He may then be at a business breakfast attempting genial oratory at eight and at a Caucus meeting at nine-thirty for an hour of punitive admonition. His brain arrives at eleven, there’s a press conference at noon, a lunch with the President of Palau at twelve-thirty and Question Time at two…In all this he’s supposed to be running the country and he can’t…And so the roof-batts crisis occurs, and the climate change backflip, and the fight with the mining giants … None of these things he would have done had he been awake. And he hasn’t been awake for two years.

The above description is of Kevin Rudd, who is later characterised as “a cocksure twerp who deserved his downfall richly”. But the debilitating political culture it evokes hasn’t changed, except perhaps in degree.

Like Hunter Thompson, Ellis casts off the fetters that neuter most political reporters. The reader may not share the author’s view that the political rivalry between Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott was “erotic”, but the observation is interesting.

Ellis reports, but from a subjective point of view that is at turns, lively, cranky, contentious, silly, surprising, but rarely dull. It’s the kind of writing that lasts, partly because it doesn’t report politics on the campaign’s own terms, but translates it into a conversation that the rest of us can participate in, get irritated by, and at times even enjoy.

When the dust had settled and the minority government was formed, Ellis surveyed the political landscape and found signs of life in the north.

I look forward especially to the ramshackle, whinnying rural-socialist manifestos of Bob Katter. Because I do admire this brilliant wayward white-hatted yodelling dingo-kelpie cross and his untamed, yelping twists of soul.

We get the politics we deserve, but not always writing about it of the quality we expect. Bob’s rude charm saves the campaign diary from itself, and his foibles at some point become endearing.

Always has it been so. Just ask our current Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who as a university student once planned to write a political musical based on the life of the Depression era New South Wales Premier Jack Lang.

Bob recalls it well, as he himself (who else?) was involved. He even has a few surviving scraps of some of the songs, one of which features Hitler, as he reveals to Annabel Crabb in this year’s best quickie so far. Crabb’s Stop at Nothing: The Life and Adventures of Malcolm Turnbull showcases the journalist’s knack for the well-turned phrase. Take this, for example

Something is missing in Australia. It’s been missing since about 9.30 p.m. on 14 September 2015… It’s the sound of Malcolm Turnbull wanting to be prime minister.

Crabb has a fine ear for the quotable quotes of others too. Recalling his mother Coral’s decision to leave his father (and nine-year-old Malcolm) Turnbull suspects she “sort of got bored with the role.”

Elsewhere in the book, discussing the PM’s diverse pre-politics careers in journalism, law and business, Attorney-General George Brandis remarks that “Malcolm has more hinterland than any previous Australian prime minister”.

And referring to the strains between our current leader and his party, another supporter observes that,

Malcolm doesn’t always realise that in the Liberal Party, when somebody raises an eyebrow at you, it actually means something.

But the chatty spiel that makes Crabb such a successful communicator on television doesn’t always translate well to the page. A blow is “ghastly”, a family farm is “beautiful”, the loss of death of Turnbull’s father (whose affairs were “tangled”) “smashed him up” and the son’s subsequent decision to keep the farm was “crazy brave”. That’s just from page one, and the “adjectivitis” keeps resurfacing throughout the text and becomes very wearing.

Yet the book succeeds mightily, due mainly to the author’s bower-bird instincts, her deep interest in character and astute choice of subject. The reader of her book, and Paddy Manning’s Born to Rule (2015), will find themselves observing those TV images of Malcolm on the campaign trail through the lens of the stories told by these writers.

And they will worry that, win or lose, the current truce between Mr Turnbull and all the people he has offended along the way, including many in his own party, might be short-lived.

The Conversation

Christopher Kremmer, Senior Lecturer in Journalism, School of the Arts & Media, UNSW Australia

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

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Reading for moral self-improvement or therapy can occasionally feel a little grim

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Camilla Nelson, University of Notre Dame Australia

This week’s Sydney Writers’ Festival not only celebrates the art of writing, but the art of reading. Of course, it is difficult not to worry that this might be because the art of reading – that is, deep, critical, transformative reading – has been so radically transformed in the age of big data and Internet skimming that – along with ink and paper – it might be considered to be endangered, too.

Much of the program seems focused on the special kind of paying attention that reading demands – and its pay off in intangible commodities such as curiosity, wonder and awe. It features events that are dedicated not just to the new, but to the enduring influence of the old, in which writers have been asked to talk less about their own work, and more about the works of others that inspired them.

