The Wheeler Centre: Dailies

As Melbourne Expands, Where Will All ...

2012-02-08T14:29:04+11:00

Melbourne is currently a city of 4 million people. By 2050, that number is projected to grow to 7 million. This means our population will nearly double over the next 40 years.

But where will they live?

It used to be the cliché that Sydney was obsessed with real estate. But these days in Melbourne, if you strike up a conversation with a stranger, eavesdrop at your local cafe, or leaf through a newspaper, the topic is bound to come up in some form. House prices, the next ‘secret’ affordable suburb, baby boomers with multiple investment properties and younger generations with none … the list goes on.

In the 90s, sea-changers moved to coastal towns for the lifestyle. The tree-changers of the 21st century might rave about the organic coffee in Woodend or the arts scene in Castlemaine, but scratch the surface even a little and the fact they couldn’t afford houses in the Melbourne suburbs will come up.

Sophie Gaballa, age 30, bought in Woodend in 2008. She was attracted to the nearby bushland and the ‘active community’, but price was definitely a factor. ‘I thought about being right in the city and having the benefits of the city lifestyle, or being completely out of the metro area and have the benefits of a rural town, rather than on the urban fringe. The rural town option was a clear winner, particularly with the more affordable prices.’ She points out that just four years after her decision, those prices are no longer so affordable.

In 2010, the top ten areas for home sales were all on the city’s fringe, with Berwick, in the city’s south-east, at number one. Other top ten suburbs were Pakenham, Frankston, Point Cook, Werribee, Hoppers Crossing, Craigieburn, Reservoir, St Albans and Narre Warren South.

Cheap houses, pricey milk

Rob Adams, director of design at the City of Melbourne, says we should be concerned at the cost of locating more and more people on city fringes. ‘The last thing we need to do is to keep spreading cities outwards, where building new homes requires new and very costly infrastructure’. He says it is ‘not credible’ for us double our current infrastructure – which we’ve built up over the past 175 years – within the next 40.

He cites Griffith University research that has found fringe-dwellers suffer real financial difficulties. ‘It’s fine for a house and land package to cost only $230,000 but does the customer realise they will spend 25% of their income getting to and from work and getting the milk? People don’t think of this.’

In his report Transforming Australian Cities, Adams looks at the hurdles facing a city already bursting at the seams, as it prepares to double its population. The study suggests ‘it will be possible to accommodate an additional 2.4 million people on a mere 6% of potential redevelopment sites dotted along the city’s bus and tram routes’. The developments proposed are medium density, between 4–8 storeys.

‘We need to break the myth that higher densities mean high rise development,’ says Adams.

The study also identifies the potential for a further 1.4 million people to be accommodated within existing activity centres and known redevelopment sites. These interventions would require only 7.5% of the land within the Melbourne metropolitan area to be transformed, potentially leaving the remaining 92.5% in its current form.

‘There is a clear case not to further extend the growth boundaries,’ the study concludes.

Planning the good life

Jane-Frances Kelly, Cities Program Director of the Grattan Institute, is similarly dubious about solving our housing problems by extending the city fringe. She cites the lack of public transport and reliance on cars in outer-urban areas as a problem for social reasons, as well as the more obvious environmental ones. And it’s not just about commuting to work.

‘We all know that relationships with others are crucially important in our lives, but we’re not used to thinking about the role that our cities play in this. For example, the way the city is structured, and how good its transport system is, makes a big difference to whether we can easily get around to see people.’

Leslie Edwards, who moved from Frankston to Kensington in 2000, confirms the importance of proximity to others, citing it as a major advantage of her move from Melbourne’s fringe. ‘I have lots of friends nearby, whereas I spent six years in Frankston and could not tell you who lived next door,’ she told the Age.

The Grattan Institute’s The Cities We Need report argues that a city’s most important characteristic is whether it meets all residents’ needs – including the need for social interaction, which she says are rarely considered in conversations about the future of Australian cities.

The ‘good life’, it says, is determined by not just basic needs like ‘clean air, food, water and shelter’, but psychological needs like ‘people’s autonomy and a sense of competence’.

Clearly, there are huge challenges ahead – and important conversations to be had about how best to face them. Those conversations are not just about where we live, but how we live.

At the Wheeler Centre next Wednesday, we’ll be talking Melbourne planning with Rob Adams, Jane-Frances Kelly, Trevor Dance and Jill Garner, as part of our free events series, Ideas for Melbourne. Bookings recommended.

City and Urban Planning (6.15pm-7.15pm, Wednesday 15 February) is the third in the series, which will be running all through next week, each weekday evening.

Is That a Hatchet Job I See Before Me?

2012-02-07T13:01:26+11:00

The winner of a new literary prize will be announced tomorrow: the Hatchet Job of the Year. Established by The Omnivore, a website that curates reviews for readers, the prize will be awarded to the best bad review of a book.

The topic of the prize is slightly tongue-in-cheek, but the aim is serious. Professional critics seem to be an endangered species these days, partly because their natural habitat, newspaper book pages, is dwindling.

The Hatchet Job of the Year hopes ‘to raise the profile of professional critics and to promote honesty and wit in literary journalism’. Anna Baddeely, founder of the prize, says, ‘We thought Hatchet Job of the Year would get a lot of attention and be a fun way to highlight professional book reviewing.’

Bad versus best

But is it in poor taste? Novelist and literary journalist Jane Sullivan recently wondered if the prize is ‘the best way to earn respect’ for literary critics. ‘The schaudenfraude in all of us responds in glee to a bad review, especially if it’s cutting down a particularly tall poppy in an elegant and witty way. But there’s more to the art of reviewing than flourishing a hatchet.’

