Special
feature
'Long live independent publishing!': ABR turns 300
Most
editors look forwards, not back. We have to: there are pages to
fill, readers to court, deadlines to meet. But publication of
a 300th issue of a literary review invites retrospection, if not
undue nostalgia.
Australian Book Review was founded in Adelaide in 1961.
Edited by Max Harris and Rosemary Wighton, the first series ran
until 1974. The second series, of which this is the 300th issue,
began in June 1978. (The contributors included Don Watson, Thomas
Shapcott, Bruce Beaver and ABR stalwart Margaret Dunkle;
Horner sketched Manning Clark on the front cover; and new books
under review included Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip, Sumner
Locke Elliott’s Water under the Bridge and Dennis Lillee’s
The Art of Fast Bowling.) John McLaren edited ABR until
the mid-1980s, and was followed by Kerryn Goldsworthy, Louise
Adler, Rosemary Sorensen and the late Helen Daniel.
It is always a privilege to work with fine writers and upholders
of literary values. I thank all our contributors – and all
our readers – for enabling us to maintain what Delia Falconer
memorably described as not just a magazine but an ideal. I salute
my colleagues and forerunners. To celebrate the publication of
our 300th issue, we invited a few of them to comment on the milestones.
–
Peter Rose
Inga Clendinnen
I wrote my first books as offerings to the Mesoamerican Academy
across the Water, which I imagined as very like the Nine Mayan
Lords of Death: nameless, aloof, implacable and almost certainly
fatal. Then I met Helen Daniel (through, as it happens, a review
in ABR) and discovered the Republic of Letters, Australian Branch.
Helen ran her second-hand book and furniture shop on Brunswick
Street as a literary drop-in centre. Then she took over the editorship
of ABR, with its comet-tail of committed helpers, writers,
readers and sympathisers. Then she introduced me to the professionals
– the publishers, the booksellers, the journal and newspaper
editors – who keep the Republic in health, and to the writers’
festivals where this normally secretive society flexes its muscle
and shows its strength.
Journals such as ABR are the Republic’s blood and
sinew, linking and animating its parts, and also its voice, declaring
its presence, demanding it be heard.
Happy 300th birthday, ABR.
Glyn
Davis
The recent demise of Australia’s longest-running magazine,
the Bulletin, recalls the fragility of literary culture in Australian
society. Despite its legendary status, the Bulletin joins
the daunting list of local magazines and journals which falter
and then vanish.
We are lucky that some defy the odds. ABR, now cele-brating
300 issues, sits alongside long-running journals such as Southerly,
Meanjin and Overland, and relative new-comers including
the Griffith Review and the Australian Literary Review,
in offering reflection on contemporary Australian literature,
politics, policy and society.
ABR demonstrates how a good review sharpens the quality
of Australian writing through intelligent criticism. This leads
to celebrated controversies and occasional injustices. Yet without
judgment there is no way to celebrate great authors, to promote
the undeservedly obscure, to create audiences for new works and
nurture debate about content and style. Criticism takes text seriously,
as the ideal vehicle to carry Australian ideas into a wider world.
In support of such important work, 300 ABR issues is barely
sufficient to start the task.
Morag Fraser
It was a Miles Franklin moment: a large crowd gathered in
the marble foyer of the National Library and speaker after charismatic
speaker calling for the establishment of an Australian equivalent
of the London/New York/Paris Review. Suddenly a
quiet voice cut through. We have an Australian Book Review
already, she said. Why search so anxiously abroad for models?
The speaker was Helen Daniel, editor at the time of ABR,
and a forceful advocate throughout her life for Australian literature
and for a critical culture to support that literature. She would
be delighted, I know, to be cutting the 300th birthday cake with
her equally passionate successor, Peter Rose.
It is a brave person who edits, funds or publishes a literary
review in Australia, with its small, scattered reading public
and the grinding uncertainty of funding, but it is an essential
labour if we want to understand ourselves in the way Miles Franklin
intended – beyond the straitjacket of national identity politics.
Literary magazines are the echo chambers of a society, the place
where poets’ words can resonate beyond their own heads, where
essays find their ease, where argument can run over more than
two column inches, where novelists find their obsessive, isolated
labours acknowledged – not always loved perhaps – and
received by the culture they explore and articulate, where scholars
can touch a reading public broader than the academy. Magazines
that claim longevity, as ABR can, help build that national
habit of critical scrutiny and the vital tradition of civil argument
and engagement. How much better than war?