Deborah Adelaide talks about The Women’s Pages (2015), but also about her lifelong fascination with Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights that inspired it. Frank Moorhouse talks about reading that Victorian marvel George Eliot, and the debt that his own capacious volumes featuring Edith Campbell Berry might owe to it.

Gail Jones talks about the strange excitement of reading Nabokov. Don Watson, in conversation Delia Falconer, discusses the wondrous works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Tegan Bennett Daylight brings the spotlight to bear on the wry, self-deprecating humour of the mid-twentieth century American short-form author JS Perelmen, who may well be new to festival audiences. Jonathan Franzen, in conversation with Daylight, not only talks about Purity (2015), his latest book, but also his vociferous reading life, encompassing the works of obscure and dazzling authors who are seldom read today, including, no doubt, Franzen’s long-standing infatuation with the scathing social satires of the early twentieth-century Austrian writer, Karl Kraus.

There are many different kinds of reading. The festival concentrates on the sort that brings art and life together. Artistic Director Jemma Birrell says, “A good festival, like a good book, should bring real-life benefits.“ Consequently, the program bristles with panels on the Books that Made Me, the Books that Changed Me, and the Books that Saved Me. It features a Literary Healing Room tended by bibliotherapists – that is, book doctors – who administer small doses of book buying as remedy and solace in an alienated world. (You can find these curious doctors at the School of Life in Sydney, Melbourne, and London, where they can be consulted in person or via Skype, at all hours.)

Marcel Proust, with his unsparing insight into human passions and illusions, recognised that there are “pathological circumstances” in which reading can become a sort of “curative discipline”.

But there’s something a little disquieting in the therapeutic cure. I find it odd, for example, that you can also purchase a “philosopher’s jumper” made of trendy black wool from the School of Life’s online shop – a touch overpriced at A$258.94 – in the hope that it will bestow wisdom or insight whenever you wear it. (It’s advertised as modelled on one that belonged to Martin Heidegger, which also seems an odd choice, given Heidegger was a Nazi.)

Also at the festival, philosopher Damon Young talks about the “ethics of reading” and the “virtues” that he claims reading engenders. In an era of clickbate, when articles have transformed into listicles, in which many of us struggle to read a text more than 140 characters long – and more are happy to outsource our critical capacities to a data algorithm known as Google – reading a book certainly demands something that is increasingly harder to find.

According to Young, reading has the capacity to teach us curiosity, patience, courage, pride, temperance and justice, to gloss the chapters of his recent book, The Art of Reading (2016).

In Young’s model of reading, it is not the book but the reader who bring these virtues into being. He argues – as, indeed, literary scholars have argued for several decades – that it may not be the reader who writes the book, but it is the reader who completes its meaning.

It is the imagination of the reader that brings the book into existence. Without a reader, a book is just a strange pattern of black marks on a page.

It is not that Young confuses art and life. He argues,

Ordinary life has a hazy atmosphere to it, whereas language illuminates brightly and sharply.

Life, in short, is much harder to navigate.

Young’s model of reading for moral self-improvement, like the bibliotherapists’ model of reading for therapy, or the current Sydney festival’s model of reading for life, can occasionally feel a little grim and prescriptive, because they skip over the idea of reading for pleasure or plain fun.

It is often a mistake to go straight for what is said, ignoring how it is said. However tempting it may be to feel that novels contain a world complete, novelistic characters are, as Samuel Beckett unkindly said of Balzac, mere “clockwork cabbages” in comparison to real people.

Books bring solace because they provide meaning when life does not. They do this because they are aesthetically patterned in a way that the real world is not.

Sometimes it is just the happy syntax of a sentence – the way it unwinds and surprises and satisfies. In this, books can also be deceptive. The fact is, how something is said is more often than not the thing that makes the reader feel what they do.

The Conversation

Camilla Nelson, Senior Lecturer in Writing, University of Notre Dame Australia

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

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Australia: New Book Laws?

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The link below is to an article that takes a look at possible new book importation laws in Australia.

For more visit:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/10/flooding-australia-with-imported-books-would-be-an-assault-on-our-literary-culture

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It’s time to future-proof Australia’s copyright laws for the 21st century

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Matthew Rimmer, Queensland University of Technology

The award-winning Australian author Jackie French is wrong. In her open letter, she blasts the Productivity Commission’s report on intellectual property, released last month.

The report, though, makes a number of sensible recommendations that will help modernise Australia’s copyright laws for the 21st century. Economically, the report is rigorous and comprehensive.

Morally, the study shows a subtle and nuanced appreciation that copyright law is designed ultimately to promote the public interest of the Australian community.