Geoff Dyer is shortlisted for his review of Julian Barnes’ Booker Prize-winning Sense of an Ending (which he damned for being ‘just so … average’). In a fascinating Guardian article last week, he asked Baddeley, ‘Were you not tempted to set up a prize for excellence in reviewing, whereby the final verdict of the review wasn’t a precondition for being eligible?’

‘It seems to me that now there could be a real incentive to write negatively,’ he said. ‘I would be wary if this were to serve as any sort of inducement to write witty and damning phrases. The key thing is the sensitivity of the response and the accuracy of the judgment.’

Peter Rose, editor of Australian Book Review, is similarly equivocal. ‘I think we’d all like to see more assertive, more biting reviews,’ he told the Wheeler Centre, ‘but I feel ambiguous about an award of this kind, mainly because it seems to cheapen the review or trivialise the reviewer’s motives.’

‘Honest to the point of brutality’

Critic Peter Craven

That said, Rose doesn’t shy away from bad reviews – or even what could be termed hatchet jobs. In his time as ABR editor, he published what is probably the most infamous take-down of an Australian book by an Australian critic: Peter Craven’s review of Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish. Craven called the novel ‘a monstrosity’, concluding, ‘I cannot believe that a novel like this has been put before the public with such a mishmash of verbal collisions, such lapses of judgment and such evasions of pace.’ (For the record, the New York Times’ Michiko Kukatani disagreed, calling Gould ‘astonishing’ and Flanagan ‘an indefatigable artist.)

‘Criticism should be honest to the point of brutality in the interests of truth,’ said Craven in 2010, continuing a discussion sparked by the Wheeler Centre’s Critical Failure, where he was a panellist.

Rebecca Starford, editor of Kill Your Darlings and regular book reviewer for the Age and the Australian, was a co-panellist. ‘Ultimately, anything that raises the profile of professional critics is a good thing at the moment,’ she says now. ‘However, I think The Hatchet Job Prize needs to be promoted in its context – these are not the best reviews published that year, they are the reviews that are the most acerbic, cruellest and most controversial.’

Anna Baddeley says that the reviews she’s selected are ‘not just entertaining, they’re learned and persuasive’. And indeed, Dyer’s excellent – quite measured – review of Sense of an Ending is hardly the harshest review of 2011. It’s only scathing in comparison to the general praise the book received; it’s brave to go out on a limb and judge a Booker prize-winning novel by a literary giant ‘average’.

‘I wouldn’t want the award to been as encouraging cruel reviewing,’ says Baddeley. ‘We’ve been careful not to include reviews we felt were personal attacks. But I also think there aren’t enough negative reviews – reviewers are too deferential a lot of the time, and it leads to a problem of trust, because the reader gets forgotten.’

Hey, Driver! Bike Riders Are People Too

2012-02-06T15:03:18+11:00

Melissa Cranenburgh, former editor of Bicycle Victoria’s Ride On magazine, argues that we can learn to share the road – if we see each other as people who ride bikes/drive cars, rather than as warring tribes of ‘cyclists’ and ‘motorists’. Shane Warne, take note.

For those with preconceived notions of ‘cyclists’, let me introduce myself. I’m a short, thirty-something woman who generally rides around the city in everyday clothes (not lycra). I always stop at traffic lights and am a (frankly, annoying) stickler for road rules. I am regularly cheerful and often flash an unprovoked smile at passing pedestrians. And I always wave my thanks when the car drivers I share the road with show me unprovoked courtesy in turn. For example, when they don’t scream at me through an open passenger window or try to kill me by opening a car door as I approach at full tilt. (Incidentally: side mirrors, people. Use your side mirrors.)

So it may come as something of a shock to learn that I also, on occasion, drive a car. Confused? Let me explain.

You see, the terms ‘cyclist’ and ‘bike rider’ mean ‘a person riding a bicycle’. Similarly, ‘motorist’ and ‘car driver’ mean (bear with me now) ‘a person driving a car’. So – and this is where the lesson gets a little difficult for some folk (aka, the Australian media) to grasp – cyclists and drivers can actually be the same people.

Which puts paid to the little ‘bike riders don’t pay for the road’ argument. In fact, the average Australian bicycle commuter generally owns a car and therefore pays an annual registration fee. So … far from needing to pay a ‘bike registration’ fee, perhaps car-owning bike commuters should get a rebate for saving the road from additional wear and tear.

Bugbears aside, the main argument between these not-so-dissimilar groups – people riding bikes and people driving cars – is over the mode of transport they have chosen; each believes they should be able to use the road unhindered by the other. Crucially, though, there is still only a relatively small (if growing) number of people who regularly choose to ride bikes for transport. So, like many conflicts, this is about territory, a sense of entitlement and the rise of a paradigm-challenging minority group. It’s no accident that one of most common heckles bike riders hear is: ‘Get off the road’.

Melbourne is gradually moving from a car-dominated commuter culture to one that is slowly (slowly) accepting that this is not a sustainable option – either for the environment or for our quality of life. No one enjoys sitting in gridlock.

But the reality is that many car drivers in Melbourne just don’t expect to see bike riders – and are surprised, shocked, and even offended when they do. They are used to the concept of roads as something for cars and other motorised vehicles, not for more fragile, slower-moving, human-powered ones.

