AU Entertainment Weekly

TOM WAITS has cultivated his gravel-voiced, hobo-chic shtick for four decades and he’s protective of it. Magicians are fierce about revealing their tricks, aren’t they?

Waits comes from a lower-middle-class Los Angeles family, his mother a churchgoing housewife and his father a heavy drinker who went missing when Waits was 10 years old. He was a smart kid who studied at the clubs in California, picking up tips from figures such as hipster-poet Lord Buckley and the working musicians on the circuit. He has mythologised his origins as others - such as Bob Dylan - did before him.

Mind you, Waits does Barney Hoskyns no favour; he would not talk to him and actively discouraged his musical colleagues from doing so. Waits says truth is overrated and there is a deficit of wonder in the world. So his life is as mythical as he can get away with.

Hoskyns’s detailed biography is a big book and is often as irritating as it is enthralling. I was exhausted by his constant gripe about Waits being unco-operative. Hoskyns makes the case that Waits’s life can be divided into halves - before marriage to Kathleen Brennan and after. We learn next to nothing about Brennan because she wouldn’t talk, either. Presumably that’s why they are still happily married and Waits’s persona remains a mystery.

Life pre-marriage is better because Hoskyns has access to Bones Howe, Waits’s producer, arranger and mentor for many years. All the buddies and musicians who were once necessities to his shows, recordings and life - and with whom he no longer maintains a relationship - offer their views.

Waits’s career trajectory is classic. He found early success as a songwriter for other artists, hooked up with management and a label, toured the world and over the years became a character from one of his noir-ish songs.

And there is the Tropicana Motel on Sunset Boulevard, where Waits lived with Ricki Lee Jones when her career was in ascendancy and his was in a holding pattern - which would have annoyed him. Jones was also a heroin addict and both these factors would strain their relationship to breaking point.

Hoskyns says that Waits was at this time uncomfortable with the milieu he had created. The songwriter was shorn of confidence and purpose. Fate decreed that a career as an actor loomed large for him.

On the set of One From The Heart, Waits met Brennan. They married and moved to a small town in California, collaborated and had three children.

Fictional fashion forecaster Michi Girl thrives on sass and sun, writes Leesha McKenny.

Masters of invention … Chloe Quigley and Daniel Pollock. Their made-up character scored a book deal after becoming a cult hit on the internet.

Michi is a single, twentysomething Melbournite who, as a forecaster of fashion and weather, has made it her business to know when shop assistants can smell fear (at 20 paces) and when it’s appropriate to wear trackpants in public (never).

If you fancy asking how she started out, how you pronounce her name or whether you’ll need a jacket today, best ask Chloe Quigley or Daniel Pollock. They invented her.

“I gave a talk last year at a design festival and it was to a full auditorium of people, and so many people’s faces dropped when they realised that she wasn’t real,” Quigley says. “They said it was sort of like the bubble’s burst.”

But it hasn’t. Not for Michi and certainly not for the two advertising professionals who gave their creation a cat, a sister and enough sass to stock a daily email newsletter, a newspaper column, and now, a book.

Michi’s Like I Give a Frock, a do-and-don’t guide (with an emphasis on the “don’t”) to fashion, is the ultimate vindication of anyone who has ever been told that bludgy emails between bored work colleagues never amount to anything.

Pollock says the idea of Michi (pronounced Mit-chee) started about seven years ago while they were both freelancing at an advertising agency.

Initially, “Michi’s” emails covered whether the weather looked good (”it was actually whether we’d go to work or not,” Quigley says), and grew to include a couple of comments about what you should wear to the beach, before developing into a daily online newsletter featuring a fashion product and short commentary that reached in-boxes each afternoon.

“We had the idea for a really basic site and we sent it out to five or six friends on the first day and we haven’t really touched it since . . . it’s kind of grown from there,” he says.

So much so that they no longer need to compare notes before composing a Michi missive; she is the point where their two personalities meet.

“Daniel and I are really close friends but somehow we’ve just managed to sound exactly the same over the years,” she says. “We made a decision on what the voice was going to be like and we sort of passed everything backwards and forwards a lot in the beginning but now it’s second nature to both of us.”

Pollock adds: “It’s a lot easier for me to write from Michi’s point of view because I’ve been doing it for so long. I think when I write from a guy’s point of view, that’s probably when I start second-guessing myself.”

Act of devotion … Gabrielle Carey, whose new book is a tribute to her mother Joan.
The sadness of her mother’s death gave Gabrielle Carey understanding and art, writes Lissa Christopher.

When it comes to the etiquette surrounding death, Gabrielle Carey would like to see a return to, very possibly imaginary, days of yore.

“I don’t know if I’m making this up but in the old days, when people were wearing black, you knew they were in mourning . . . now it just means you live in Newtown. There is no signal. I would love a signal that people would recognise and just leave me alone.”

Carey is in mourning. Her much-admired mother, Joan - written about at length in Carey’s recently published memoir Waiting Room - died last month and Carey, still in the thick of grief, is weepy, unable to sleep and struggling to keep up with the mundane demands of life. She says while some people have been incredibly kind and supportive, the insensitivity of others has been shocking. She imitates a few of the more gauche responses - putting on a carping, witchy voice - but asks that they remain off the record.

Carey has also asked to be interviewed at her home - a place, she says, she’d normally be loath to bring a journalist - because she can’t trust herself not to cry. She does not, when the time comes, shed a tear, though her occasional bursts of laughter have an on-the-edge quality.

Amid all the sadness, Carey is also experiencing “this rush of things I want to write. I’m beginning to believe that maybe all my life, the way to deal with pain has been to transform it into art - if what I do is art - to transform it into something else, take it out of yourself and put it somewhere else that makes it bearable.”

In Waiting Room, Carey describes the drive to write as a symptom of malfunction.

“Once, when Brigie [Carey’s daughter] was about eight, I thought I noticed the kind of withdrawn behaviour that I had exhibited as a child - the kind of psychology that leads a person to go silent, to ruminate and then, finally, to write things down. I went into an immediate panic and arranged an appointment with a child psychologist.”

