46 
The History of the Book in Australia
46 IAN MORRISON
At the beginning of the 21st century, Australia is among the most urbanized countries in the world, and one of the most sparsely populated. The three major cities of the eastern seaboard—Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane—account for nearly half the country’s population of 20 million. Similarly, the book trade is dominated by just a few of the more than 200 active publishers. In 2001, six multinationals—Penguin, Random House, HarperCollins, Pan Macmillan, Hodder Headline, and Simon & Schuster—held more than 60 per cent of the general retail market. The largest Australian-owned publisher, George Allen & Unwin, had 9 per cent of the market. Only two other Australian-owned companies—the (now British-owned) travel-guide publisher Lonely Planet and the directory publisher UBD—featured in the top 25. The general retail market is dominated by chain stores and franchises.
Sales data are more ambiguous, however. The educational and general non-fiction markets are dominated by Australian titles, which in 2004–5 outsold imported titles by more than two to one (84.4 million copies, against 39.5 million). Adult fiction, however, is dominated by imported titles, which in monetary terms outsold Australian titles by more than 50 per cent. Translating this data into an accurate account of what Australians read is complicated by the fact that it reports only mainstream commercial outlets: direct retail sales by small publishers, religious bookselling, and subscription publishing by multinationals such as Time-Life Books and Reader’s Digest are not included. Further, a 2001 survey found that as many as one third of books purchased are intended as gifts; that few of these gifts are actually read; and that about one third of the books that are read are borrowed either from friends or from libraries. It is clear that Australian authorship and subject-matter are valued highly by readers of non-fiction, but are largely inconsequential to readers of fiction.
Australia’s foundation legends are products of the European Enlightenment: from reports of explorers, scientists, and settlers, beginning with Dutch landfalls in the 17th century, through the scientific voyages mounted by the French and the English in the 18th century, to the ‘heroic age’ of land exploration in the 19th century. The eleven convict transport ships that set out from England in 1787 to establish a colony in New South Wales brought books of all kinds and a printing press. Although nobody was found to work the press until 1796 (the first professional printer, George Howe, arrived in 1800), print culture was integral to the colony from the start.
The first book produced specifically for distribution in Australia was a homily directed at transported convicts, Richard Johnson’s Address to the Inhabitants of the Colonies Established in New South Wales and Norfolk Island (London, 1794). An official account of The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay was published at London in 1789, and several officers also produced accounts of their experiences. Watkin Tench, John White, John Hunter, and David Collins were all remarkable for their scientific curiosity. Their books went through multiple editions and were widely translated. A number of works attributed to the ‘gentleman thief’ George Barrington (who had been transported in 1790) were compiled by hack writers from these genuine narratives. Long before Europeans began publishing accounts of the continent, however, the Aboriginal Australians had complex oral cultures stretching back tens of thousands of years, with hundreds of different languages. The subtleties of their encounters with European literacy have only recently begun to be explored. David Unaipon (Native Legends, 1929) is justly famous as the first published Aboriginal author, but the first Aboriginal to engage actively with European literacy was the Eora leader Bennelong, who dictated a letter in 1796. In the intervening years, Aboriginal publishing was predominately conducted by white missionaries and fell into two main categories: language books directed at Europeans (starting with Lancelot Threlkeld’s 1827 Specimens of a Dialect of the Aborigines of New South Wales); and scripture texts and primers for Aboriginals on mission stations. Penny van Toorn has pointed out that categorizing Aboriginal culture as ‘oral’ and European as ‘literate’ is oversimplistic, privileging European concepts of what writing is and does over other sign systems. Aboriginal culture inscribed meanings on message-sticks, as well as on rocks, bark, human bodies, clothing, and ritual objects. European writing appeared, as van Toorn puts it, ‘on objects as diverse as Bibles and flour bags’, and ‘entered Indigenous life-worlds as part of a foreign invasion’ (van Toorn, 14).
