The Difficulty of Literature
By Robert Wood
“Without family support, other income, or a lucky break in the form of Powerball, a good horse, or a night at the casino, writers are left out of the Australian promise.”
THE DIFFICULTY OF LITERATURE
It is a difficult time to be in literature in Australia. I say that even as it is more difficult elsewhere, and knowing full well that literature often does well in difficulty. What it means is that we can be critical as well as generous and grateful. Here, I want to map out what makes it hard right now, which is something critical, while also acknowledging (a) the violence targeting literati overseas is worse than here, and (b) the great work of our local communities and the latest specific victories.
For point (a) I simply highlight the murder of 45 journalists worldwide as reported by the International Federation of Journalists in 2021. We could also highlight ongoing repression from poets to booksellers in India, Cambodia, Myanmar, China and Hong Kong, to only mention Asia given this publication’s interests. By comparison, writers are not murdered in Australia because of their profession even as they may be targeted for their identities and actions. Here we can speak of hate crimes, harassment, intimidation especially for us as Asian-Australians rather than violent crimes against writers, with violence mainly being a threat or a semantic and structural reality. Our relative safety should fuel our generosity to peers beyond the nation.
For point (b) I simply highlight the recent writing of Elizabeth Tan, Andre Dao and several others, many of whom have featured in these pages. Such excellence is stimulating to be around, and, there have also been forms of recognition from Australia Council for Sara Ayoub, Eileen Chong, Lamisse Hamouda, Jamie Marina Lau, Mohammed Massoud Morsi. Ouyang Yu also won the $80,000 Literary Fellowship from the same organisation in 2021. If this energy is not yet reflected in the diversification of prize culture let alone universities, which I will come to, there are reasons to be grateful for what we are creating in the industry itself. At this very minute, there is an ongoing shift.
Neither of these things are difficult to acknowledge. Rather, we find the true difficulty in Australian literature when we follow the money. I only want to briefly mention how this often intersects with racism. It is true that Australia is white and that wealth is concentrated in white hands; but, instead, my focus here is on the state of literature in general, which means that this difficulty includes white writers and white literature workers and First Nations people too. I welcome those readers most of all as allies to Liminal’s cause.
Defunding Writers
On 13 January 2022, trade journal Books and Publishing presented the Australian Society of Authors 2021 survey findings. With data gathered from more than 800 respondents, it was chastening reading:
58% of all authors earned between $0 and $1999 from their creative practice, which was up more than 8% from 2020
58% of full time authors earned less than $15,000 with 25% earning less than $1999
81% of all authors earned less than $15,000 in the last financial year
Only 13% of authors received an advance over $10,000 down 1.6% from the last financial year
The majority of authors did not intend to apply for funding to offset this. 52% said they would not apply to state governments, 58% would not apply to Copyright Agency, 57% would not apply to Australia Council
Of those who did apply to Australia Council, only $4.7 million was distributed, or 6%, of the total Australia Council budget, which is less than some individual major arts organisations
These numbers show that the majority of writers have been effectively defunded. They do not make a living from their work, nor do they feel that they are competitive for public grants. After all, only 19% of writers in 2021 made more than $15,000. When it comes to public money, there has been recent growth in creative writing PhDs and scholarships there can approach $30,000 per year. But with universities hit hard during COVID, this life-raft has a puncture. Taken alongside the decline of paying publications due to the growth of free online content, writing has become harder to maintain as a profession over the last ten years or the whole term of the Liberal Federal Government.
When we consider this alongside housing prices, the reality of the poverty becomes stark. According to the Australian Financial Review, the national median price of a home is now $956,000. This means that if 58% of writers worked for 478 years and spent their earnings on nothing else, they could then afford an average Australian home. Without family support, other income, or a lucky break in the form of Powerball, a good horse, or a night at the casino, writers are left out of the Australian promise.
Defunding Journals
When we think of defunding writers, we also need to think about how this matters with defunding journals, which are their workplaces. This also affects their managers who are the editors, staffers, designers and others, and all those involved in the literary sector, including readers. Since the last Federal Election in 2019, there has been a precipitous decline in funding for literary journals. As the editors of Semaphore wrote on 4 April 2020 in regard to Australia Council funding:
Of the organisations that were either unsuccessful or who have received transitional one-year funding, many are journals devoted to commissioning and publishing new, experimental and critical writing about Australian arts and culture—among them eyeline, Artlink, Art Monthly Australasia, Overland, The Lifted Brow, Australian Book Review and the Sydney Review of Books.
This has affected literature most of all, but the loss extends to writing about the arts in general. To be certain, some journals have received other forms of funding, including $63,000 to Overland and $100,000 to Australian Book Review in the latest Australia Council round of December 2021, and the Sydney Review of Books started a newsletter in October called ‘The Circular' as funded by the Australia Council Sector Recovery Initiative.
As valued as all of this recent money is, Semaphore’s open letter was in reference to multi-year organisational funding, which is to say funding that keeps the lights on rather than funding that is project specific and short term. The long-term defunding of journals then means the removal of secure, national, and ongoing monies, all of which are needed to create the right culture for excellent work to flourish. If that difficulty was present before 2020, it has since accelerated notwithstanding smaller wins in late 2021. The return of multi-year funding for journals is necessary to create a strong base from which all of literature can thrive.