Despite Carey’s fears, however, the writing condition is not manifest in Brigid, now an adult. “She’s into fashion and beauty,” Carey says, seeming pleased - and yet not so pleased. “My children are much more rounded healthy individuals than I am.”

Most of Waiting Room was written about seven years ago, when Joan Carey was diagnosed with a brain tumour. It describes her catastrophic memory loss and muses on her taciturn, stoic-to-a-fault approach to life; the role of the middle-aged parent caught between the needs of their own children and an ailing parent; and Carey’s passionate desire to know her mother more intimately.

Carey, now 50, says she recognises much of her “out there” behaviour as a teenager as an attempt to break through her mother’s inscrutability. (Regarding “out there” behaviour, for those perhaps too young to know, Carey is the co-author, with Kathy Lette, of Puberty Blues.)

“A lot of my behaviour was because she was so dignified and so reserved and, I guess, uncommunicative. There was a sense of wanting to rip her open, tear at her and really provoke a reaction. And I would provoke her more and more.”

Joan, however, “stayed a mystery to the end”, something Carey has come to respect. “It’s sort of honouring the self . . . and I think that’s fair. We live in an age of Oprah confessionalism where everything just hangs out in this most vulgar sort of way and I guess she was the opposite to that.”

Joan didn’t die of the brain tumour but of stomach cancer, diagnosed about two years ago. “When the doctor came round for the first time after the operation,” Carey says, “to tell her that they couldn’t do anything for her, she was looking pretty frail. He told her and she just looked up at him very directly and said, ‘So, it’s palliative care, is it?’ You could see he wasn’t used to people just taking it in like that and responding so pragmatically about it.”

Carey is both writer and writing teacher, although she is taking a few weeks off from her teaching role, at the University of Technology, Sydney, to steady herself and to write. Even at the best of times, she says, writing and teaching are not compatible.

“The energy you use to teach writing is precisely the energy you use to write. My theory is that there is a very limited amount of creative energy of any type around and you have to choose what you’re going to spend it on. Teaching makes writing very hard but, on the other hand, we’re in the middle of this global financial crisis and I’m very lucky to have a job.”

She envies the life of the Renaissance essayist Michel de Montaigne and others of his ilk. “You had private means. You retired to your country estate and wrote. That would be ideal. I’ve never liked this working business.”

Carey has published a great deal about her personal life: her youth, her relationship with her father and her relationship with the long-term prison inmate Terry Haley are just a few examples.

Asked why she decided to make this story public, she says, “Overall, I felt it was a tribute to [my mother] and an honouring of her and her life. I have always felt that my father was known for his activism and my mother, because she was quieter and behind the scenes, didn’t have the same recognition. I have a very strong sense of people who do good works and who are good individuals, but whose names are not remembered. This is also why I’m trying to establish the Joan Carey Peace Award.”

Joan was an anti-Vietnam War campaigner and a long-term member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, which, Carey says, “is very keen to auspice the award”.

Waiting Room is being marketed as a memoir but Carey says it’s actually “a personal essay, which is a really different thing … Part of the nature of the personal essay is that it brings up ideas and discussion points, and arguments that people are then supposed to carry on as a discussion.”

Waiting Room poses questions about declining stoicism, about the nature of suicide, about generational change, maturity and parenting.

In a lengthy explication published in The Australian last year, Carey described the personal essay as “digressive, philosophical, conversational and sometimes unstructured to the point of rambling. It’s overwhelming feature, however, is intimacy.” As such, she says, it tends to make Australians uncomfortable.

Reviews of Waiting Room - such as Gerard Windsor’s, published in the Herald last month - haven’t been effusive but, says Carey, “when a review isn’t bad, I’m grateful. You know, this book was written for my mother. It’s a gift to her. And people I really respect, like Gail Jones, she wrote just about the nicest thing anyone has ever said.” Jones wrote: “Some forms of writing are also forms of love.”

Joan Carey, too, read the book. What did she make of her gift? “My mother was typically inscrutable. She didn’t say very much at all.”

Waiting Room by Gabrielle Carey is published by Scribe, $29.95.

The Australian book industry is fighting for its life, writes Richard Flanagan.

 

I am reminded standing here of my cousin, Arthur “Mad Dog” Kemp, a professional boxer of falling note in the late 1960s, who featured occasionally on the Golden Gloves TV show, and who was once described by the old Melbourne Sun as “having taken the once noble art to a new all-time low”.

In truth the bottle was already winning with Arthur and he took to spending much of his life in the park in Fitzroy with the multi-hued humanity that drank and slept there, including those Aborigines who looked after him.

Some years passed and in 1972 Muhammad Ali flew into Australia. The first thing he said to the crowded press conference at Tullamarine was: “Where are the black people?”

There was stunned silence, but within a short time Ali’s limo was speeding its way to Fitzroy followed by a motorcade of media.

It stopped at the park and Ali made his way across to where Mad Dog Kemp was drinking with a group of blackfellas. Mad Dog still retained something of the old pugilist spirit and, recognising the figure advancing toward them, leapt to his feet, walked over to Ali, and said, “You’re not the greatest, I am.”

“No,” said Ali. “You’re just the ugliest.”

Now I had intended to talk to you today about love stories. But at the end of this most marvellous week for Australian writing that began with Christos Tsiolkas winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize and has continued with this wonderful festival, it would be wrong of me to not talk about the attack that is presently being mounted on Australian writing.

Mad Dog Kemp was part of a sport in which boxers were expected to take falls and lose fights in order to benefit rich promoters. And at the moment, Australian writers and readers are being asked to take a fall in order that a few rich people get richer. And I don’t think we should be taking that fall, and tonight I want to talk about what strikes me as the rotten and stinking deal that is being proposed to us.

And so I’d like to begin with the word-if not quite at the beginning-then in the late fourth century AD, when St Jerome translated the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New Testament into Latin. For the next thousand years St Jerome’s version, which became known as the Vulgate Bible, was the book.