The first monograph on an Aboriginal artist. The Bread and Cheese Club’s leading spirit was J. K. Moir, who donated his collection to the State Library of Victoria. The Commonwealth National Library was the forerunner of the National Library of Australia. Private collection
Literacy levels among the ‘invaders’, who included Irish, Scots, and Welsh, as well as West Indians such as Howe, also varied enormously. The culture of many convicts and common soldiers was primarily oral and highly diverse. Nonetheless, Lieutenant Ralph Clark was able to stage a production of Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer with a convict cast in 1789.
Howe’s appointment as Government Printer around 1800 marked the beginning of local publishing. He started Australia’s first newspaper, the Sydney Gazette, in 1803 with a press run of 100 copies. Modelled on the London Gazette, it contained official notices, advertisements, and general news. With such a tiny circulation, its survival depended on Howe’s government salary and the success of his other business ventures, notably trading in sandalwood. In 1810, Howe replaced the original wooden common press with an iron Stanhope. By 1819, the colony’s population had grown to 30,000 and the Gazette’s circulation to 400. Howe’s publishing activities expanded to include missionary works in Pacific languages, some literary titles, and John Lewin’s Birds of New South Wales (1813).
The next permanent British settlements in Australia were in Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania, at Hobart in 1804 and at Launceston in 1806. Hobart’s first newspaper, the Derwent Star, appeared in 1810. It ceased after a few issues, and only three copies have survived. The Hobart Town Gazette, established by Andrew Bent in 1816, proved more durable, surviving Bent’s imprisonment and sacking by Lieutenant-Governor Arthur in 1825. In 1827 Bent’s replacement, a free settler, Dr James Ross, started an independent newspaper, the Hobart Town Courier.
The 1820s were a turning point, with the settlements’ physical dimensions expanding. Explorers had been pushing west, south, and north: in 1812, the known land of New South Wales consisted of a few dozen miles around Sydney, but by 1827 it extended for hundreds of square miles. The Australian colonies were becoming attractive to free settlers. Hobart and Sydney were no longer prison camps on the edge of the recognized world; they had become proper towns, with churches, schools, and other civilized amenities. Military rule was beginning to give way to civilian councils. During the 1820s, 11,200 out of 43,950 new arrivals were free; in the 1830s, free settlers numbered 66,400 out of 117,090 arrivals. Growing numbers of people born in the colonies were now of an age to become parents themselves.
Many convicts and emancipists had a rudimentary education, but few could afford to spend large sums of money buying books. Libraries and learned societies began to form. Although the Philosophical Society of Australasia (Sydney, 1821–3) and the Van Diemen’s Land Scientific Society (Hobart, 1829) were stillborn, the decade saw the opening of the Wesleyan Library in Hobart in 1825 and the Australian Subscription Library (forerunner of the State Library of New South Wales) in Sydney in 1826. Independent newspapers were increasing in number, and were less vulnerable to government interference: Bent’s defiance had been squashed in 1825; but when Governor Darling imprisoned the proprietors of the Australian and the Monitor in 1829, the newspapers both continued publishing.
The mid-1820s saw an upsurge of original poetry in Sydney and Hobart newspapers. The first magazine, Robert Howe’s Australian Magazine (Sydney, 1821), was soon followed by the first book of verse by an Australian-born poet, Charles Tompson’s Wild Notes from the Lyre of a Native Minstrel (Sydney, 1826) and the first Australian-published novel, Henry Savery’s Quintus Servinton (Hobart, 1830).
In 1820, there were only two Government Printers, Howe and Bent; ink and paper were expensive, often unobtainable, and seldom of high quality. The limited capacity of colonial printers and the high costs of raw materials ensured that the book trade continued to be dominated by imports, and most Australian writers sought to have their books produced in England. The colonial market was nevertheless substantial: booksellers’ and auctioneers’ catalogues from the 1840s show between 10,000 and 30,000 books advertised each year. The London publisher Thomas Tegg’s sons James and Samuel arrived in 1834. James established a business in Sydney, Samuel settled in Hobart. For most of the following decade, they played a dominant role in the Australian book trade. James published more than 100 titles, including two magazines (Tegg’s Monthly Magazine, 1836, and Literary News, 1837–8), broadside and book almanacs, political and religious pamphlets, literary works, and William Bland’s account of Hume and Hovell’s expedition to Port Phillip (1837).