The proposed reforms will enhance consumer rights, competition policy, access to knowledge and Australia’s ambitious National Innovation and Science Agenda and “ideas boom”.

The report also makes some helpful suggestions regarding Australia’s process for treaty-making in respect of intellectual property.

Competition policy

The Productivity Commission has recommended the repeal of parallel importation restrictions for books, which supports the position of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Treasurer Scott Morrison.

Allowing parallel imports will make books cheaper, potentially boosting sales and the number of active readers.
J Brew/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Australia’s parallel importation restrictions are an anachronistic hangover from British imperial publishing networks and are anti-competitive.

Over the past 40 years, the High Court of Australia, the Prices Surveillance Authority, the Australian Parliament, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the Productivity Commission and the Harper Competition Policy Review have highlighted how Australian consumers are paying more than they should for books.

Parallel importation restrictions largely benefit multinational publishing networks and foreign authors rather than local authors. As the Productivity Commission comments:

Most of the additional income from higher book prices goes to overseas authors and publishers whose works are released in Australia. The Commission estimated the additional income flowing overseas is around 1.5 times that retained by local copyright holders. In effect, PIRs impose a private, implicit tax on Australian consumers that largely subsidises foreign copyright holders. Indeed, none of the authors with top ten titles in the sample provided by HarperCollins are Australian.

The removal of parallel importation restrictions would be beneficial for Australian readers. Cheaper books for Aussie kids would be a great policy outcome.

In response to the Productivity Commission, publishers and authors have been running a scare campaign against the commission’s recommendations. The multinational publishing empire HarperCollins has grimly defended the restrictions.

Authors Thomas Keneally, Richard Flanagan, Peter Carey, Tara Moss and Jackie French have railed against the report. However, their emotive arguments are weak, inaccurate and unconvincing.

Parallel importation laws are not an effective means of protecting local culture or creative livelihoods. The removal of the restrictions will not destroy the local publishing industry. Indeed, opening up the book market may well be beneficial for publishers and authors by removing age-old distortions in the marketplace.

The Productivity Commission also supported the Australian Parliamentary Inquiry into IT Pricing and recommended that Australian consumers should be able to circumvent geoblocking.

Australian consumers deserve a fair deal in the digital economy. It has been concerning that Australian internet users are paying much more for IT works than our counterparts overseas.

Foxtel has opposed these recommendations. However, consumers such as Mark Serrels have complained that Foxtel’s service provides a poor distribution system for TV shows such as Game of Thrones.

Innovation

The Productivity Commission was concerned that “Australia’s copyright system has progressively expanded and protects works longer than necessary to encourage creative endeavour, with consumers bearing the cost”.

The commission also recommended that Australia should adopt a broad defence of “fair use”, supporting the previous inquiry by the Australian Law Reform Commission Into Copyright Law and the Digital Economy.

The defence of fair use in the United States has enabled innovative start-ups to flourish in hot-spots such as Silicon Valley, Boston and New York. Indeed, the US courts recently recognised that Google Books was protected under the doctrine of fair use.

Professor Peter Jaszi has noted that fair use is the “secret sauce” of US competitiveness.

Australia is at a competitive disadvantage because it has only a much more limited, purpose-specific defence of fair dealing. Start-ups may well be reluctant to base themselves in Australia because of fears of copyright litigation by incumbent industries.

The Productivity Commission recommended:

A new system of user rights, including the introduction of a broad, principles-based fair use exception, is needed to help address this imbalance.

The commission observed:

One of the key advantages of a fair use over a fair dealing exception is that the law can adapt to new circumstances and technologies.

The Australian Law Reform Commission has already highlighted how a defence of fair use could future-proof Australia’s copyright laws.

In addition, the Productivity Commission has recommended that all Australian governments should implement an open access policy for publicly funded research.

The policy should provide free access through an open access repository for all publications funded by governments, directly or through university funding, within 12 months of publication. This proposal will help boost Australia’s Ideas Boom.

The open access sharing of research will support the creative industries, as well as science and technology. Ryan Merkley, CEO of the Creative Commons project, has highlighted the benefits of open access publishing.

In particular, public health research could benefit. As US Vice President Joe Biden recently observed, there is a need to get cancer research out from behind pay-walls.

Fair trade

The Australian government has been involved in a flurry of negotiations over intellectual property and trade, with the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and various trade agreements with Chile, Japan, China and South Korea.