But as Latin became not so much a lingua franca as a language of exclusion and privilege - a form of power in other words - the battle to know the great truth of that age in your own tongue - to hear the stories that mattered most in your own language and idiom - became inextricably bound up with the battle for freedom of thought and for freedom itself.

For good reason the Inquisitors’ first question of a suspected “heretic” was always whether he knew any part of the Bible in his own tongue.

This battle begins in earnest with the birth of the printed word and the desire - punished throughout Europe by hideous death - to read the book, the Bible, not in Latin, the dead tongue of the old imperium, but in the tongue of the field and town, the languages of the people - German, Dutch, French, Spanish.

In our language, this battle’s greatest landmark is the publication in 1525 of William Tyndale’s English translation of the Bible.

Though there had been English translations before, Tyndale, under the influence of Erasmus of Rotterdam, was the first to base his work not on corrupted Latin glosses, but return to the Hebrew and Greek originals, coupling his linguistic and literary gifts to a profound humanism.

“If God spares my life,” Tyndale said, “I will cause the boy that drives the plow in England to know more of the Scriptures than the Pope himself!”

Tyndale introduced many phrases that the plowboy might comprehend - such as the salt of the earth; let there be light, filthy lucre, fight the good fight. But in tandem with such earthiness, he brought the poetry of the Hebrew original into the English language. And so we have not the best song, but the song of songs, not the best book, but the book of books. And he made changes that have transformed scripture into some of our greatest poetry.

By insisting, for example, that love - and not charity - was the correct interpretation of the original Greek in St Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians 1:13, we have that great poem that begins: “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”

In this way, writes one scholar, Tyndale’s Bible “directed the language to a form of eloquence that became its paradigm”.

But this same English Bible was deemed heretical, and people caught distributing it were burnt at the stake. Nor did God spare Tyndale his life. Strangled at the stake, Tyndale was then also burnt.

But the liberating currents of his Bible were to bring fundamental change not just to English religion but to its politics, and more fundamentally and enduringly, to the language itself, his translation forming the basis for the definitive King James bible of 1611.

To make his Bible accessible to the plow boy Tyndale had invented many new words, including atonement and beautiful. For such words many died, yet the moment this process begins, that time when we discover ourselves in our own vernacular, we gain something extraordinary in the merge, and we begin to invent ourselves anew.

For translating the Bible into English simultaneously gave what was a mongrel language a new authority and dignity, while investing the language with a grandeur, a poetry, and a sense of transcendence that was not just to inform English literature that followed, but in a fundamental sense also invent it.

The battle to understand this world in our own tongue that Tyndale’s Bible represents, to make the universal particular, the sacred secular, and the secular in its turn sacred, is a battle that has strangely resurfaced here in Australia this year.

For it falls to us to once more to defend the right - our right and our deepest need - to our own stories in our own voice, which is also, historically and perhaps inevitably, that same battle between truth and power.

At this moment, as many of you would be aware, the Australian Government is giving serious consideration to a proposal that would see the ending of territorial copyright for Australian writers.

This dullest and dreariest of phrases - territorial copyright - is the drab motley thrown over a measure which will do untold damage to Australian culture. I cannot begin to convey to you the destructive stupidity of what is being proposed, nor the intense sadness and great anger that so many Australian writers feel about this proposal.

At a recent dinner in New York with the leading publisher in the USA and a leading European publisher, the conversation came round to territorial copyright.

“But why?” asked the European publisher.

After all, territorial copyright for writers was fought for from the 19th century on, and was the basis for the rise over the last 200 years of the novel as the great democratic art form.

The American publisher laughed, saying that while Australia’s folly would profit him, why on earth was the Australian Government contemplating such an insane idea that would destroy an industry and damage a vibrant literary culture?

Why indeed?

Even a few Manhattan blocks away from where the king of fraud, Bernie Madoff, flourished with his Ponzi rackets, people know it to be stupid idea fit only for the most credulous. But in Canberra, our Federal Government, which sometimes gives the appearance of being almost bizarrely hostile to Australian culture, is now giving serious consideration to destroying one of our greatest cultural success stories.

For publishing in Australia, though it has a history almost as old as European settlement, is effectively an industry less than 40 years old. When in 1945 the federal government held a commission of inquiry into Australian publishing, it was told by Harold White, the Commonwealth Librarian, that Australia had no publishing industry. Australian readers were, said Gough Whitlam in 1964, “a captive British market, a subject people”.

Then something remarkable happened.

Against the odds, an Australian publishing industry came into being. The battle to build a worthwhile culture of writing and reading in a country so large with a market so small was extraordinarily difficult.

But Australian publishing over the last four decades is an extraordinary cultural achievement. In an era when national cultures suffered greatly from globalisation ours grew stronger, in no small part because of our book industry. We read Australian stories from cradle to grave, and the best of our writing is judged around the world as globally significant.

It is also an outstanding commercial success, a story that might warm the heart of the coldest free trader. Today we sell more books per capita than most nations. Our print runs of literary novels are often the same in absolute terms as the USA or Britain. We export cook books, children’s books, fantasy, thrillers, literature low and high, and every year more and more of our books are being published in more and more overseas territories.

And though the book industry returns in GST alone somewhere in the realm of $75 million, it receives virtually no government support other than just $6.7 million in Australia Council grants - much of which goes to other, smaller arts bureaucracies.

This is nothing like the over $100 million of direct subsidy that the Australian film industry receives - to say nothing of the tens of millions more of taxpayer breaks Australian film receives on top of this. Yet Australian film is a cultural industry which, with very rare exceptions, unlike Australian books, struggles to find either critical success or any audience here or overseas.

I am not at all suggesting that our film industry shouldn’t be supported. But on what logic is one industry supported on essentially cultural grounds to this extent, while another, which makes money and creates jobs and tax revenue and costs the tax payer almost nothing, threatened with destruction?