During the 1830s, newspaper circulation grew and prices fell; the cover price of the Australian, for example, was 9d. in 1830; by 1835, it was down to 4d. The total weekly output of all newspapers in 1827 was 3,700 copies; in 1836 it was 7,800. Sydney readers could choose from seven titles: the staid Sydney Gazette, the radical Australian, the once outrageous but now stuffy Monitor, the conservative Sydney Herald, the eccentric Sydney Times, the provocative Colonist, and—for business news—the Commercial Journal. Only the Herald (now the Sydney Morning Herald) survived the economic depression of the 1840s, but new papers continued to appear, and the overall effect was of continuing expansion. Hobart too had several newspapers, and a provincial press was emerging in the towns around Sydney, as well as in the new settlements of Moreton Bay (Queensland), Western Australia, South Australia, and Port Phillip (Victoria). Most struggled financially, but their proprietors were motivated more by political power than by financial gain. By the end of the 1850s all the colonies had elected legislatures, and many politicians were newspapermen.
Booksellers were running successful circulating libraries in the 1830s, and athenaeums or mechanics’ institutes were established in the larger centres: Hobart (1827), Sydney (1833), Newcastle (1835), Melbourne (1838). By the end of the century, every town of any size had its ‘institute’. Free public libraries were slower to develop. The Melbourne Public Library (now the State Library of Victoria) opened in 1856, and the other colonies gradually followed suit: New South Wales (1869), Tasmania (1870), South Australia (1886), Western Australia (1887), Queensland (1890).
The great spur to colonial growth in the 1850s was the discovery of gold in Victoria and New South Wales. Early gold finds had been suppressed by administrators fearful of losing control—a reasonable fear in a penal colony. The influx of free settlers, and the economic downturn of the 1840s, made such news more welcome. It is impossible to overstate the effects of the rushes. Between 1851 and 1861, the population of Victoria grew from 77,000 to 538,000; New South Wales from 178,000 to 350,000; South Australia from 63,000 to 126,000; Queensland from 8,000 to 30,000. Tasmania, however, flat-lined; the end of convict transportation in 1855 combined with the pull of the mainland gold-fields to cancel out any population growth from free settlers. Universities, too, were being established—at Sydney (1851), Melbourne (1853), Adelaide (1874), and Tasmania (1890)—although higher education remained the exclusive preserve of a tiny minority until well into the 20th century, and university libraries were accordingly slow to develop.
Inflation soared as employers increased wages to keep tradesmen from the diggings. In 1850, skilled tradesmen could earn 5s. or 6s. a day; by 1855, compositors on the Melbourne Herald were being paid £1 a day. Melbourne, the city hardest hit, embarked on a series of major public works—a Public Library, an Exhibition Building, a University—to bring a sense of order to what was essentially a frontier town devastated by the stampede to the diggings. By the 1890s, Sydney and Melbourne were comparable in size to many European cities. Melbourne’s leading newspapers, the radical Age and the conservative Argus, had reputations that extended far beyond Victoria. International Exhibitions brought Sydney (1879) and Melbourne (1880 and 1888) world attention.
The gold rush also accelerated the growth of non-English publishing. The first German newspaper, the German Australian Post, appeared in Adelaide in 1848, and numerous other German-language publications were issued in South Australia and Queensland during the second half of the century. German Moravian missionaries were active in publishing works in South Australian Aboriginal languages. Other non-English publications included the French Journal de Melbourne (1858), the English and Chinese Advertiser (Ballarat, 1850s), the Welsh Yr Australydd (Melbourne, 1866–72), and a Hebrew almanac (Hobart, 1853).
Rapid population growth created a steady market for textbooks and practical treatises, but literary publishing remained fragile. The colonial market was too small to sustain even the most prolific writer. Newspapers were the main outlet for fiction and poetry throughout the 19th century. The country press in particular was extraordinarily literary by 21st-century standards, but it offered only a precarious livelihood. Most colonial writers had other careers—commonly the law or the civil service—or private means. The few who lived by their pens either published in Britain or worked as journalists or newspaper editors.