This psychological blindness is one of the biggest hurdles in good driver–bike-rider relations. It means that drivers are less likely to be on the look-out for cyclists, which makes it a potentially more volatile situation when they do encounter them. Many well-meaning drivers can even end up reacting angrily because they feel protective toward bike riders. ‘I could have killed you,’ one woman shouted at me, accusingly, after she partially opened a car door in front of me, nearly sending me into the path of an oncoming tram. (I was too shocked to point out that according to the road rules, it was her responsibility to look for cyclists before she opened her door.)

Equally, bike riders can feel personally targeted by what they perceive as car drivers’ casual indifference to their safety – but this ‘indifference’ may actually stem from the aforementioned psychological blindness to the other’s existence. For example, if a car driver suddenly comes from behind to merge in front of a swiftly moving bike rider, a hot-headed cyclist might then feel moved to wreak vengeance on the driver’s car bonnet at the next set of lights. Not socially acceptable, but sociologically explicable …

But, I think the confrontation between car drivers and cyclists can sometimes go much deeper. Cars, by totally encasing us in metal, can have a dehumanising effect. From within and without. It’s too easy not to see the person driving the car as a person, but as a ‘car’. Equally, from inside a car, a cyclist can start to look like some kind of mobile speed hump, taking up space on an otherwise nice, roomy road.

I was thinking about this dehumanising phenomenon while riding, not so long ago, when I felt a hard thump between my shoulder blades. I was momentarily winded, but managed to keep my bike under control just long enough to see a grapefruit-sized lemon roll off the road near me and a car speeding past – the sound of laughter cut short as it burned off.

Later that night, as my friend was checking out the bruise spreading across my back, I pondered that casual act of violence. I could certainly imagine a group of mates psyching each other up to see if they could ‘hit the cyclist’. But what if they’d thought of me not as a ‘cyclist’ – but as ‘a woman riding a bike’?

Melissa Cranenburgh is associate editor of the Big Issue and a former editor of Bicycle Victoria’s magazine, Ride On.

At the Wheeler Centre next Monday, we’ll be talking about Melbourne’s streets – and about transport issues in general – as part of our free events series, Ideas for Melbourne.

Transport and Movement (6.15pm-7.15pm, Monday 13 February) is the first in the series, which will be running all through next week, each weekday evening.

Smut for Teens? More, Please

2012-02-02T10:23:53+11:00

In yesterday’s Age, Michelle Griffin wrote a passionate plea for why we should be exposing teens to more ‘dirty books’. She says that in an age where teens can easily access actual porn over the internet and formal sex education emphasises disease and danger (and is often awkwardly delivered by well-meaning but reluctant teachers), dirty books are ‘the best chance they have to free their fantasy lives from the shackles of banal commercialised sexuality’.

She reports that only half of Year 10 students have had sex (though ‘surely all of them are thinking about it’) and suggests that it’s far better for them to imagine their own scripts – based on their own desires and fantasies – than to leave them with only the restrictive scripts provided by porn:

We should fill school libraries, family bookshelves and e-readers with all manner of explicit literature: not just copies of The Joy of Sex, but steamy airport novels, raunchy teen lit and straight-up smut.

Controversial feminist Gail Dines, author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, spoke at the Wheeler Centre last year about how porn can shape sexuality, particularly for adolescents who are still discovering theirs.

In an essay following Dines’ visit, Rochelle Siemonowicz, publications manager for the Australian Film Institute (and mother of a primary-school-age son) wrote about her own discomfort with the way porn shapes sexuality, in unimaginative ways. Her conclusions weren’t too different from Griffin’s – after reflecting the way erotic films can enhance sexuality, she concluded that she plans to leave such films ‘accidentally’ lying around the house for her son to discover when he’s ready, as a so-sneaky-it-just-might-work way of combating the influence of internet porn.

Writer and bookseller Krissy Kneen – author of erotic memoir, Affection, and erotic novel, Triptych – has also spoken at the Wheeler Centre on the difference between erotica and porn (though she also has no problem with the latter). Kneen, too, is emphatic about the positive effects of ‘dirty books’.

In the (very busy) comments section for Griffin’s article, some have reflected on their own formative erotic reading. Books mentioned ranged from Jean M. Auel’s fantasy series The Earth’s Children to Jackie Collins’ Gino, Judy Blume’s Forever and the Kama Sutra.

Will DIY e-Publishing Kill the Book?

2012-02-01T15:32:26+11:00

Ewan Morrison is famous for last year’s bleak Edinburgh Festival address diagnosing the publishing industry as in ‘terminal decline’.

Yesterday he tapped into the zeitgeist again, with a Guardian article warning of the fall-out for writers and publishers when the ‘self-e-publishing bubble’ inevitably bursts.

Digital technology has made self-publishing cheaper and easier than ever before. Not only are there no printing costs, but distribution – once involving trudging around bookshops on foot (and considerable ongoing postage costs) – is now as simple and accessible as a few clicks of the mouse.

The star: Amanda Hocking

And just as any film nerd with a dream can look to Matt-and-Ben’s Good Will Hunting as inspiration, aspiring e-novelists have their own DIY success story to aspire to.

Amanda Hocking needed to raise $300 to travel to a Muppets exhibition in Chicago. With seventeen unpublished paranormal romance novels on her laptop and a shoebox full of publisher rejection letters, she decided to sell them on Amazon to raise the money. She had six months; when her self-imposed deadline came, she’d raised over $20,000 and sold 150,000 copies. In twenty months, she’d made $2.5 million dollars – and sold 1.5 million books.