Unlike the car industry, the book industry receives neither tariff protection nor endless handouts. Yet, ABS figures suggest it employs 15,000 people directly - one quarter of what the car industry does. Unlike the forest industry it does not receive hundreds of millions in taxpayer subsidies, or the fossil fuel industry, which according to a recent NRMA report, receives $10 billion in taxpayer subsidies. Yet it generates greater attention for Australia globally - all positive - than almost anything else we do culturally or economically.

The big end of town - Dymocks Booksellers in cahoots with Coles-Woolworths - are pushing for a change that will see jobs lost, a remarkable industry crippled and Australian cultural life dealt a body blow. Misleadingly called “opening the market”, it would allow the dumping of books by overseas publishers on the Australian market. Territorial copyright protection for Australian writers would cease to exist.

This alliance of wealth for profit has given itself the predictably deceitful title of the Coalition for Cheaper Books.

What they propose amounts to a return to the colonial days, not so old nor so distant as we perhaps thought, when Australian companies merely sold books from another country, and we bought with them notions of life that bore little relevance to our own world.

While the Coalition’s proposal is opposed by everyone from Matthew Reilly to Tim Flannery to Tim Winton, from the Australian Booksellers Association to the Australian Publishers Association to the Children’s Book Council of Australia, the only people the Coalition can wheel out in its defence, to plead its supposedly egalitarian case, are those horny handed sons of the proletariat, Alan Fels and, yes, Macquarie Banker Bob Carr, peddling the fiction of privileged writers and grasping publishers opposing cheaper books for the masses.

It’s all a bit like Fatty Vautin criticising a rape crisis centre for insensitivity to women.

Which may explain why Dymocks felt compelled to so shamefully manipulate its customers, using its email subscriber lists to enlist support for its purported campaign for “cheaper books”. Would the members of its “Booklovers” group have felt so moved if they had been asked to support a proposal to make big business richer? And would Dymocks franchisees welcome a call by Australian writers to Australian readers to boycott Dymocks stores because of this attack on Australian writing? That would be rightly condemned as destructive stupidity that will cost jobs - but then, what better description could be given to Dymocks’ own dissembling campaign?

For it is the old lie - self serving elites versus the masses - that the true self serving elites used through the ’90s to serve themselves ever more from the trough. For while the proposal may make money for a few big corporations whose power is already widely regarded as damaging and distorting in other retail fields, it is not even demonstrable that it will make books cheaper.

My most recent novel, Wanting, was published in Australia for $35 and generally sold at $30. Earlier this month it was published in the USA where it will sell for US$24 - or at 75 US cents to the Aussie dollar, the exchange rate on the day of publication, Australian $32. But if you add GST - $3.20, the cost goes up to $35.20.

Of course, it will be objected there is Amazon. And indeed there is. Wanting is discounted on Amazon to $16.32. But there is a shipping charge to Australia of $4.99, taking the cost up $21.31, or at 75 US cents to the Aussie dollar, $28.45. Were GST to be added as it is here, applicable at full and not discounted retail cost, the figure comes to $31.65 - or more than the discounted price of my novel here.

But perhaps this isn’t really about cheaper books at all.

Behind the rhetoric of cheaper books, the Coalition is about something else - a new sensibility among Australian book chains. Some among their number have come to believe that publishers have the whip hand over book chain retailers and that this is a situation now needs to be reversed., that this is a war, and it is a war that will be won by the book chain retailers.

They believe it will give them more power to force larger discounts off publishers and increase their own profit margin, while by destroying the viability of smaller competitors, allowing the major chains to increase their market share.

It is a mentality that comes out of Australian grocery retailing. There, according to a PriceWaterhouseCoopers report in 2007, the Coles-Woolworths duopoly controls 80 per cent of the national grocery retail market and are pushing aggressively into petrol and alcohol markets. The Coles-Woolworths duopoly has the highest level of market dominance in grocery retail in the developed world.

Ria Voorhaar, spokeswoman for consumer watchdog Choice, was reported in The Age in 2007 saying shoppers were losing out due to the lack of competition.

“The duopoly” she said, “is not doing consumers any favours when they go to the checkout.”

The aggressive push by Coles-Woolworths into new retail areas such as liquor and petrol doesn’t seem to be helping consumers there either.

Last year RACV petrol spokesman David Cumming was reported saying he was “extremely worried about the huge market share” of the two retail giants in the petrol sector, while the NRMA claimed motorists were paying eight to 10 cents more for petrol because of the dominance of Coles and Woolworths service stations in NSW.

Nor is the Coles-Woolworths duopoly doing any favour for producers. The Victorian Farmers’ Federation, the Horticulture Australia Council and the Australian Beef Association all expressed concerns about the market power of Coles and Woolworths to the ACCC in 2008. A HAC survey showed 85 per cent of growers were unwilling to raise issues with major retailers “for fear of retribution”.

As business journalist Michael West wrote in The Age in 2008: “A bundle of evidence has emerged from the [ACCC] inquiry about the chains monstering their competitors with town planning laws, and monstering farmers because the farmers are forced to deal with them as they cannot go elsewhere - such is the dominance of Woolies and Coles.”

West went on to say: “The push into liquor by Coles and Woolies has left them so dominant in grog retailing that Lion and Foster’s are held to ransom on prices. You want us to stock that wine or that new ale? Sorry, we’ll have to pay this very low price for it. There’s a lot of wine and ale around.

“There is a case for legislative relief. The Government could pass antitrust legislation as has been done in US, Canada and the UK.”

Yet West concludes this is unlikely.

“Competition policy has failed,” he writes. “It is too late.”

This then is the ghost of Christmas future that now haunts Australian writers and readers.

To trust companies like Coles and Woolworths, companies with this sort of record, with the Australian book industry, is like inviting the Taliban to babysit the Obama children. No one should express surprise with what ensues.

One might have thought the Rudd Government would be keen to rein in the excesses and distortions consequent on such a duopoly, to wind back its power. But no, far from it. Courage does not seem to have spent an evening lately at the Lodge. Rather, to placate the cruel gods of commerce, the reform the Rudd Government is considering is feeding the monster more victims.