Given these conditions, the richness and diversity of writing that appeared in the 1860s is remarkable. The instant popular success of the Australian Journal (Melbourne, 1865–1962) gave colonial writers a major boost, in morale if not earning power, and the decade saw the emergence of prolific popular writers such as Garnet Walch and R. P. Whitworth. Marcus Clarke and ‘Rolf Bold-rewood’ (Thomas Alexander Brown) began their careers as newspaper columnists, the precocious Clarke writing for Melbourne’s Australasian and Boldrewood for Sydney’s Australian Town and Country Journal. Nicol Drysdale Stenhouse, a Sydney lawyer, became the patron of a coterie of intellectuals that included Daniel Deniehy, editor of the Southern Cross (1859–60), and the poet Henry Kendall. Kendall and his contemporaries Charles Harpur and Adam Lindsay Gordon are renowned for their poems of the Australian bush, but each was just as at home with European and biblical mythology.
The major book publishers during this period were all based in Melbourne: George Robertson, Samuel Mullen, and E. W. Cole. Several of the larger Melbourne printing firms also became successful publishers. Sands & McDougall, F. F. Bailliere, and Gordon & Gotch all built intercolonial mini-empires based on publishing modest-looking reference books that few could afford to be without. Sands & McDougall’s postal directories (published from the 1850s to the 1970s), Gordon & Gotch’s Australian Handbook and Almanac (1870–1906), and Bailliere’s atlases, gazetteers, and directories (1860s to 1880s), have retained their value as sources for historical research.
Among the notable figures in the Sydney trade were: William Maddock (active 1862–96), whose list included practical treatises on topics as diverse as billiards and animal husbandry; William Woolcott and J. R. Clarke (active 1850–95), who published music and scenic views; and J. J. Moore, whose Moore’s Almanack and Hand Book (1852–1940) quickly established itself as a standard reference work. Unlike its English namesake, the Sydney Moore’s was a rationalistic compendium of useful knowledge.
The prominent religious publishers were the Catholic Edward Flanagan and J. G. O’Connor (Sydney, 1860s–1880s) and the Anglican Joseph Cook (Sydney, 1850s–1890s). Heterodox publishers included Joseph Wing, publisher of the Spiritual Enquirer (Bendigo, 1874–5), the Reformer (Melbourne, 1880–83), and numerous spiritualist pamphlets; the atheist Joseph Symes, publisher of the Liberator (Melbourne, 1884–1904); and the spiritualist W. H. Terry, publisher of the Harbinger of Light (Melbourne, 1870–1956).
Many provincial centres had flourishing printer-publisher-booksellers. Most survived principally as booksellers and jobbing printers; some, notably Ballarat’s F. W. Niven (who developed an innovative crisp photolithographic process), played a major part in the industry’s development.
South Australian and Tasmanian publishers concentrated on localized almanacs, guidebooks, and technical works. In Adelaide, the major figures were E. S. Wigg (active from 1849) and W. C. Rigby (active from 1859); the firms they established flourished well into the 20th century. Hobart publishing was dominated by the Davies family—proprietors of the Mercury newspaper (established 1854)—and the Walches. Besides their Literary Intelligencer (1859–1915) and Tasmanian Almanac (1862–1980, by far the longest-running Australian almanac), the Walches were significant for promoting the career of the writer and artist Louisa Anne Meredith.
Western Australia and Queensland, both first settled in the 1820s, developed more slowly. Other than government publications, their 19th-century publishing consisted mainly of newspapers and almanacs.
During the 1870s and 1880s, colonial publishers, especially in Melbourne and Sydney, were increasingly active in promoting local authors, but they seldom managed to do more than cover expenses. Writers with serious ambitions looked to Britain. Clarke’s His Natural Life (1874) and Boldrewood’s Robbery Under Arms (1888) first appeared as serials in Australian journals, but only achieved ‘Australian classic’ status after publication in London. The prolific thriller writer Fergus Hume published his first novel, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, in Melbourne in 1886; he returned to England in 1888 and spent the rest of his life there. The careers of such diverse writers as Rosa Praed, Ada Cambridge, and Nat Gould all followed similar trajectories.