This month, 27-year-old Hocking’s first ‘traditional publishing’ book, Switched (a fast-paced romance about changeling trolls – and the most successful of her e-books) will be released in Australia. It’s just one of the outcomes of a $2.1 million publishing deal with St Martin’s Press in the US and Pan Macmillan in the UK.

Bubble bubble, toil and trouble

Most self-published authors sell less than 100 books a year. Recent figures suggest 48% of them are sold for under $2.99 per copy and 28% for 99 cents or less.

For the most part, the profits are made by the manufacturers of e-readers (which are expensive) rather than the creators of e-books (which are insanely cheap, sometimes even free). And, of course, by the big e-booksellers like Amazon and Apple’s iBookstore.

Morrison calculated that over twelve months, ‘with five million new self-publishing authors selling 100 books each, Amazon had shifted 500 million units. While each author … made only $99 after a year’s work.’

Australia’s e-landscape

‘Australia is some years behind the US and the UK when it comes to the availability of e-books, though it has finally started to play catch up over the past year or two,’ says Matthia Dempsey, editor-in-chief of Bookseller and Publisher magazine.

It’s been a period of massive change for the Australian book industry. We’ve seen the declining fortunes of physical bookshops, epitomised by the demise of the Angus & Robertson and Borders chains (representing roughly 30% of the Australian market), a steep rise in consumers buying books online, and a growing awareness and embrace of e-readers. A year ago, Booki.sh, an Australian-based e-book platform, was launched.

And late last year, Dymocks, Australia’s sole surviving major book chain, launched the controversial D Publishing, a company that creates both print and e-books, distributed via the Dymocks website: for a fee and with a restricting rights clause that has been heavily criticised.)

‘I think it’s safe to say the awareness of e-self-publishing as an option will be on a steep upward curve at the moment for most would-be Australian writers,’ says Dempsey.

The e-author: Angela Meyer

Angela Meyer is one Australian writer who has happily dabbled in self-e-publishing, publishing her three of her short stories as stand-alone e-books. They’re available on both Smashwords and Amazon; two are priced at 99 cents and the third is free. ‘I did it partly as an experiment to see if anyone would read or buy them,’ she says. ‘I also wanted to extend the life of stories that were previously published in journals but were never available digitally.’

Her free story, ‘You Will Notice that Hallways are Painted’ – which inspired the novel she’s now writing – has had ‘a couple of hundred’ readers; some have gone on to purchase the other stories. ‘It’s worked out pretty well for me.’

Most readers have come through Angela’s blog, Literary Minded (she’s Australia’s best known literary blogger) and her social media accounts.

Visibility is a problem for most self-e-published authors. It’s very cheap and easy to publish an e-book, but most get no readers because they’re lost in the crowd of millions, without the backing of a publishing house for promotion. ‘If you look at Smashwords you can see just how much rubbish is on there,’ says Meyer. ‘My strategy to “rise above’ was to have edited stories with well-designed covers, and to have them available via the social networks I’d already established.’

Money for nothing and writers for free

Morrison worries that the proliferation of ‘so much writing-for-free’ (or ridiculously cheap) will lower the price consumers are accustomed to paying. He fears this will have a similar influence to that of the many websites that don’t pay writers – that it will devalue writing and make it harder to make a living.

‘I’m pretty convinced by the argument that paints the recent past as an unlikely-to-be-repeated golden age for writers in terms of advances and their ability to make a living as a full-time author,’ says Dempsey. ‘As in other major creative industries, the web and digitisation has fragmented the market, making it harder for most to make the kind of profit they once did.’

Lisa Dempster, director of the Emerging Writers Festival, believes it’s ‘a misnomer’ that there have been periods where it’s been easy to be a writer. ‘The struggling-writer-in-a-garrett is a cliché for a reason!’ She says, ‘I don’t think the low price of e-books is the thing that is going to sink the writing industry. Personally, after such a long time of free digital content, I think we’re starting to see a shift towards consumers being willing to pay for work that they know will be good quality online.’

Dempsey is also hopeful. ‘As some readers of cheap self-published works already admit, when you wade through enough bad writing you do become more willing to pay a little more, and that little bit more recognises the role played by the traditional gatekeepers: selection, investment, editing and so on.’

Where’s the cream?

The Australian writing folk we spoke to weren’t as gloomy as Morrison about self-e-publishing, though they all agreed that most writers who think they’ll follow the glittering path of Amanda Hocking – or even make a living from it – will be disappointed.

Dempsey and Dempster believe genre plays a role in what kind of books have a chance of succeeding. ‘It would take a brave person to self-publish a literary novel, however self-published romance novels and travel books are booming,’ says Dempster.

Ultimately, though, success depends on expectations. ‘I think that for writers who see e-self-publishing as a chance to make their writing available for non-financial reasons, and who are not labouring under the notion that they will make a living (let alone a fortune) out of it, the ease with which it is now possible to publish a book would be a welcome development,’ says Dempsey.

‘You could make the case for the new self e-publishing ecosystem functioning as a kind of public slush pile … a way of being a part of it – with the hope of being noticed by traditional publishers or newer e-only imprints and publishing houses.’

Amanda Hocking’s publishers – not surprisingly – agree. ‘It’s always been the same, since the days when people were self-published from the back of their car,’ Matthew Shear of St Martins Press told The Guardian. ‘Cream will rise to the top.’

Good Sign for Melbourne Designer

2012-01-31T14:59:14+11:00

It’s always nice to see Australian creators gain attention and accolades overseas – even more so when they hail from Melbourne. And when they’re written up in a lauded international publication for a book about Melbourne … well, that’s impressive.