But it is endless, relentless attention to detail and dedication
– to the twists and turns of the culture, and to the placement
of every comma – that produces a magazine of quality, so
I salute all at ABR, and all who have gone before them,
for being there, day after day and night after night, to see her
grow old(er) with such precision, wit and grace.
Kerryn Goldsworthy
Asked in my capacity as one of its former editors to say a
few words on the occasion of ABR’s 300th issue, I
am remind-ed of my mother in the cake shop one year, buying, for
the family celebration of my sister’s birthday, a cake featuring
her favourite cartoon cat. ‘And how old is the child, Mrs
Goldsworthy?’ the man in the cake shop inquired oleaginously.
‘Thirty-seven,’ Ma replied, deadpan.
While I was its editor in the mid-1980s, ABR was my baby.
Twenty years on, I’m glad to see it still being looked after
so well as it celebrates another anniversary. Nothing could have
prepared me for the reality of editing the magazine, for, as with
a real baby, it required, with unrelenting ruthlessness (and no
doubt still does), to be fed and cleaned up. When you edit a monthly
magazine, you’re working on three, sometimes four, issues
at once: commissioning, editing, marking up, laying out, and trundling
round the country to conferences and writers’ festivals with
promotional bundles of the current issue costing you a fortune
in excess baggage.
But one of the unexpected satisfactions of ageing is watching
things that you had a hand in twenty years ago as they continue
to thrive. I am sure the original editors Max Harris and Rosemary
Wighton never thought the magazine would outlive them, but at
this rate it will outlive us all.
Clive James
In Australia, one of the penalties for having survived long enough
as some kind of literary figure is to be asked, in one’s
senior years, to write a chapter in the latest distinguished volume
devoted to the history of Australian literature. Such requests,
though flattering, oblige the victim to write a story from which
he must leave himself out. My powers of self-abnegation stop well
short of that, so I always say no. Why should I leave myself out
when I have so many contemporaries to do it for me?
But if I were forced at gunpoint to write such a chapter, I would
begin by saying that the growing prominence of the independent
literary magazines in recent years has helped to create an inhabitable
Australian literary world, and that ABR has been in the
vanguard of this development. Long wished for, an Australian literary
world was slow to arrive, partly because it was so keenly awaited:
the pot grew nervous from being watched. Especially in the field
of poetry, the pre-modern era was dependent on the newspapers,
with the Bulletin counting as a kind of amplified newspaper.
The requirements of popularity had some strong results. (Les Murray
has always been right to stress the importance of what he was
first to call the ‘newspaper poem’, and, gratifyingly
often, he still writes it.) Looking back to my own beginnings,
I remember the magazines as being few, thin and hard to find unless
you were attached to the same university as they were.
Actually, this memory is inaccurate: it was always worthwhile
to keep a file of Meanjin, for example, and when James
McAuley started Quadrant he raised the stakes for everyone.
But when I sailed for England in the early 1960s, that was the
way the Australian picture looked to me. From here on, my brief
account gets personal. Peter Porter, I suspect, has a more informative
story about what it meant to become an expatriate Australian poet.
He had more reason to think about what was involved, because poetry
was his whole endeavour, and the problem of maintaining a spiritual
presence in the homeland he had physically left would be a matter
of life and death to him. I could never claim that kind of thoughtfulness.
Working more by instinct than by strategy, and always more by
luck than judgment, I had a big enough task establishing and maintaining
a poetic reputation in Britain, where my other reputation as a
professional entertainer seemed determined to get in the way.
Get caught on screen with your arms around Margarita Pracatan
and see what it does to your status as a lyric poet.
But precisely because Britain was in possession of a fully developed
literary world, it had room for someone who broke its rules of
dignity. In Britain, everyone is aware, even if they hate the
idea, that the poet who doesn’t fit the picture might be
part of the picture. One could be given the cold shoulder –
any number of cold shoulders – yet not be frozen out. Even
my poems about Australia found space in the literary pages of
London. Eventually, I found myself writing more and more such
poems, and Australian editors – who were still keeping their
eye, as always, on the British and American magazines – began
asking to re-print them. I was glad to comply, although I hasten
to insist that I had no plans for making a reconquista. It had
long been apparent to me that the expatriate, should he wish for
a return, was up against the same difficulties as a space traveller
making a re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere: unless he
got the angle exactly right, he would burn up, with the implacable
Australian press waiting on the ground to interview the fragments.
But really my poetry was proof that I had never been away.
It had already proved that to me. Any decent poem be-gins in feelings
so deep that we might as well call them instinctual, and what
I had been discovering was the nature of my instinct, which had
been formed in Australia and never forgotten it, whatever my conscious
mind might have thought. With a whole heart, I can thank the Australian
magazine editors for having spotted this almost before I did.