To the extent that such writers built their careers on British sales, they might seem irrelevant to Australia. However, the Australasian colonies were, at least in terms of volumes per capita, many British publishers’ largest market. The newspaperman James Allen was doubtless bragging when he commented at length in his History of Australia (1882) on the wide reading and deep knowledge of contemporary literature, science, and international politics displayed by the people of Victoria; but all the statistical and anecdotal evidence supports the general point that Australians devoured any printed matter they could obtain. British publishers began to produce cut-price ‘colonial editions’ in the 1840s; by the end of the century, several—notably Cassell & Co. and Eyre & Spottiswoode—had established branches in the colonies rather than rely on agents, and had become part of the local publishing scene.
By the 1880s, colonial publishing was again shifting gears, conscious of the coming centenary of British settlement and of the growing agitation for the Australian colonies’ political union. The market for commemorative reference books—such as the Australian Dictionary of Dates and Men of the Time (1879), Cyclopedia of Australasia (1881), Picturesque Atlas of Australasia (1886–9), Cassell’s Picturesque Australasia (1887–8), Chronicles of Early Melbourne (1888), and Australian Men of Mark (1889)—seemed inexhaustible. With the success of the aggressively nationalistic Sydney weekly, the Bulletin, in the 1880s, it was possible to imagine a future in which Australia had a thriving literary culture all its own.
By the 1890s, Australian attitudes to Great Britain and the empire were diverse and complex. A series of crises in the Pacific spurred agitation for political union; fears of French and German expansion were exacerbated by reports of Russian plans to attack Melbourne and Sydney. In 1885, Queensland, Tasmania, Western Australia, Victoria, and Fiji formed the Federal Council of Australasia. Sir Henry Parkes, the New South Wales premier and former newspaper proprietor, initiated moves towards full political unification in 1889. Then, leading up to Federation, the Australian colonies contributed troops to Britain’s war against Boer separatists in southern Africa. One of the most popular Australian books of this period was the Revd W. H. Fitchett’s Deeds that Won the Empire (first published as a newspaper serial in 1896), with total sales of more than half a million.
After a decade of negotiations and political campaigning, New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, and Western Australia formed the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901. A strain of populist nationalism—at once egalitarian and xenophobic—found literary expression in the Sydney weekly, the Bulletin, which also produced a popular monthly, Lone Hand (1907–21). A. G. Stephens, the Bulletin’s literary editor (1894–1906), had mixed success with his own magazine, the Bookfellow (three series: 1899, 1907, 1911–25).
The success of Angus & Robertson and the Bulletin in promoting populist, nationalistic writers proved there was a viable market for Australian stories told in an Australian idiom. The New South Wales Bookstall Co.—the first great Australian pulp publisher—offered Australian writers the prospect of a living wage in their own country for the first time. In Melbourne, the bookseller Thomas Lothian began publishing in 1905, setting a more literary tone with poets such as Bernard O’Dowd, John Shaw Neilson, Marie Pitt, and ‘Furnley Maurice’, as well as the short-lived magazine the Native Companion (1907), which published the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield’s first stories.
When the Berne Convention on international copyright was signed in 1886, Australia was part of the British empire, and the Net Book Agreement of 1900 perpetuated British control of the Australian market. Although Australian writers were free to seek out US publishers, British editions of their works took precedence in their home country—and Australian literary history has been framed largely within the history of British publishing. Although US editions were demonstrably superior in their physical presentation, the quality of their texts, and the financial rewards they gave to authors, they have remained largely unknown to Australian audiences. British ‘colonial editions’ retained a presence in the Australian market until 1972.
Once the initial euphoria of 1901 had passed, the Commonwealth of Australia continued to cling to the British empire. Between the 1890s and the 1940s, Australian culture became increasingly xenophobic. A defining moment for the new Commonwealth was the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, which effectively prohibited non-European immigration. The ‘White Australia Policy’ was not formally abandoned by the Australian government until 1973.