The concentration of ownership of book retailing in the hands of one or two chains as in Britain and the USA has been catastrophic for the book industries in those countries.

The Australian book retail sector - with its strong and varied mix of independents, chains and discount department stores - is regarded as one of the healthiest and most diverse in the world, enabling large volume, large variety and price competition.

Yet many independent booksellers believe the ending of territorial copyright will lead to the further closure of independent bookstores, concentrating bookselling further into the hands of the discount department stores owned by Coles and Woolworths, and the larger retail chains, which have a record of often charging above the recommended retail price for books and even discriminating actively against small publishers.

Australian independent bookstores have for decades supported the unknown Australian writers, built the audience for books for us all, from David Malouf to Christos Tsiolkas, backed the Chloe Hoopers and Joan Londons, reminded us why Helen Garner mattered and Don Watson was important, persuaded us to buy a first Australian book by a Nam Le or a Steve Toltz. They are also the path into which books from elsewhere that matter are introduced to this country, and keep our book culture from becoming gangrenous. Their future under this proposal is bleak indeed.

Writers and books that matter will become like an endangered species with no habitat left to support them. The fate of most of them in the large chain and discount mega store culture will be that of marsupials in new outer suburbs, dicing with death on freeways, not knowing until that short moment of blinding light dazzle that this is no longer their home.

Of course, as the Coalition for Cheaper Books - or, as we might more accurately call it, the Coalition for Bigger Business - would point out, that’s not the whole story.

This is.

What is being proposed doesn’t exist in Europe or the USA. And even if US and British publishers are allowed to dump books on our market, Australian publishers will not be allowed to do the same in theirs.

In the one country in the world where the change was introduced, New Zealand, publishing has, according to the New Zealand Publishers Association, suffered, and books are now more expensive.

Bookselling in America, like Australia, runs on a consignment system. Where it differs is that return rates there are typically 50 per cent. These returned, unsold books are generally pulped or remaindered - sold off for one or two dollars, the author receiving no payment. Under this proposal these returned books will now be able to be dumped on the Australian market like Italian canned tomatoes.

Thus even a hugely successful Tim Winton novel - a book that enables his publisher here, Penguin Australia, to nurture new Australian writers of talent - could end up in Australian remainder bins. A dumped US hardback of Breath would be far cheaper than an Australian paperback, but with no royalty payable to the author and no profit to their Australian publisher.

The effects of this would be two fold: it would ultimately force major Australian writers to publish out of the USA to protect their own interests, with all the sorry consequences that would entail, while it would see the destruction of support for the next generation of Tim Wintons as Australian publishers went to the wall, or survived as they did for the best part of two centuries, as distributors for imperial wares made elsewhere for others.

It is true that books are made more cheaply in the USA in part because they pay writers less. While the royalty on an Australian paperback is between 10 and 12.5 per cent, in the USA it is 7.5 per cent. Thus once Australian writers are compelled to again publish for Australia from New York, they will effectively have taken between a 25 and 33 per cent pay cut, a sacrifice for laissez faire economics that Macquarie Bob may wish to publicly emulate. And yet, even after ripping writers off, US book prices are often no cheaper.

At the same time, Australian publishing suffers the problem - and considerable costs - of a small market spread over a huge land. Every major Australian publisher maintains a large sale force. And yet books here are no more expensive.

My Dutch publisher, Ambo-Anthos, highly successful, employs just one sales rep. And yet, come this September, the Dutch paperback of Wanting will go on sale for e19.95 - or, (at 54 eurocents to the Aussie dollar) Australian $36.92. The Australian paperback, to be published in the same month, will sell for $24.95.

The Coalition for Cheaper Books makes several arguments that are simply untrue. They argue that “there is no connection between the business of importing and distributing international books and the business of publishing Australian books.”

If this were true how do they explain the success of, for example, Australia’s most successful independent publisher, Allen and Unwin. A large part of its business comes from overseas titles such as the Harry Potter series, but these profits are ploughed back into its outstanding Australian list, featuring such Australian writers as Andrew McGahan, Christos Tsiolkas and Michelle de Kretser.

The Coalition argues that there will be a greater diversity of books available under this proposal. But as large publishers believe it will compel them to reduce their Australian lists, as small publishers believe it could push them to the wall, and independent booksellers - those bookshops that stock the diversity of books consumers want - believe it will damage their trade and close shops, what will happen is a significant reduction in the diversity of books available to the Australian consumer.

Or does Bob Carr think Big-W will stock the complete Gore Vidal just for him? For there may be more American celebrity books, and dumped best sellers going as red light specials, but that will be it. Given the pricing of overseas books, the practice of large chains and the experience of New Zealand, it is likely that a less competitive retail and publishing environment will make books generally more expensive.

And as a nation, and a society, we will be back forty years ago to when we were a colony of mind, with the money we spend on books going overseas.

The coalition argues the Australian publishing industry “will continue to grow” because it “is a dynamic industry driven by local demand. People want to read about their country, its peoples, its history and its prospects”.

If this were true, why was this demand not met for most of the last two centuries when Australians were force-fed a pottage of English books?

And the answer is, because that’s what made money for the big English publishers, as this proposal, as the American publisher observed, will now make money for him.

Bob Carr doesn’t believe this though.

On Lateline, in response to a question about how the ending of national copyright might lead to less Australian writing being published, he said: “I have never heard such garbage spoken as this. I have heard a lot of garbage in my time. The fact is Australians will always want to read Australian stories. Can the publishers point to a single title they’ve put into print as a subsidy for Australian writers. In other words a title that they know is not going to make a profit but which they’re putting out into the market as a favour to Australian culture.”

At this point I’d like to share with you one of Australian publishing’s odd secrets, something no publisher, I suspect, would say publicly. I’ve been published in my time by three major Australian publishers - Penguin, Pan Macmillan, and Random House - all subsidiaries of international companies, yet each fiercely proud and supportive of their Australian writers.

