Australian literature’s standing as the most underfunded art form in the country is “a national scandal”, according to one of Australia’s leading writers.
The treatment by successive governments of Australian writers rates among the worst in the developed democratic world, according to Booker-prize winner Richard Flanagan. The literary sector, he said, should secede from the Australia Council, which is the federal government’s peak funding and advisory body for the arts.
“The Australia Council is a disaster for writers and for literature,” Flanagan said in his submission to the government’s national cultural policy, which is currently in development.
“Funding and the politics of funding within the Australia Council is dominated by performing arts, the lion’s share of funds goes to performing arts bodies, and it is essentially a performing-arts grants body. It’s time it was recognised as such, and literature split from it.”
Helen Garner, Kate Grenville and Charlotte Wood weigh in
The undervaluing of the $1.7 billion book industry is a common thread through many of the more than 1,000 submissions the Labor government has received, as it prepares to release its new national cultural policy by the year’s end.
It is a concern aired by fellow writers Helen Garner, Kate Grenville, Charlotte Wood and Stephen Sewell, who wrote in his submission: “The Australia Council has overseen the closure of the Australian mind, as it has been reduced to an empty office with an answering machine. The last government encouraged us to be pigs at the trough. I’m hoping this government can help us recall our humanity.”
A submission by Macquarie University’s department of economics – written by Professor David Throsby, Dr Paul Crosby and Dr Jan Zwar – identified reduced government support for the promotion of books and reading as the most pressing concern the national cultural policy needed to address. The Arts Law Centre of Australia described the literary sector as “woefully underfunded”, with a decline in Australia Council funding of 40% in the past decade.
In dollar value, literature is the least funded art form through the Australia Council, receiving just $5m in support in the financial year prior to the Covid-19 pandemic that threw the entire cultural sector into turmoil.
That same year music received $10.6m, theatre $14.1m and visual arts $12.7m.
“Yet books inspire stories across all these art-forms,” noted Stella prize-winner Charlotte Wood, whose latest book The Weekend was optioned for a film in July, with a stage adaptation in the works for Belvoir St theatre. In her submission, Wood highlighted the “vast inequity” in funding for literature, which had reduced even the most highly respected Australian writers to living on or near the poverty line in recent years.
Writers were crucial primary producers of Australian culture, be it screen, film, theatre, opera or journalism, she said.
“Without writers there is no publishing industry, no bookselling industry, there are no literary agents, no book reviewers or printers, no book and mixed-arts festivals drawing tourism to regional areas out of season.
“Primary producers in agriculture and mining are offered subsidies, incentives and business development opportunities, but none of that is available to us; instead we are offered the smallest possible – and diminishing – proportion of federal arts funding.”
Submissions from Garner and Grenville both recognised the government grants and fellowships they received early in their careers in the 1970s and 1980s, which helped to cement their status as successful writers.
“Without the help I was given, my work would have been hasty and shallow, and my working life harder and more painfully fragmented,” Garner wrote.
“The funding I had from the Literature Board [of the Australia Council] when I was starting out in the late 1970s and early 1980s gave me weeks and months of unencumbered time for the wide, deep reading every writer needs to do.”
Grenville said the steep decline in support to writers over the past two decades meant a corresponding decline in jobs growth, economic activity, and national identity.
“That decline means that everyone is worse off,” she wrote.
“It’s easy to take for granted that we can walk into a bookshop and choose from a huge range of books that reflect our own lives and our own sense of ourselves as Australians. But that’s a fragile privilege. It didn’t happen before there was government support, and it will wither on the vine unless governments give adequate, dependable and long-term support.”
‘The writing community needs a peak body’
Flanagan told Guardian Australia that the Australia Council’s past failure to lobby on behalf of writers and publishers was reason enough for Australian literature to be extracted from the council’s ambit.
Finding that Australians were paying as much as 35% more for books than US readers, in 2015 the Productivity Commission recommended that the Turnbull government lift parallel importation regulations on overseas books. At the time, writers such as Flanagan and Christos Tsiolkas – along with the majority of publishers and the Australian Society of Authors – argued that lifting the restrictions would destroy territorial copyright for Australian authors and their publishers, and force the local industry to compete with a flood of books from overseas, via online behemoths such as Amazon.
The restrictions were ultimately not lifted but the debate, Flanagan told the Guardian, exposed the Australia Council’s ineffectiveness to go in and advocate for writers. He said the Australian literary sector needed to form its own national peak body to lobby governments directly – in much the same way Screen Australia lobbies for the country’s entire film and television industry, independent of the Australia Council.
“The writing community needs a body that is separate from the Australia Council, and which represents its interests to the government,” he said.
In a statement provided to the Guardian, CEO of the Australia Council, Adrian Collette, said:
“The Australia Council understands the vital importance of Australian literature … [which] underpins creative activity across multiple artforms. We continue to advocate tirelessly for increased investment in Australian literature.”
Flanagan also called for a fixed book-price system, which successfully operates in more than a dozen countries in Europe and prevents large operators such as Amazon heavily discounting new titles in a marketplace in which smaller, independent sellers are unable to compete.
“A fixed book price would be the single most effective method of ensuring that we grow Australian publishing,” he said.
Re-prioritise the humanities
Another recurrent suggestion in many of the submissions was to overturn the previous government’s increase to the cost of humanities degrees, which became more expensive under the guise of a “jobs-ready” banner.
According to a submission by the Australian National University’s Research School of Humanities and the Arts, the Morrison government’s prioritising of STEM degrees over the humanities has devalued the importance of arts and culture in Australia.
ANU also argued that tying government research grants to efficiency dividends was an inherently flawed system.
Under the federal government’s Australia Research Council (ARC) scheme, proposed research projects must demonstrate their potential to engage with industry to meet efficiency requirements.
But under the previous government, the definition of “industry” had explicitly excluded arts and culture, thereby corroding the public perception’s value of the arts and cultural sector by relegating it to “hobby” status as opposed “real labour” conducted in the “real world”.
Levelling the field of access to research grants was also highlighted by the University of Western Sydney’s professor of literature and creative writing, Anthony Uhlmann, who noted that under the current ARC scheme, only 70% of recommended grants in literary studies were approved for 2022, compared to 98.9% of projects overall.
On average, it was nearly 30 times more likely that a grant in literary studies would be refused than for other fields of research, he said.
Submissions to the national cultural policy closed in late August. A collection of review panels and an expert advisory group, which counts Australia Council chief executive Adrian Collette among its members, is now sifting through the more than 1,200 submissions, with arts minister, Tony Burke, promising a new cultural roadmap by the end of 2022.