Commemorations such as the sesquicentenary of Sydney in 1938 and the centenary of Melbourne in 1934 saw an upsurge in the collecting of Australiana, especially books from the age of British exploration in the 18th and early 19th centuries. This trend reached its apex when the Melbourne businessman Sir Russell Grimwade acquired ‘Captain Cook’s Cottage’ (actually the home of the navigator’s parents after their son had gone to sea) for Melbourne’s centenary celebrations. That Cook never saw Melbourne, and may not have seen the cottage, was no deterrent. More importantly, large-scale bibliographies were appearing: the Mitchell Library’s Bibliography of Captain James Cook (1928); Edmund Morris Miller’s Australian Literature (1940); and Sir John Alexander Ferguson’s Bibliography of Australia 1784–1900 (1941–69). Sir Edward Ford began the collecting that would eventually lead to his Bibliography of Australian Medicine (1976).
A key episode in the development of Australian library services was the scathing report in 1935 by Ralph Munn, of the Carnegie Corporation, and Ernest Pitt, head of the State Library of Victoria. The Munn–Pitt report was a political success in promoting the concept of free, municipally funded public libraries; by the 1960s such libraries had replaced, or subsumed, the vast majority of the subscription-funded mechanics’ institutes and schools of arts that had been the standard model of library service since the mid-19th century. Circulating libraries, too, began to decline after World War II, and, although some lingered into the 1970s, they ceased to play a significant part.
Robertson’s Monthly Book Circular came to an end in 1891, and when Walch’s Literary Intelligencer closed in 1915 the Australian book trade found itself without a local journal. In 1921, D. W. Thorpe started the Australian Stationery and Fancy Goods Journal, forerunner of the Australian Bookseller and Publisher.
Art publishing gathered momentum during World War I with Thomas Lothian’s production in 1916 of two lavish books, The Art of Frederick McCubbin and Ida Rentoul Outhwaite’s Elves and Fairies. Sydney Ure Smith established two key journals: Art in Australia (1916–42), with its tipped-in colour plates, provided a forum for the fine arts; The Home (1920–42), although focused on interior design and decoration, included articles about contemporary art, and featured covers by such notable artists as Thea Proctor. Manuscripts (1931–5) was another notable art journal, promoting the work of such artists as Margaret Preston, Eric Thake, and Christian Waller, although it also included substantial poetry and prose fiction; later issues included bibliographical notes by George Mackaness.
One of the most striking little magazines of the period was Vision (1923–4). Edited by Frank C. Johnson, Jack Lindsay, and Kenneth Slessor, it struck a pose against both the populist balladeers of the Bulletin and European modernism, instead struggling to articulate an aesthetic based on youth and vitality. Decorated with Norman Lindsay’s erotic drawings of nymphs and satyrs, its stated aim was to make Australia the centre of a new renaissance. Two Vision poets—Slessor himself and R. D. FitzGerald—became major figures, but Vision, like so many other journals, folded after a few issues. Lindsay’s next magazine venture, The London Aphrodite (published by his Fanfrolico Press, 1928–9), was deliberately planned to cease after six issues. Johnson, at that stage working in Dymock’s bookshop, went on to become a successful paperback publisher.
In 1939, the Sydney branch of the English Association, based at the University of Sydney, started Southerly, now Australia’s longest-running literary journal. The Brisbane journalist Clem Christesen established Meanjin in the following year. Initially a vehicle for Queensland writers, Meanjin had achieved a circulation of 4,000 and a national profile by 1943. Published with the patronage of the University of Melbourne from 1945, Meanjin developed during the 1950s and 1960s an increasingly internationalist outlook along with an interest in contemporary political events, as well as in literature and art. Since Christesen’s retirement in 1974, it has become predominantly an academic journal.
Angry Penguins (1940–46) promoted surrealist art and writing, making it a target for the ‘Ern Malley’ hoax perpetrated by the conservative poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart. The duped editor, Max Harris, put up a spirited defence of the poetic quality of the fake author’s work, but in the face of withering tabloid scorn he had little chance of being taken seriously by anyone who was not already sympathetic. It would be another twenty years before Australian literary editors were comfortable publishing poetry that rejected conventional forms.
The end of World War II brought a period of reconstruction. The population boomed—from 7.5 million in 1947 to 10.5 million in 1961. Country towns stagnated, but in the major cities suburban sprawl escalated. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s there was a growing sense of cultural maturity, as writers and artists found it increasingly possible to be based overseas without losing their ‘Australianness’, or to develop an international profile without leaving Australia.
