keeping that drowsy emperor awake

Three things I really enjoyed reading over the past couple of months, and have only noted here now:

Delia Falconer's beautiful essay in the August ALR on the spaces we cannot afford to lose within our classics, here.

Richard Neville's terrifying piece in the September ALR on the future. I don't know how I managed to read anything else after this. It was like being dipped in a pool of fire; reading outside on a beautiful spring morning, I looked around at the trees and wondered why I was still there when I'd finished it. Dick's in fine form, building from a quiet start to a relentless elegy for the planet that he dares to top off (as only he can) with a savagely ironic question. That takes some nerve.

The last was from Text Publishing's founder, Michael Heyward, was in last Saturday's Age and is on Australian writing and publishing. Unfairly characterised by the editor as a 'lament', it is more correctly read as an unerring and surprisingly positive analysis of the state of Oz publishing with some very useful recommendations for the future (of publishing, that is) which I seriously hope the Government adopts:

The next step is to invest in our editors. A program with a five-year life to help publishers hire and train a dozen editors would cost less than $1 million a year. It would be a great investment.

It would soon enough allow 100 or more books to be published each year that either aren't published now or are brought to market too soon. Given that each year a maximum of about 50 novels enter the Miles Franklin it is easy to see the potential.

If those 100 books sell 5000 copies each at about $22, each will generate $10,000 in GST. Taxpayers will not only get to live in a cleverer country but they will get their money back.

And if you want to make more money overseas you need to build your publishing capacity.You can't sell international rights in books that don't exist or aren't good enough.

Back in 1990 it wouldn't have made sense to propose a scheme like this. We have spent a couple of decades assembling a publishing infrastructure and it's time to finish the job. The writers are waiting for us.