Stephen Banham’s Characters: Cultural Stories Revealed by Typography (co-published by Thames & Hudson and the State Library of Victoria) is dedicated to public signage and typography in Melbourne. It gets a rave review on Salon today, as ‘a book that is exemplary in nearly all respects’.

The review was originally published on respected design website community Imprint, by Paul Shaw, a writer who, as he admits, ‘has become infamous for no-holds-barred critiques of books’.

Here’s just a taste of the review:

Characters is more than a cool collection of images, an occasion to wallow in nostalgia for the past ― a time before the Internet, computers, franchises and chain stores, international corporations and globalization; a time before Helvetica. It is a collection of stories about signs that go beyond the aesthetics of color, design and type to reveal the cultural, social and economic changes that have happened in Melbourne over the course of a century. Banham, owner of Letterbox, a ‘type studio’ in Melbourne, has researched the history of how the signs were conceived, designed and manufactured; what has happened to them over the intervening years; and what they have meant to different generations of Melbournians. Thus, Characters is a book about place as well as about time.

The stories in Characters are short but often smart, eloquent, funny and poignant. Banham stresses the importance many of the signs have to Melbournians, not just to graphic designers and typographers, as part of the city’s cultural identity and visual history.

If you’re interested in intelligent discussion and cultural writing about the city we call home, you might want to check out these videos of previous events, discussing Melbourne in terms of its history, green lifestyles and social equity.

And watch this space for our program launch this Friday 3 February, when we’ll be announcing the details of a new events series, Ideas for Melbourne.

Here’s a flavour of the feast for your eyes (and grey matter) that awaits you between the covers of Characters:

Is it a Woman’s World After All?

2012-01-30T11:17:38+11:00

The underrepresentation of women writers was one of the big topics of 2011. Australian novelist Kirsten Tranter wrote about it for us on International Women’s Day (8 March) last year, pointing out the skewed gender balance in Australian literary coverage. Presciently, she also argued that women are less recognised by our major awards – which was to become a major issue the following month when the Miles Franklin (which Tranter was longlisted for, for The Legacy) announced an all-male shortlist.

Recently, in a Salon article archly titled, ‘The agony of the male novelist’, ‘midlist’ writer Teddy Wayne argued that complaints about lack of recognition by bestselling novelists like Jennifer Weiner – who has been one of the loudest voices in the US gender debate – were ‘missing the point’.

‘For the majority of male literary authors — excluding the upper echelon of Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Don DeLillo and their ilk, plus a few younger writers like Chad Harbach who have scored much-ballyhooed advances — it’s actually harder than it is for women to carve out a financially stable writing career.’

Women, he wrote, buy around two thirds of all books and 80% of fiction. They are also far more likely to belong to book groups, which not only drive immediate sales, but are an effective way to spread word-of-mouth. This, says Wayne, increasingly translates when it comes to sales – and publishing prospects.

We asked Sophie Cunningham, novelist (Geography, Bird), former publisher and chair of the Stella Prize committee, what she thought about the claim that women writers sell better than men, though they may not attract the same level of recognition. Cunningham said that in her experience, male writers seem to be better at creating ‘that kind of persona’ around them that helps to attract public attention and thus sell books. However, she’s careful to emphasise that her experience is limited to literary fiction – and she reports hearing from commercial publishers that it’s a different scenario for them. She hears that female commercial authors do ‘at least as well’ as their male counterparts financially, even when they receive little or no coverage.

The book club factor

The CAE has run book clubs across Victoria for decades, providing book lists, reading notes, and even lending out sets of books. We asked program manager Samarra Hyde if it was true that book clubs (which are mostly women) read mostly women writers. The answer seems to be yes. ‘In general, we try to program a range of titles for the main program – both male and female authors,’ she said. ‘But it really comes down to books that we think will be suitable for the list. Over the past four years we have programmed more than double the number of female authors than male.’ Hyde says that out of their ten most popular titles for the year, just two are by male authors. Of the top 25, ten are by male authors. And of 115 new titles suggested for 2011 by the CAE’s groups, 44 were by male authors.

But when we look at two independent Victorian booksellers who run book club programs with a focus on literary novels, the gender divide is very different. The 11 books read by Avenue Bookstore clubs over the past year included six books by men and five by women. At Readings, a look back at the past three years of book group picks reveals a similar story, with an average of six women writers to every five males.

Who gets published?

Wayne believes that it is harder for mid-list male novelists to be published in the first place. He says a ‘book-editor friend’ confided to him, ‘When we buy a debut novel by a man, we view it as taking a real chance.’

Aviva Tuffield, fiction publisher at Scribe Publications (which publishes both literary and commercial fiction), says ‘whether the novel is for women or men doesn’t really come into the equation at all. What matters is: do I love this book?’ She says that if a book is written well enough and the story is strong enough, then ‘I’d assume it will cross over and find readers of both sexes’. For instance, one of Scribe’s most popular books last year was Chris Womersley’s novel Bereft, which appeals equally to men and women. ‘And it’s not a novel of domestic life'.

Chris Flynn, books editor of The Big Issue, has a good overview of new release fiction slated for 2012 and his own first novel, A Tiger in Eden, will be published Text in March. ‘I have noticed that established authors – like Peter Carey and Murray Bail – aside, I seem to be almost the only Australian male fiction author to have a book out this year,’ he says. ‘I don’t know if publishers feel they’re taking a chance on debut novels by men, or if it’s just the case that there aren’t many blokes coming through at the moment, but it does strike me as a little odd to be on my own, pretty much.’