The Productivity Commission noted that the Mickey Mouse copyright term extension under the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement was incredibly expensive for the Australian community. Australia is a net importer of copyright works, and there was a need to mitigate against the costs of exorbitant copyright term extensions.

Reflecting upon such hectic activity, the Productivity Commission has been critical of the government entering into trade agreements without openly and fully assessing the benefits and costs of intellectual property obligations.

The commission warned:

Agreements embodying provisions on the scope and term of IP protection necessarily involve a ‘wrestle for rents’ – Australia should not capitulate too easily.

Moreover, the commission was concerned about the “spaghetti bowl” of trade agreements that Australia had been involved in:

Further, in more recent times, there has been a tendency to favour bilateral and regional initiatives over multilateral ones, resulting in overlapping and complex rules.

The commission’s report will provide a salutary caution for the Australian Parliament as it evaluates the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Rather than let the Productivity Commission’s report be lost in the tumult of the 2016 election, Australian politicians should pay heed to the popular interest in the study.

The Australian public has been crying out for copyright reforms to our anachronistic laws to bring them up to date with the digital age of the 21st century.

There is a great opportunity for political leaders to capitalise upon this public interest in competition, innovation, access to knowledge and fair trade.

The Conversation

Matthew Rimmer, Professor in Intellectual Property and Innovation Law, Queensland University of Technology

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

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Australia: Readings – Best Bookshop in the World

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The link below is to an article that takes a look at Victoria’s ‘Readings’ bookshop, which recently won ‘Bookstore of the Year’ at the London Book Fair.

For more visit:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/02/interview-with-a-bookstore-melbournes-readings-the-best-bookshop-in-the-world

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How Australia produces $30 billion worth of ‘grey literature’ that we can’t read

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Timothy McCallum, University of Southern Queensland

Australia spends more than $30 billion a year on projects which produce “grey literature” – documents which are produced by government departments, academic institutions, private companies and more. But despite all this effort, Australia lacks a standardised mechanism to curate and freely distribute grey literature.

There has never been a better time, than right now, to investigate opportunities into improving our country’s memory.

Government agencies allocate billions of dollars, each year, to research projects and programs. These activities produce research papers, conference papers and other forms of grey literature.

Examples of these agencies include The Australian Research Council and The National Health and Medical Research Council. These two agencies collectively allocated approximately $19 billion dollars in public funding to Australian research projects between 2000 and 2014.

Students in the higher education sector also produce high quality grey literature in the form of Theses and Dissertations.

Of course the public – inclusive of tax payers, business owners, teachers, farmers, researchers, students and more – can all benefit from free and uninterrupted access to all publicly funded knowledge and information.

The importance of grey literature

Given the context, grey literature is a very important source of information in this age of immediacy. It is also perfect for industry research collaboration due to its greater speed and flexibility of dissemination to a wide audience via the internet.

Unfortunately, Australia, unlike its competing international counterparts, has limited provisions for the digital curation or information stewardship of grey literature. At present firms mostly use their company web sites to store information and in turn, the Australian public are heavily reliant on commercial search engines to find information.

The inability to find information quickly impacts innovation and stunts collaboration.

Australia’s Ideas Boom

It is now widely known that Australia’s collaboration between industry and the research and higher education sector is the lowest in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries (OECD). In response, the Australian government has launched the national innovation and science agenda, with PM Malcolm Turnbull calling for an “Ideas Boom”.

The Ideas Boom promotes the collaboration between universities and industry in order to create more profitable, sustainable and export focused industries.

While there has been much debate about the flow-on effects from the Ideas Boom, contrary to what some believe, recent research shows that successful industry/research collaboration results in the increased quality and quantity of research output.

Unfortunately knowledge does not transfer through silo-ed organisations and institutions automatically. It also does not flow freely through the boundaries of firms or institutions towards the public.

Australia’s knowledge preservation

This raises concerns about the long-term preservation of Australia’s knowledge, which some think is compounded by the recent decrease in funding to the National Library of Australia which directly effected an online database called Trove which was designed to provide a single point of access to Australia’s openly accessible information.

Of course, Australia does have open access policies. These policies, amongst other things, mandate that publicly funded research be made available through university websites (also known as Institutional Repositories). However, individually searching (or even locating the URL for) each Institutional Repository in-turn is both inefficient and impractical.

Moreover, individually searching each of these systems world-wide would be bordering on impossible. This is part of the reason why information technology infrastructure and products like search engines have boomed (and made billions from advertising) during the last decade.

The gap in sustainable collaboration

A recent Australian Research Council funded Linkage Project revealed that Australia lacks a body that can advise and liaise on best practice for digital information production across government, education, civil society and industry.