In every company every year there were Australian books that were published that everyone knew would not make money. And they were published because those publishers believed that this Australian book mattered. That this Australian writer mattered. That this Australian story should be heard. That these Australian poems, these Australian essays, this Australian novel should be read.

But they didn’t do it as a favour to Australian culture, or the writer, or to anyone or anything. They did it because they intuitively understood that their role was not just making money, necessary as that was. Because as well as being a business, every Australian publishing house I know of sees itself as part of Australian culture. Publishing companies are not millionaires’ factories for anyone involved and Australian culture is not an abstract term for them: it is what they do. It is who they are.

And despite what some in the chain book retailers think, the Australian book industry is not yet a war zone.

The Australian book industry is for the most part a series of collaborations and partnerships. I am not pretending that there aren’t differences or battles, that it isn’t competitive, that tough business isn’t done. But my experience is that the industry is most successful when writer works with publisher and publishers with booksellers in all their forms to sell books. My experience is that there are many good people at every level and in every size and aspect of the book business who believe in books as something more than mere product.

One might think that if the Federal Government were serious about creating free trade, if they really wanted a level playing field, that they would either take the GST off books sold in Australia, or oblige Amazon to charge it at source, as Amazon does for other countries and several US states to which it ships.

Taking GST off books ought be seriously considered as an economic stimulus that would create jobs, stimulate sales, and act as a considerable fillip to our literary culture. If the Coalition for Bigger Business is genuine about Australians having cheaper books they would come out and back one of these measures. But that won’t happen, because this isn’t about cheaper books at all.

It is the final sorry issue of big end of town greed coupling with starry eyed free trade ideologues in government who, knowing nothing of the market, believe in its genius only working when fully unfettered. The same combination, in other words, of corporate greed and political naivety that has given us the greatest economic crisis since the Depression.

Kevin Rudd has famously declared, “that the great neo-liberal experiment of the past 30 years has failed,” going on to say that, “Ironically, it falls to social democracy to prevent liberal capitalism from cannibalising itself.”

But does he mean any of it?

For it falls to Kevin Rudd to explain exactly why his Government is now seriously contemplating exactly the sort of cannibalism that he so publicly railed against.

And if his Government sanctions this proposal it will fall to Kevin Rudd to explain not just to Australia, but to the world, what sort of nation he wishes to lead that would seek to destroy rather than support and develop its writing?

For what nation can advance with its tongue torn out?

Maybe this proposal will benefit its sponsors, Dymocks and Coles and Woolworths. But it will not the Australian people. They will pay more for books made elsewhere in the image of others. There will be less Australian books. There will be a slow dieback of Australian literature that will be as sad in its way as the dying of the Murray or the Great Barrier Reef. There will be less jobs in publishing, bookselling, and printing, something else Kevin Rudd and his economic ministers claim to be concerned about.

And for those Australian writers who do not do what they had to do for the best part of two centuries - leave for exile in the US and Europe - there will be even less chance of surviving in a country that perhaps values its writers and book culture less than any other in the western world.

That for a short time Australian book culture had been one of the more inventive, vibrant and exciting literatures in the world, will be the cause for wistful wonder, rather than the foundation of a dream of the different country we might have been. And for that we’ll be able to thank Bob Carr and his mates and think of how only Bernie Madoff got away with selling a bigger fantasy.

For this reason, there is at the heart of this battle a great sadness. There is a new philistinism abroad. The cold contempt which it reveals some in power to have for a creative community that has done so much for this country is despicable.

It is therefore not enough that we defeat this pernicious job, wealth and culture destroying proposal. Because unless we propose something better, something worse will eventuate and Australian writing faces a future defined not by its achievements, but by the interest of the rorters and racketeers, those who fleece and fly. We’ll be taking the fall again and again for the promoters that Mad Dog Kemp always warned about.

I began by speaking about the battle six centuries ago to have the Bible published in the language of the people, and I spoke of the right - our right - to our own voice, which was also, historically, the battle between truth and power.

Once more, that battle to want to know stories that matter in your own idiom flies in the face of a dominant orthodoxy, this time a theology of the abacus rather than that of the cross.

We can prostate ourselves to the abacus, tear out our tongues, and end up as a banging gong, a clanging cymbal. Or we can with love seize our language, our stories, and with them make ourselves anew.

Because none of this would be just a reflection of who we are, but a reinvention of ourselves that never ends. That is the great and historic possibility that now presents itself to Kevin Rudd, a possibility that allows his Government to show that it is not just one more empty vessel; that it is brave and that is visionary, and that it wishes to build on our strengths, our creative talents to make Australian literature one of the world’s great emerging literatures of the 21st century.

Kevin Rudd can do more than just reject the measure to end territorial copyright. He can turn around, recognise the centrality of Australian writing to Australia, and offer something large and positive in its place. He could make explicit national support for Australian stories told in Australian voices. Is this too much? I think not; it is, after all, exactly what Canada has for its writers.

And then, building on that clarity, create a raft of measures, programmes, laws and institutions all with the purpose of supporting Australian writers telling Australian stories. We could for example have a national book commission charged with developing the book industry, that takes over the grant work of the Australia Council’s poorly financed literature board, but has a broader and larger role.

It should on a much larger scale instigate well funded, comprehensive measures that aid and develop small publishers, that assist in book distribution, maintain retail diversity, that build professional standards in editing, design and publishing, and develop book culture. That fosters exports and creates international attention for Australian writers. That ensures Australian literature becomes a central, rather than peripheral part of our humanities teaching at secondary and tertiary level. That ensures Australian writing benefits rather than suffers from the new technologies, and prospers in a twittering world of e-books and e-commerce.

For the last quarter of a century we had a politics, an economy and a society that had as their central dreaming a certain idea of life as being reduced to a fiction of a free market. I say fiction pointedly. We are after all a species defined by above all other things our capacity for reflecting, diving and creating anew our world through story.