John Hunter, publisher at University of Queensland Press, says, ‘I have never, as a publisher, editor, or reader, paid the slightest bit of notice to the sex of an author.’ However, he says that ‘the general gist’ of Wayne’s article is ‘pretty accurate’.

‘If you want to talk about the literature machine and the kinds of books it produces and honours then you cannot ignore the broader picture. And that, by and large, is a system run by women for women.’

Uptown girls?

Wayne says that arguing about the very upper echelon of coverage concerning the top one percent of writers (as Weiner recently has) amounts to ‘‘uptown problems, which aren’t really problems at all’. He says Weiner – blessed with her enviable sales record – shouldn’t complain.

Does he have a point? ‘Publishing’s an “uptown” industry,’ says Sophie Cunningham. “Of course writers want to be taken seriously. I understand that. Dismissing feminist concerns as middle-class is a pretty standard way of dismissing those concerns.’

Salman Rushdie, the Jaipur Festival a...

2012-01-26T13:06:17+11:00

Freedom of speech – and freedom from persecution for writers, in particular – has often been a subject for The Wheeler Centre’s events and articles.

This week, Salman Rushdie, one of the world’s most famous persecuted writers, had to cancel his appearance (then the video session that was to replace his physical presence) at India’s Jaipur Literary Festival, due to threats of violence.

Kabita Dhara, veteran of the Jaipur Literary Festival and publisher at Brass Monkey Books (a company that specialises in bringing Indian writing to Australian audiences) gives us the low-down on why it happened – and how it’s connected to Indian politics.

When asked what word he would use to describe the controversy that has surrounded his scheduled appearance at the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) last week, Salman Rushdie uses the word ‘farce’. In an interview with NDTV’s Barkha Dutt, after a scheduled video link with the festival (to make up for his inability to physically attend) was also cancelled due to threats of violence, Rushdie explains that he has been visiting India for years now; he has spoken at events in India a number of times in the past few years. So why all the fuss now?

Fingers are pointing to the fact that it is election time in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, which borders the state of Rajasthan (the state of which Jaipur is the capital). When it was announced that Rushdie would be appearing at the JLF, the Darul Uloom Deoband an ‘influential fundamentalist Islamic seminary’, demanded that Rushdie’s visa be withdrawn. (A poorly thought-out move: Rushdie, born in India of Indian parents, has documentation that means he doesn’t need a visa to enter India.) Consequent events suggest that the government, after initially supporting Rushdie’s visit both on a federal and state level, had second thoughts and decided that courting the 20% Muslim vote in Uttar Pradesh was more important. (One Indian TV presenter likened the situation to instances where villages that struggle with no electricity for years get given free laptops come election time.)

Jaipur, India

Just days before Rushdie was expected in India, emails purporting that three assassins were travelling to Jaipur from Mumbai to murder Rushdie were sent to the festival organisers and government officials, and subsequently to Rushdie himself. Government officials seemed unable to guarantee Rushdie’s safety and doubted that they could control the situation (even though they manage just fine with other visiting international dignitaries and sporting teams). Rushdie decided that it would be irresponsible to attend the festival due to the danger to festival-goers and because of the stress it would place on his family. It was later found that the emails and their content were probably fabricated, and now no organisation is taking responsibility for the emails or the intelligence that informed the emails.

When a video broadcast to the JLF crowds was organised to replace Rushdie’s initial scheduled appearance, the festival organisers again received threats of violent protests in Jaipur and had to cancel. All of which begs the question, while a democracy might see it as prudent to ban a book, how can it, effectively, ban the author? When the government banned The Satanic Verses when it was published in 1988, then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi took pains to clarify that the ban was because of concerns that the book would offend India’s Muslims and cause civil unrest, and that it did not reflect on the literary quality of the work.

The Satanic Verses is banned in India under a law that prevents its importation and dissemination, which raises the question of whether the ban is even relevant anymore given that the book can be downloaded from the internet. This does not mean its author is banned, or that one cannot discuss the book. When four other writers – Hari Kunzru, Amitava Kumar, Jeet Thayil and Ruchir Joshi – decided to read from The Satanic Verses at the JLF, to protest the treatment of Rushdie, they too found themselves under threat of prosecution, although Kunzru and Kumar deliberately read passages that had nothing to do with Islam but reflected instead the quality of Rushdie’s work.

The worrying aspect of this whole saga is the lack of clarity as to, firstly, whether the threats to Rushdie were orchestrated by government officials in a bid to dissuade Rushdie from attending the JLF because of impending elections (an Indian TV presenter charmingly referred to this possibility as ‘match-fixing’) and, secondly, who these people actually are who claim to be speaking for India’s Muslims. While the answer to the first is crucial to answering the second, it can only be speculated on, given that the only evidence is that which has been gleaned from media reports and literary blogs. So let’s consider the answer to the second.

While The Satanic Verses is still banned in a number of countries, after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, in 1998, the fatwa on Salman Rushdie that started the whole controversy was lifted. The book is available in some predominantly Muslim countries such as Turkey, Egypt and post-Gaddafi Libya, and has been translated into Turkish and Arabic. Most relevant to recent events in Jaipur, the book has long been read in India by those who bought it from overseas or downloaded it from the internet – and this group includes Muslims. A number of Indian Muslims have spoken up in defence of Rushdie’s right to free speech and have even sent him messages of support on social media. As Rushdie says in his interview with NDTV, the average Indian Muslim has more to worry about in day-to-day life than to protest about the visit of a writer. So which Muslims were threatened by Rushdie’s presence in Jaipur?