At the head of these editors was Peter Rose, who generously made
space available in the ABR for poems I had published in
Britain and America but which might also appeal to Australian
readers who had no easy access to the periodicals they first appeared
in. Later on there were other editors, and there were poems which
had their first publication in Australia, but ABR continued
to provide me with my most welcoming landing strip for things
I was sending in, or bringing back, from abroad: it was my Edwards
Air Force Base. ABR even ran the full text of the address
I gave when I received, in Mildura, the Philip Hodgins Memorial
Medal, which remains my sole big literary prize, and the only
one I will ever need (ABR, September 2003).
When I published that address as a chapter in a book, I gave the
book the same title as the chapter, The Meaning of Recognition.
Self-dramatising is what I do for a living – everything I
write, in whatever form, is an unreliable memoir – but the
drama, I would like to think, is not always entirely about me.
In writing about the magnificent but cruelly abbreviated achievement
of Philip Hodgins, I was an ex-patriate trying to fulfil what
I think of as part of the expatriate’s duty: to help give
Australia to the world, and to bring a world view to the task
of clarifying Australia’s position to itself. Laid out as
an argument, the full story of how I view that duty would take
a book all on its own, but I would be surprised if my work had
not been telling the story by implication for these many years.
ABR has played a crucial part in helping me to tell it,
so I have a personal reason for being grateful for the magazine’s
existence, and I am sure there has been many a contributor, over
the course of its 300 issues, who could say the same.
Finally, it comes down to the importance of having a forum in
which the concept of intellectual freedom trumps all other political
standpoints: a forum in which, wrapped in our separate togas,
we can speak our minds to each other without being knifed on the
way home. No literary magazine is worthy of its title if it doesn’t
provide that. ABR does.
Richard Walsh
I was actually on the board of the National Book Council when
we made the big leap of faith and revived ABR in 1978 under
the inspired editorship of the bearded and somewhat dishevelled
literary warrior, John McLaren. I later served on its advisory
board, as I think it was then called, under Brian Johns. I recall
delivering a toast to its sainted editor, Kerryn Goldsworthy,
at a typically rumbustious lunch in a small Melbourne eatery,
probably on the tenth anniversary of the Glorious Restoration.
Such fond memories emerge from the mists of time, but the need
for ABR remains constant. In March I reviewedin these pages
Bruce Dover’s new account of Rupert Murdoch’s adventures
in China. For some reason or other, this book will definitely
not be reviewed in the Australian newspaper, nor, it seems, in
its monthly Australian Literary Review supplement. Eric
Ellis’s excellent review of it for the Far Eastern Economic
Review (which recently fell into Rupert’s clutches) has
been spiked.
Long live independent publishing! Long live ABR!
Geordie Williamson
I remember my first conversation with Peter Rose, even though
it took place seven years ago, because I took the call on a mobile
while standing beneath the four-tonne chandelier hanging in the
auditorium of Sydney’s State Theatre. It glowed in Kitsch
affirmation as he asked whether I was interested in reviewing
for ABR. I was, and did, starting with some bloke –
Malcolm Knox – who had written a novel called Summerland.
I don’t think my effort was up to much, but it was largely
positive and hopefully not too far off the money. (When, years
later, we finally met, Malcolm was blissfully unaware of my review.
‘Actually,’ he added, ‘I thought you were a woman.’)
It sounds naïve to say so, but that review was my first glimmering
that Australian critics could write about Australian artists,
and that such dialogue had its own weight and worth. For someone
who had been living solely on imported literature, it was a timely
reminder of the riches to hand. I began devouring everyone from
Thea Astley to Patrick White by way of restitution.
After moving to London for work and study, I turned to Australian
authors for a different reason: homesickness. I know, for instance,
that I read Martin Boyd’s The Cardboard Crown in a
pub off the Portobello Road, because my copy still contains the
establishment’s beer mat as a bookmark. Likewise, a dried
umbril of Cow Parsley pinpoints a reading of the ‘Buladelah-Taree
Holiday Song Cycle’ to the Undercliff, above Lyme Regis in
Dorset. Oz Lit became my Moveable Feast during these years. Or,
more appropriately, it became my endlessly nourishing Magic Pudding.
When I eventually decided to return home, to join the Noble Society
of Pudding Owners – whose ‘members are required to wander
along the roads, indulgin’ in conversation, song and story,
and eatin’ at regular intervals from the Pudding’ –
it was ABR I was thinking of. I’m grateful to the
magazine for welcoming me back to the feast.
AUSTRALIAN
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