ACL 2009
Australian Literature
Semester 2 2014
Footscray Park

Lecture 4
The Rise and Fall (and Rise?) of Australian Literature

by Ian Syson

 Mark Davis

• Mark Davis, 'The Decline of the Literary Paradigm in Australian Publishing'
• Mark Davis, 'Literature, Small Publishers and the Marketing Culture', Overland 190.
• Katherine Bode, 'Publishing and Australian Literature: Crisis, Decline or Transformation?' Cultural Studies Review volume 16 number 2 September 2010
  

Davis gained infamy for his book Gangland.

His more recent work has looked at the collapse of what he calls the ‘literary paradigm'.

Older method of compiling besteseller lists -> Nielson BookScan

We have entered a phase in publishing where the literary novel is seen in a negative light, a necessary rump – raising the spectre of its being seen as an unnecessary rump.

By the early 200s almost no major Australian publisher was aggressively seeking or promoting new literary fiction at the forefront of their lists. (p94)

If, as Davis suggests, the Australian literary paradigm is on the decline, what are we to make of the problem?

• Is it a problem?
• Why?
• What does literature give us that other forms of discourse do not?
• Does literature limit us in certain ways?

____________________________

When I was in England in 1997 I met my brother in law's legal partner, a highly educated man in the English way. He asked me what I did. I told him: academic . . . and that I edited a literary magazine.

He responded, bemused: “Oh, do you have those over there?”

I was baffled by the response and muttered something like “umm yes”. I didn't strut, I don't think I cringed, but I'm sure I didn't attain Phillips' “relaxed erectness of carriage”.

This one brief conversation in itself justifies our entire field of study.

He is perhaps typifying a certain kind of English ignorance that sees us as a nation of beer-swilling sports nuts who have no time or care for culture and literature.

Lest I descend into cringe mode, while he isn't completely right, I think he is not utterly wrong.

Prem Lit Award story

This is from a review I published in ALS, 19.1, 1999.

At the 1998 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards the keynote speech was given by visiting English actress Claire Bloom. She admitted to the audience that she hadn't read much Australian writing apart from Patrick White's Voss, of which she was reminded as she flew over the 'empty' heart of Australia. She then mentioned David Malouf and proceeded to enlighten us colonials about Hardy (no, not Frank), Thackeray and all those wonderful Victorian novels that made her love literature so. And what did we wild colonial girls and boys do or say in response? Infrequent muted heckling aside, nothing. Those generations, movements and individuals who developed, and those still developing, a spirited critical culture in Australia were betrayed by a spineless cringing before the inane mutterings of a glib emissary from the heart of empire. A disgrace. And -:- as if to turn the knife - when Richard Flanagan (who won the Vance Palmer award for the best work of fiction) used his acceptance speech to condemn the proposed GST on books, the hissed protests were much more audible. That hoary old shibboleth: 'keep politics out of literature' seemed to have been let out of the same bag that produced the rejuvenated 'cultural cringe'.

• We don't do culture
• In the middle bit we don't do anything.

You can see why if Australian literature didn't exist we'd have to invent it. Which in a sense is exactly what we did.

Prior to WWII, Australian literature didn't exist. Insofar as it:

• Wasn't studied at university
• Wasn't seen as a serious publishing category within Australia .
• Authors needed to obtain overseas publication to be taken seriously (the cringe?)

As I said last week the post war period sees our culture trying to develop and throw off the cringe.

One part of this process was the installation of Australian literature courses in Australian universities.

Public campaigns were made and eventually the first Chair in Australian literature was established at Sydney Uni in the 50s. Leonie Kramer.

Interestingly, the first unit she established was a comparative one comparing European classic with Australian texts.

While slightly cringy this response is still better than some other responses from around the same time”

http://www.cybersydney.com.au/dhl/about%20dhls.htm

According to Robert Darroch, vp of DHL soc of Aust:

John Pringle, former editor of the Sydney Morning Herald , and the author of Australia Accent -one of the most perceptive non-fiction books written about Australia - said Kangaroo (to which he devoted an entire chapter in his book) was perhaps the only profound work written about our country

Yet the most famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) accolade given to Kangaroo was from Professor J.I.M. Stewart, who, when asked to deliver the inaugural Commonwealth Literary Fund lecture on Australian literature in 1948, said that, as he could find no examples of literature written by Australians, he would instead give a talk on DH Lawrence's Kangaroo

To cut a very long story short, Australian literature was established as a serious university discipline by the late 70s. The Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) became quite a powerful representative body in the 1980s.

The struggles to establish Australian literature echo the struggles to establish English literature 50 years before.

Is there a general historic law that intellectual culture elevates the ancient and the general above the contemporary and the local?

Having established itself as a serious discipline, Australian literature started to wane in the 90s.

• Ozlit course seemed to collapse around the country
• ASAL's membership lost both volume and passion
• Literature generally lost its centrality and other cultural forms became legitimate objects of study
• The Australian became a vexed category.
• If ‘Australian' once was a figure of anti-colonial independence that we could wear proudly – it had morphed into a term of exclusion. The term 'Australian' had generated its underside 'unAustralian'.

A general mistrust of nationalism and patriotism (except in relation to sport) and the facts of a post-national world combined with the decline of literature saw Australian literature become a difficult category.

What need was there for a body of writing that claimed our independence and isolation when the only way that could be interpreted was as exclusive?

Where you might have on the one hand Australian literature and on the other unAustralian literature.

Mark Davis draws together the decline of literary publishing and the decline of ozlit in the academy p103

So, in my own contrary way I hit upon the idea of establishing a unit in Australian literature, not as a way to resuscitate or defend the Australian legend but to try to see the term Australia as a space in a post-national world.

Books like Barracuda and Unpolished Gem demonstrate, cross and undercut the border limits of the nation and its legends. Whereas books like Wake in Fright, and Coonardoo destabilise the legend from within.

This is also a unit that is deliberately conscious of being established after post-colonialism, in the space that David Carter identifies in the very first set of readings in the reader.