While it is in an elected government’s mandate to pass laws to protect the people of its country, when that country is a democracy, it also has the responsibility to balance that mandate with allowing freedom of expression as granted in its laws and Constitution. A burning question for Indians is how is the world’s largest democracy can justify stifling healthy debate because of threats of violence. (Where is Amartya Sen’s ‘argumentative Indian’ now?)

I will give the last word to Rushdie himself. In a passage in the last chapter of The Satanic Verses – a complex meditation on alienation, migration, Western materialism and the political manipulation of religion (amongst other things) – Rushdie has one stuttering character say, about India,: ‘Fact is … religious fafaith, which encodes the highest ass ass aspirations of human race, is now, in our cocountry, the servant of lowest instincts … ’

Kabita Dhara is director and publisher at Brass Monkey Books.

Ben Ball on Penguin’s 'Monthly Catch'

2012-01-26T12:55:13+11:00

Earlier this week, we tweeted the news that Penguin’s general publishing department is now accepting unsolicited manuscripts, in a new initiative titled, ‘The Monthly Catch’. Submissions are restricted to the first week (1-7) of every month, starting on 1 February.

It’s been six years or more since Penguin last accepted unsolicited manuscripts; previously, they considered only those represented by agents.

We knew this was pretty interesting news, but were surprised by just how interested our Twitter followers seemed to be. (There’s a reason Melbourne is a City of Literature, it seems. Lots of writers.)

We spoke to Penguin publisher Ben Ball to discover the thinking behind the company’s new embrace of the unknown and unfiltered.

‘Perhaps the main reason is that the digital world is bringing us closer than ever to readers, and therefore aspiring writers,’ said Ball. ‘We want to be an even more active part of that community.’

‘Our relationship with agents is of course vital, but although we haven’t accepted unsolicited submissions for the last few years, we’ve had a long and successful history of discovering new authors directly. So this is part of our past as well as future.’

Is there any kind of project Penguin are on the lookout for? “Nope,’ Ball told us. ‘We want to discover new things we like, and want to be surprised. We look for books of the highest quality, but we’re a broad church when it comes to subject.’

All manuscripts will be carefully read and assessed, though only successful submissions will be responded to.

Submissions should be sent according to strict (but easy to follow) guidelines, which can be found – along with full details – on Penguin’s website. Most importantly, perhaps: don’t send hard copies. They’ll only be recycled.

As we’ve reported before, other large publishers have their own versions of The Monthly Catch: Allen & Unwin has accepted manuscript pitches from aspiring writers every Friday for years. And last year, Pan Macmillan announced their own version of The Friday Pitch – Manuscript Monday (10am–4pm).

Notions of Nationhood

2012-01-26T12:22:58+11:00

Portable patriotism. (Source: Stephen Barnett/Flickr)

Today, ideas of national identity, patriotism, community and equity come to the fore in the Australian imagination (sharing real estate with flags and barbeques, perhaps). Drawing on events held during the past year, we’ve put together a list of viewing recommendations for your public holiday.

Prior to the arrival of Captain Cook and cohort, Australia’s indigenous population carefully managed their environment, making use of fire to rejuvenate the land and manipulate the movement of fauna, historian Bill Gammage explained.

The appearance of European colonialism planted the seed of today’s reconciliation debates. We explored this debate – covering treaty, social justice and opportunity – in our Not Sorry Enough discussion. Larissa Behrendt discussed the challenges of overcoming indigenous disadvantage, while Sarah Maddison presented an argument for how mainstream Australia can move beyond white guilt.

A South Australian Corroboree (1864) by WR Thomas, from the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia. (Source: WikiCommons)

Iconic storyteller Thomas Keneally presented his take on early nationhood and Australia’s regional racism in his Lunchbox/Soapbox presentation in December. Race and Aboriginal politics were amongst the myriad topics addressed in a marathon two-hour interview between Paul Keating and Robert Manne, with some of Keating’s sentiments echoing Manne’s earlier polemic regarding our national political complacency. Also cautioning against complacency, Susan Mitchell spoke of the potential disaster of a Tony Abbott victory.

We held many discussions on the state of our democracy. We asked whether it was broken, dumbed down or going nowhere fast, and for how long we might remain the lucky country. Tim Soutphommasane presented his case for why progressives should embrace National Service, and one of our Intelligence Squared debates focussed on the question of whether our soldiers should be in Afghanistan.

In a series of events, we paid tribute to our country’s literary heritage, whilst writerly alumni of the University of Melbourne’s Janet Clarke Hall celebrated their colleagues. As for contemporary literature, the 21 titles comprising the 2011 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards shortlist provide a compelling picture of our nation’s writers today.

Finally, in our So Who the Bloody Hell Are We? series we explored the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. Doubtless, many such stories are being shared as you read this.

Melinda Tankard Who?

2012-01-25T14:27:30+11:00

If you’ve been reading the Fairfax press (or surfing social media) recently, you’re probably familiar with the debate about writer and activist Melinda Tankard Reist – and whether she has the right to call herself a feminist.

Tankard Reist is the author of two books by Melbourne feminist publisher Spinifex Press, Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls and Big Porn Inc. (edited with Abigail Bray). She runs an activist group, Collective Shout, that works against the objectification of women and sexualisation of girls for commercial profit.

She’s also a conservative Christian who is anti-abortion (or ‘pro-life’) and spent twelve years working for Tasmanian senator Brian Harradine.