Defunding Research
If workers have been defunded and so too their workplaces, then we must also acknowledge that their training providers have been unfairly targeted as well. In other words, the defunding of literature extends to universities where a great many practitioners learn their trade. There have been many articles on this decline when it comes to an education in English literature, but perhaps all we need to highlight is the recent ministerial veto of Australian Research Council projects in literature specifically.
In late 2021, acting Education Minister Stuart Robert blocked six recommended grants from their awarded funding. All of them were humanities projects: two were about modern China, two about English literature, one about student climate protests and democracy, and one about religion in science fiction and fantasy novels. Four of them were in literature. This news, in an unnecessarily cruel fashion, was unveiled on Christmas Eve, meaning that 81% of all grant applicants were disappointed, and, in particular, that these six researchers were presumably disconsolate after ministerial interference.
The blatant politicisation of peer reviewed research recommendations is part of a wider and conscious attack on literature. But it also spoke to the poverty of funding for university research in general. There was $258.6 million awarded for 587 successful projects in 2022, from a pool of 3095 applicants. That is a very small amount of money—small compared to submarine purchases, road maintenance, corporate subsidies. That highlights the size of the field we are dealing with and its relative cost effectiveness. After all, for every $1 the government spends on education, the return is $21, which is for education in general, of which literature is a subset. In other words, education even including literary research, is good value.
The defunding of a literary education, when we read it alongside defunding writers and defunding journals, makes it seem that this that this government ‘demonstrates a dismissive attitude to the value of imagination and creativity’, just as the oft quoted opening paragraph of the petition against Stuart Robert would have it. But, the petition, which I signed, has it wrong. This government is fully aware of just how dangerous literature is, which is why Robert has made a concerted and co-ordinated effort to undermine literary research, precisely for the political threat it poses. To so obviously target it does not demonstrate dismissiveness but an ideological partisan interestedness. We see this when we realise that they have stacked the bench of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.
Prime Minister’s Literary Awards
The Prime Minister’s Awards has no peer when it comes to an example of the congealed, hegemonic, conservative literary bureaucratic establishment, no peer when it comes to seeing literature as part of the culture war. This is seen most especially in the judging panels. To highlight the most egregious—the Chair of the Non-Fiction and Australian History Panel is a former member of state parliament who served for the Liberal Party in the NSW Legislative Assembly from 1988 to 2007, and is an amateur writer. He is joined by three journalists from The Australian and a professor of business law. I will repeat that, a former Liberal Party MP is joined by three Murdoch journalists to judge our most prestigious and lucrative literary awards with prize money that can become a home deposit. It is no wonder that the award winners have been carefully selected in the most recent cohort. It was not like this five years ago, let alone ten. The culture war is here and being played on the government’s terms.
Put more simply, the Prime Minister’s Awards Judging Panel is where cronyism plays out—the ones who couldn’t secure diplomatic postings or private sweeteners or their own book deals laughing amongst themselves over tea and scones thinking that they are masters of the Australian literary universe orbiting around an evangelical sun wearing a smirk that knows no bounds. It is the same corruption as ministerial overreach into peer review, cuts to the Australia Council and its journals, as well as sports rorts, car parks, Western Sydney airports, Darryl McGuire, water rights, sexual harassment, and a whole host of party political interventions that have happened in the last deplorable decade . Although easy to miss, this includes the defunding of writers, defunding of journals, defunding of research. This is precisely where the difficulty in literature now is.
Vote Them Out
In the national public sphere, and the culture wars specifically, literature has always been second to history in the space it takes up. That is true when we think of Keith Windschuttle thirty years ago right through to Bruce Pascoe today. Is this because of literature's lesser use to the national project? Is it because of the creep of history into all other humanities and social sciences, including the study of literature, where most academics are simply historians of texts after all? Literature has a different truth content than history and it has greater linguistic opacity after the theoretical turn, but perhaps the reason it initially appears less significant is that the government fears people who can think critically for themselves. Literature is a step along that path, indeed one further along than history but one step before philosophy. It is after the gateway drug and before the daily addiction to critique, a steady habit you could call it. It is what unmasks the marketing spin.
When you work in the sector, it is easy to think that literature does not matter, that we simply persist and get it done, assuming there are no ‘real world consequences’. We must remember that literature has power, that it can help those without money, those without tenure, those without grants have a voice, one even they are not often fully aware of, a power that can help manifest changes in government. Being defunded can actually liberate one from the shackles of funding agency logic, from award taste, from the national project as a political and aesthetic conceit that is disseminated through degree granting institutions.
But defunding does not put food, or rapid antigen tests, on the table. And that, after all, is what writers, literary workers, literature researchers and their families also care about. To do that, to fund ourselves, might mean we have to seek out honourable forms of labour be they caring professions, therapeutic ones, or those that are just plain essential, all of which will inform our literature with a greater sense of justice and purpose than the government would like anyway. And while we work away at this difficulty, we would do well to join our unions and vote these bastards out along the way. As long as we keep writing, as long as we keep reminding them that literature is essential in a way they cannot fully understand, then perhaps we have a chance to restore some much needed balance to the systems we live within.
Robert Wood is a poet. He is interested in dream, enlightenment, nature, suburbs and philosophy. Robert is a Malayali with connections to the East Indian Ocean. He lives on Noongar country in Australia.