Higher education expanded dramatically. Until the 1930s, universities were a minor part of the Australian library scene. At that time Australia had just six universities—one in each of the state capitals—and a range of other tertiary colleges. Between 1946 and 1980, thirteen new universities were established. Melbourne’s Monash (1958) and La Trobe (1964) were completely new institutions; others, such as the Australian National University (1946) and the University of New England (1954), were developed out of existing regional colleges. A complex series of reconfigurations over the next twenty years saw the number of universities double again, with most having multiple campuses. Many regional centres now have a university campus; some universities have expanded internationally: Monash, for example, has campuses in Malaysia, South Africa, and Italy. The number of students as a proportion of the total population has grown from a few thousand out of 3.7 million in 1901 to around half a million students in a population of 20 million at the end of the century.
The growth of higher education was a major factor in the development of Australian publishing, in particular during the 1960s and 1970s, as income from textbooks gave publishers scope to risk promoting less commercial works—poetry in particular—that they considered culturally important. A precondition for the growth of tertiary education was increasing retention rates in secondary schools. F. W. Cheshire in Melbourne and the Jacaranda Press in Brisbane specialized in secondary-school publishing. Melbourne University Press (which concentrated on non-fiction, including key reference works such as the Australian Dictionary of Biography) and the University of Queensland Press (which played a leading role in promoting the work of new poets and novelists, most famously Peter Carey, David Malouf, and Michael Dransfield) became major players in both the general and education markets. Angus & Robertson continued to produce important reference works, notably the ten-volume second edition of the Australian Encyclopedia (1958), and Ferguson’s Bibliography of Australia, the seventh volume of which appeared in 1969.
The Australian branches of Oxford and Cambridge university presses seemed intent on outdoing each other with guides and companions to all aspects of Australian history and culture. Oxford argued, with some justification, that the Australian edition of its Concise English Dictionary was a more genuine Australian production than its locally named but American-sponsored competitor the Macquarie Dictionary. Cambridge picked up the Encyclopedia of Melbourne (2005) when it was abandoned by Melbourne University Press. The small publisher Currency matched the academic presses with its Companion to the Theatre in Australia (1985) and Companion to Music and Dance in Australia (2003). Another minnow, Australian Scholarly Publishing, produced the first volume of John Arnold et al.’s Bibliography of Australian Literature (2001); subsequent volumes were published by the University of Queensland Press. Melbourne University Press added to its stable of reference works with Marcie Muir and Kerry White’s Australian Children’s Books: A Bibliography (1992–2004).
The pace of postwar change and the structures adopted for the expansion of public library services differed from state to state: in Victoria, for example, local lending libraries were run by municipalities, with the State Library completely separate; in Tasmania, local lending libraries became branches of the State Library. However, the broad principle of public funding for library services—a radical innovation when it was proposed by Munn and Pitt in 1935—had become the accepted norm. Professional qualifications for librarians and archivists shifted from a workplace training model to graduate qualifications. Melbourne Teachers’ College introduced a programme for school librarians in 1955. John Wallace Metcalfe initiated a postgraduate diploma course at the University of New South Wales in 1960; a master’s programme began in 1972. Jean P. Whyte, a Master in Library Studies graduate of the University of Chicago, started a master’s programme at Monash University in 1976. By the 1990s, graduate professional qualifications were also becoming a requirement for editors and publishers.
Libraries were becoming conscious, too, of rare or ‘heritage’ materials, and specialist rare book librarians were beginning to be appointed in the larger institutions. During the 1960s and 1970s, increasing numbers of private individuals gave their collections to them. Among the more significant were: Henry Allport and Sir William Crowther to the State Library of Tasmania; Ian Francis McLaren and Orde Poynton to the University of Melbourne; J. K. Moir to the State Library of Victoria; Father Leo Hayes to the University of Queensland; and Sir Rex Nan Kivell to the National Library.
A Commonwealth Literary Fund had been established in 1908, essentially as a pension scheme for writers and their dependants. In 1973 its functions were taken over by the Literature Board of the Australia Council, which, with a dramatically increased budget, moved to provide fellowships to support writers during their working lives. The Miles Franklin Award, for a published novel portraying some aspect of Australian life, was initiated in 1957; other literary prizes proliferated during the 1970s and 1980s.