The project titled “Grey Literature Strategies” identified a potential national efficiency impact of around $17 billion per annum in relation to grey literature accessibility.

Designing deliberate solutions

Last year the AMP Tomorrow fund provided an opportunity to make inroads into building an access portal into the global wealth of publicly funded information. The project artefact, which is in beta, openaccess.xyz has since harvested as much of the world’s publicly funded research as possible.


openaccess.xyz

The free and ever expanding website, allows users to search millions of grey literature records. At present the interface has two modes: a traditional search engine results page, and a modern data visualisation software product known as Bookworm; the software which inspired the Google Books Ngram Viewer:

screen capture of openaccess dot xyz
openaccess

The artefact is currently in beta and will undergo further development and refinement in the knowledge that solving the problematic transfer of knowledge between industry, governments and academia requires more than meets the eye.

The Australian economy can benefit from the improved curation of, and access to, publicly funded knowledge. Designing and building digital curation infrastructure for grey literature would be of value to Australia.

The unprecedented amount of information which we currently see is, not surprisingly, ever increasing and the time is right to deliberately design a demonstrable system which would ensure the preservation of knowledge and assist in securing Australia’s position as a leading, but more importantly sustainable, industry-research collaborator.

The Conversation

Timothy McCallum, Senior Analyst, University of Southern Queensland

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

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Journalism in Australia will not die because Fairfax is walking away from the job

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Brian McNair, Queensland University of Technology

With depressing regularity I return to this column to talk about cuts to precious journalism capacity in Australia, usually at Fairfax. This week it’s the equivalent of 120 editorial positions consigned to the dustbin of journalistic history, on top of the many hundreds, nay thousands, slashed at Fairfax and other news organisations in Australia in the past three years.

Former Age editor Michael Smith* appeared on ABC News Breakfast this morning to say he thought the:

… future of Fairfax as a news organisation would be decided in the next few weeks.

Would the cuts fall on what he called the “flim-flam” of Fairfax commercial properties such as Next, or where so many have already struck – at the heart of the once-proud news producer’s editorial resource?

We can perhaps guess the answer to that question based on the company’s ruthless race for profit in recent times. Nothing wrong with that, if you’re a shareholder or manager on performance-related bonuses. Too bad if you’re a journalist, or indeed a member of Fairfax’s rapidly dwindling readership.

Readers comments on the SMH coverage of the story make clear the disgust of once-loyal customers of a once-quality product, and the fatalistic realisation that it’s all over for Fairfax as a credible supplier of news in this country.

Rupert Murdoch and News must be enjoying it all hugely. With every cut to their only serious rival in the print and press journalism sector in Australia the dominance of News is enhanced. And deservedly so.

While Fairfax has let what one former senior manager described as “150 years of journalistic talent walk out the door” – and that was quite some time ago, so you can double that figure now – News continues to take its journalism seriously.

You might not agree with every anti-ABC rant you read in The Australian; you might be appalled by some of the tabloid headlines and front pages its popular mastheads deliver – but at least News believes and invests in, well, news, which is far from self-evidently the case for Fairfax’s management.

To some extent – and this is not for a moment to understate the tragedy of jobs lost and careers terminated – Fairfax’s loss has been the gain of Guardian Australia, The Conversation, Crikey and other online outlets that have recruited or benefitted from the input of ex-Fairfax staffers. And we know that the future of journalism has little to do with analogue-era newsrooms and permanent editorial positions.

Journalism in Australia will not die because Fairfax is walking away from the job. It just goes elsewhere, to those places where the digital natives live. It has already done so, if we go by declining print circulations, not just in Australia but all over the advanced capitalist world. Journalists of the old school face huge challenges in adapting to this turbulence.

For all that the digital age will bring opportunities for new kinds of journalist, and new kinds of journalism, there is real tragedy about the continuing defenestration of a once central element of the Australian public sphere. Eric Beecher’s 2013 warning of a looming “civic catastrophe” may have been dramatised for effect, but not by much.

The decline of Fairfax places even greater importance on Australian taxpayers continued support for strong public service journalism.

More than that, they must acquire and stick to the habit of paying for online journalism in the way we used to pay for newspapers. “No pay, no play” might be the takeaway from this week’s sad news.

*This attribution has been corrected. An earlier version of this article incorrectly attributed this quote to former Age editor-in-chief Andrew Holden.

The Conversation

Brian McNair, Professor of Journalism, Media and Communication, Queensland University of Technology

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