The free market was a cocaine rush of a story, a blast of confidence and belief that fortuitously coincided with the collapse of a rival utopian tale, Communism. It gave unprecedented economic growth to the world, delivered millions from poverty and famine.

But at the beginning of this millennium it has become apparent that it also is running out of time: that it led us also to epidemics of depression, to ceaseless, unwinnable wars, to an economic malaise and environmental despair. Today more people live in poverty than in any time in human history. Today the land and the sea are under assault from a climate system stressed and unstable. We need new stories. We need the capacity to make those stories. And to do that we need to come together - readers, writers, politicians.

But as in Tyndale’s time, we will need to stand up for such things to happen, for the ongoing right to hear our stories in our voice. And in time I hope we in Australia may even find our own words as remarkable as those words beautiful and atonement, new words that not just describe but create a new country and people coming into being, an idea for our language in the shape of these words and the worlds that come forth from them, words and worlds it remains our shared possibility to make and our future glory to know.

Thank you for coming to listen to me.

The Chaser team has managed to cause a bit of a hullabaloo in parliament - and for once they didn’t have to show up to create a commotion.

In a Senate estimates committee Liberal backbencher Russell Troode quizzed the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) about the recent antics of the Chaser team in Rome.

Senator Troode’s concerns centred around a skit, which involved the Chaser’s Craig Reucassel launching a blimp over St Peter’s Square in the Vatican.

After being briefed on the Chaser escapade, DFAT’s Greg Moriarty told the committee four Australian men had been arrested over the incident.

Senator Troode was reassured the four had not been a drain on public funds - they hadn’t sought any consular assistance.

Nor was former Nationals leader Tim Fischer, now Australia’s ambassador to the Holy See, called in to get them out of a jam.

Members of the media wait outside the Priory Hospital.

Susan Boyle is getting better after an anxiety attack caused by the pressures of her overnight fame, with celebrity judge Simon Cowell planning to help her launch a professional career, Cowell’s agent says.

The Scottish songbird who finished second in the “Britain’s Got Talent” competition landed in a London hospital on Sunday night after suffering what one of her brothers described as severe anxiety.

Show judge Amanda Holden and Max Clifford, who represents Cowell, both said Boyle should recover her equilibrium fairly quickly now that she is getting treatment. Holden said Boyle does not have any underlying mental problems.

Clifford said Cowell, the mogul who helped create the show, plans to work with Boyle after she is better to make sure her career gets off to a good start.

“She is recovering well,” Clifford said on Tuesday after speaking by telephone to Boyle’s two brothers.

“They are saying they weren’t surprised by what happened, due to the speed of everything that happened, with her getting worldwide fame in seconds. Provided she’s given a few days and then allowed to be as normal as possible, she should be fine. All she wants to do is sing.”

The cut-throat show continued to draw criticism in the British press for its cavalier attitude toward the wellbeing of participants, and Britain’s independent Ofcom agency, which handles complaints about broadcasting, said an investigation is possible.

But attention shifted to speculation about Boyle’s future, with most predicting commercial success but some saying she would have a hard time attracting a paying audience.

Clifford, who has represented many of Britain’s biggest stars, said there is little doubt that there is a public appetite for Boyle. He said her mental stability should not be an impediment provided she is surrounded by people she trusts, either her brothers or close friends from Blackburn, Scotland, her longtime home.

“It shouldn’t be too difficult to get it under control,” he said. “She’s going to have potentially huge album sales, particularly in America. Americans absolutely love her. Everyone wants her on their show singing. That gives her massive potential, and Simon will make sure she has the best songs and the best productions.”

Her brothers have also said she wants to continue her singing career despite the problems in the last few days.

It is not clear yet whether Boyle will be well enough to take part in a 17-show “Britain’s Got Talent” concert tour set to begin on June 12. Organisers said on Tuesday they expect Boyle to perform along with the other nine finalists, but no final decision has been made.

 

Allies of singing sensation Susan Boyle rallied round as it emerged she was rushed to a London clinic with exhaustion and possible mental health problems soon after a shock talent show defeat.

Boyle, whose frumpy appearance hid a soaring voice which made her a global star, was taken by ambulance to the Priory Clinic in north London on Sunday accompanied by paramedics and police after acting strangely at her hotel, The Sun newspaper reported.

The news came hot on the heels of her surprise defeat late on Saturday in the final of the Britain’s Got Talent television show, when she was voted into second place by the public behind urban dance troupe Diversity.

In a sign of how big the story has become, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he had spoken to the show’s judges about Boyle because he “wanted to be sure that she was OK”, he told ITV television on Monday.

Boyle’s brother Gerry said he had spoken to her and she was feeling better.

“She’s at the Priory talking to people there about how she feels and where she goes from here,” he told the Guardian.

“She sounded a bit happier, she sounded a bit more like herself, but certainly a bit more rested.

“She’s been on a tremendous rollercoaster. There’s been an enormous amount of media speculation and intense activity. She’s not used to that. She’s coming to terms with that now that she’s no longer an anonymous face.

“I think what led up to it was the build-up to the show and just psyching herself up for that and then wondering after the show, ‘Where do I go now?’”

Britain’s Got Talent judge Piers Morgan said Boyle was “essentially fine” and predicted she would bounce back for a successful career after some rest and recuperation.

“I believe she’s going to have a few days of rest, get better, get her energy back, get some sleep, eat properly again and then live her real dream,” he told Sky News television.

“I think that Susan will get back soon and get into a studio and record an album that I would imagine in the next few months is going to be one of the biggest selling albums of the year.

“That will be the real Susan Boyle fairytale.”

The Priory, which says on its website it specialises “in the treatment of mental health problems”, said it did not comment on individual cases.

It is part of an exclusive chain of private clinics known for treating troubled performers including Amy Winehouse and Pete Doherty.

Susan Boyle’s shock talent show loss has reportedly caused the surprise singing sensation to suffer an emotional meltdown.

Britain’s Daily Mail is reporting that Boyle was rushed to The Priory - the famed celebrity rehab clinic - because of “exhaustion” following her Britain’s Got Talent defeat.