The award of the 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature to Patrick White brought international attention to Australian literature. In the decade leading up to the award, a generation of writers that included Randolph Stow, Thea Astley, and Christopher Koch followed White’s lead in rejecting ‘dun-coloured realism’. However, White was only able to produce the sort of work he did because he was independently wealthy and did not need to earn money from his writing. In contrast to White was the prolific pulp writer ‘Carter Brown’ (Alan Yates), who wrote several hundred thrillers during his 30-year career. His early successes in the Australian market enabled him to leave his day-job as an airline publicist, and huge American sales brought him wealth and (at least pseudonymously) fame. The detective novelist Arthur Upfield and the romance writer Lucy Walker were hailed overseas but disdained in Australia—Upfield sought his revenge by casting one of his detractors, the novelist Vance Palmer, as the murder victim in An Author Bites the Dust (1948). It was only with Peter Corris’s Chandleresque Cliff Hardy in the 1980s that crime writing acquired local critical respectability.
Penguin established a Melbourne office in 1946 and immediately became a major publishing force, selling some half-million books in their first year. George Allen & Unwin established a Sydney branch in 1976; this became the Australian-owned Allen & Unwin in 1990. Meanwhile, small Australian publishers such as Outback Press (1973–80), McPhee Gribble (1975–89), and Fremantle Arts Centre Press (1976– ) were discovering writers as diverse as ‘B. Wongar’, Helen Garner, and Elizabeth Jolley. The arrival of significant numbers of Vietnamese refugees in the late 1970s, along with the Australian government’s shift from ‘White Australia’ to a commitment to multiculturalism, was followed by the flowering of a non-English language press; by the 1990s leading non-English newspapers such as the Greek Neos Kosmos and the Italian Il Globo were commonly available in metropolitan newsagents. Aboriginal people were recognized as citizens after a referendum in 1967; movements for land rights and reconciliation followed. Magabala Books (established 1974, wholly Aboriginal-owned since 1990) took the lead in promoting indigenous writers; IAD (Institute for Aboriginal Development) Press and the Aboriginal Studies Press soon followed. The mainstream success achieved by the feminist cooperative Sisters (1979–83) encouraged the development of other feminist presses. Gay and lesbian writing began to enter the mainstream commercial market in the 1990s.
The Children’s Book of the Year awards instituted by the Children’s Book Council in 1946 encouraged the development of critical standards in evaluating writing for children and young adults, although its awards have been frequently criticized for favouring worthy, issues-based books over material that attracts and engages young readers. The Yabba awards (instituted 1985) are selected by children and invariably produce a very different list from the CBC awards.
Creative writing programmes began to proliferate during the 1990s, just as publishers moved away from cross-subsidization and became increasingly reluctant to risk publishing anything that would not pay its own way. Whether in spite of or because of this, a new professionalism in publishing emerged, and a cultural maturity capable of accepting that for most readers of fiction the tag ‘Australian literature’ is not in itself sufficient reason to buy or read a book. At the beginning of the 21st century, Australian crime, romance, and speculative-fiction writers are finding commercial and critical success both at home and abroad. A generation that includes Shane Maloney, Kerry Greenwood, Garth Nix, and Glenda Larke seems at last to have found forms of expression for an Australianness that needs neither assertion nor concealment.
D. Carter and A. Galligan, eds., Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing (2007)
W. Kirsop et al., eds., A History of the Book in Australia, vol. 1: To 1890 (forthcoming)
M. Lyons and J. Arnold, eds., A National Culture in a Colonised Market, A History of the Book in Australia, vol. 2: 1891–1945 (2001)
C. Munro and R. Sheahan-Bright, eds., Paper Empires, A History of the Book in Australia, vol. 3: 1946–2005 (2006)
A National Survey of Reading, Buying and Borrowing Books for Pleasure, Conducted for Books Alive by A. C. Nielsen (2001)
P. van Toorn, Writing Never Arrives Naked (2006)
E. Webby, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature (2000)