Boyle became a worldwide internet hit after her impressive rendition of I Dreamed A Dream stunned judges and audience members.

A video of her performance became an internet viral smash and received about 100 million hits.

But despite her instant celebrity status, a dance group called Diversity managed to stage an upset victory on the weekend final of the talent quest.

Boyle received 20 per cent of the 4 million audience votes that decided the show’s winner.

Bookmakers had made her the favourite to win, but after an unconvincing semi-final performance, there were fears that Boyle, who was starved of oxygen at birth and has mild learning difficulties, was suffering under the pressure.

She was spoken to by police after an outburst at the London hotel where she was staying, while Britain’s Got Talent judge Piers Morgan described her as “a frightened rabbit in headlights” and said she considered quitting.

The 48-year-old Scot had appeared gracious in defeat, declaring “the best people won” but following the show she reportedly suffered an emotional breakdown.

Paramedics were called to her London hospital and she was then voluntarily admitted to The Priory, a celebrity favourite for drug and alcohol rehabilitation, which also treats mental health problems.

TV Company talkback Thames reportedly released a statement saying Boyle had been told by doctors to take a break from her sudden stardom.

“Following Saturday night’s show, Susan is exhausted and emotionally drained. She has been seen by her private GP who supports her decision to take a few days out for rest and recovery,” the Daily Mail reported the statement as saying.

“We offer her our ongoing support and wish her a speedy recovery.”

The pressure of fame had reportedly led Boyle to threaten to quit the popular talent show amid reports of tantrums and tears in the lead-up to the final.

Judge Piers Morgan said coming second was the best outcome for Boyle, whose life had become a circus.

“I think she has found a lot of it quite hard to deal with and I think the pressure of actually winning and living up to all that expectation would have just carried on the mayhem for her,” Morgan was reported as saying.

“I’m only sorry that the extraordinary tidal wave of publicity she attracted meant so many people got either bored or irritated by Boyle mania and decided not to vote for her.”

 

Unlikely Scottish singing sensation Susan Boyle is plotting her future after her shock defeat in the Britain’s Got Talent television show which made her a worldwide star thanks to the internet.

Boyle, a frumpy, 48-year-old church volunteer, will reportedly earn up to eight million pounds ($16.2 million) in the next year from a record deal, book about her life and even a film.

She is set to start rehearsing for an album of showtunes this week and will fly to Prague next month for recording sessions with the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, British media said.

Boyle’s career looks likely to reach new heights even though she lost to the multi-ethnic street dancers Diversity in a public vote of one million viewers after the talent show final late on Saturday.

Despite winning praise from the audience and the judges in her last performance on live television, Boyle was forced into second place, saying the “best people won” and wishing the dance troupe winners “all the best”.

Boyle enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame over the past two months after video footage of her audition piece for the show, I Dreamed A Dream from the musical Les Miserables, was posted on YouTube.

It has had at least 100 million hits and brought her celebrity fans including actress Demi Moore and rock star Jon Bon Jovi, who embraced the dowdy spinster from small-town Scotland with a voice worthy of Broadway.

Bookmakers made her the favourite to win, but after an unconvincing semi-final performance, there were fears that Boyle, who was starved of oxygen at birth and has mild learning difficulties, was suffering under the pressure.

She was spoken to by police after an outburst at the London hotel where she was staying, while Britain’s Got Talent judge Piers Morgan described her as “a frightened rabbit in headlights” and said she considered quitting.

In a live performance in the Britain’s Got Talent final on Saturday, though, Boyle proved the critics wrong and repeated her audition piece with gusto.

Judge Amanda Holden said after the performance: “I have never heard such powerful, confident vocals.”

Following her performance, Boyle - wearing a grey-blue, long sequined dress - gushed appreciation for her worldwide fan base.

“I want to thank people for all the support they’ve given me,” she said.

Asked if it was worth all the media pressure, she replied: “Well worth it!… I really feel at home on stage, I’m among friends.”

As for her future plans, Boyle added: “I hope to get an album out - I’ll just play it by ear. What a journey - unbelievable, and very humbling. Thank you for everything.”

Simon Cowell, one of the show’s judges and its mastermind, said he had high hopes for Boyle.

“It’s the biggest phenomenon I’ve ever seen out of any of my shows,” Cowell, who is also a judge on American Idol, told the News of the World newspaper.

Boyle’s performance was watched by hundreds of fans in her home town of Blackburn, outside Edinburgh, where she lives in social housing with only her cat Pebbles for company.

“She told me that after the final, she wants to come back and resume her previous life,” one of Boyle’s neighbours, 24-year-old housewife Vicky McLean told the Mail on Sunday newspaper.

“She doesn’t want to make millions and go to America, she just wants to sing. I think all she really hopes to have out of it is enough money to buy her house.”

From Neighbours to Hollywood … Dichen Lachman.

TWO years ago Dichen Lachman was enjoying her first taste of acting success in the Australian soap Neighbours.

Now she’s starring in Dollhouse - the new offering from Buffy creator Joss Whedon and one of the few American dramas to survive the economic crisis to a second series - and is touted as an actress to watch.

It’s been a fast ride to the top, the 27-year-old admits, but one she’s not taking for granted.

“I came to LA and after one role in a giant lizard movie [Aztec Rex] I had eight months of not working. I had one month of rent left because I’d gone through all my savings and then Dollhouse came along. I’m very lucky.”

In the series, which premieres in Australia next month on Fox8, Lachman plays Sierra, whose personality has been wiped by a mysterious agency. She is supposed to be the perfect “doll”, able to take on any role, but part of her original personality is slowly seeping back.

“Sierra has had her power taken away and one of the fun things is that Joss [Whedon] has said he’s looking forward to her getting her power back,” Lachman said.

In the meantime, Lachman’s own power grows. She boasts international appeal, with an Australian father and Tibetan mother. This month Lachman was named as one of the 100 hottest women on screen by prominent lesbians in the media site afterellen.com. “What a privilege to be there,” she said.