Melinda Tankard Reist

Tankard Reist has long been a controversial figure – particularly in feminist circles – but the current furore began with a front-cover profile in Sunday Life magazine on 8 January, nearly two weeks ago. The profile writer, left-wing feminist Rachel Hills, says she interviewed Melinda because she ‘thought it would be interesting’. She wrote on her website, ‘Like many journalists, I spend too much time thinking about what goes on in other people’s heads, and Melinda was a public figure I found particularly perplexing … I still didn’t “get” her. And I wanted to.’

This weekend, iconic Australian feminist Anne Summers argued that you need to sign onto certain principles in order to be a feminist – and abortion rights is one of them. ‘As far as I am concerned, feminism boils down to one fundamental principle and that is women’s ability to be independent. There are two fundamental preconditions to such independence: ability to support oneself financially and the right to control one’s fertility … To guarantee the second, women need safe and effective contraception and the back-up of safe and affordable abortion.’

She concluded of Tankard Reist, ‘Just because she says she is a feminist does not mean she is.’

In a past Wheeler Centre debate, Summers' contemporary Wendy McCarthy recalled abortion in the 1960s – before social pressure from feminists and others made it legal – as potentially fatal. ‘In my own experience, to get an abortion required furtive phone calls, 63 guineas (a large amount of money), cops patrolling up and down the road, hoping someone would give you advice when you left…’

Yesterday, Kate Gleeson said the most significant argument against Tankard Reist’s identification as a feminist is her involvement – through her work as Harradine’s adviser – in restricting the approval of the abortion drug RU486 and ushering in Australia’s adoption of the ‘global gag rule’ that dictates AusAID’s overseas family planning guidelines.

Gleeson said this had ‘profound implications for women’s access to contraception in our donor destination countries’, contributing to ‘the two-tier system in which Western women have mostly unfettered control over their reproduction, while those in the developing world are at the mercy of dangerous abortions’.

Today, Cathy Sherry takes issue with all those who’ve questioned Tankard Reist’s right to call herself a feminist. She says ‘I have long considered myself a feminist and been disturbed by the parts of the sisterhood who operate like the nasty in-group in primary school … I do not know Melinda Tankard Reist and I am not pro-life, but I defend her right to express her opinions, call herself a feminist and prosecute her own beliefs … The real test of tolerance is tolerating those with whom we strongly disagree. We will never have a right to express our own contested ideas if we do not defend others' rights to do the same.’

A somewhat baffled Rachel Hills (who says that the huge response to her profile – including five separate opinion pieces last weekend – has been both ‘a bit of a dream’ and ‘challenging’) reflected this week on what she’s learned from the experience. She concluded, ‘if you want people to listen to what you’re saying – whether you have a big platform or small one – you also have an obligation to engage in good faith’.

Hills’ approach to the profile was to avoid a hatchet job, but ‘to write something critical (in the sense of making analytic judgments) but still human’.

While perhaps not all the arguments being traded are useful (or indeed respectful), the broad debate is teasing out some big questions.

Who Cares About Australian Classics?

2012-01-24T14:33:40+11:00

In a nice departure from the traditional Australia Day focus on flags and sporting heroes, The Sunday Age has marked the lead-up to the occasion with an editorial decrying our ‘tendency to anti-intellectualism’.

It lamented the fact that Australia’s ‘great writers, artists, soldiers, politicians and scientists … take second place to footballers, cricketers, swimmers and tennis players’.

‘As we approach Australia Day and make our plans for the beach or the backyard, it’s worth reflecting on what we are losing through this neglect of our classics. They are our stories written in our voices, and give us specific clues as to how we became the country we are today.’

In an opinion piece published alongside the editorial, Michael Heyward, publisher of Text Publishing, argued that while Australia has come a long way in recent decades when it comes to valuing and celebrating our homegrown authors, we ‘seem not to care’ about the great authors and books of our past, neglecting to keep them in print and to consistently teach them in our universities.

‘Those of us who choose and influence what people might read – publishers, professors, teachers, journalists, commentators, editors – have done a lamentable job of curating the primary materials of our literary history,’ wrote Heyward.

He said it will take ‘all kinds of effort’ to change both publishing and academic cultures. Increased adaption of Australian novels to film and television was one proposed solution, while he also suggested that the rise of the eBook ‘may liberate some writers from the dungeons of neglect’.

Making old books new

Text will release a new series, Text Australian Classics, in 2012, featuring titles such as David Ireland’s (currently out of print) The Glass Canoe, winner of the 1976 Miles Franklin Award, as well as earlier works by current favourites such as Kate Grenville and Peter Temple.

It’s not the first time Text has dabbled in resurrecting neglected works of Australian writing. In 2009, Madeleine St John’s debut novel The Women in Black (1993) – never before published in Australia, though set in Sydney – was published in a handsome new edition, packaged with accolades from much-loved Australians like Barry Humphries, Helen Garner and Clive James. The novel, a sharp-witted, affectionate portrait of a group of women working in the ladies department of a store much like David Jones, was embraced by both critics and readers; it was followed by new editions of St John’s subsequent novels.

Christina Stead’s work has enjoyed renewed interest thanks to some high profile endorsers. Watch our session The Late Great: Christina Stead here.

The endorsement of a popular writer was also integral to the recent renewal of interest in Christina Stead, after The Man Who Loved Children (1940) was given a rave review by Jonathan Franzen in The New York Times. Melbourne University Press published a new edition, with a stylish cover and introduction by Franzen, shortly afterwards. This was followed by new editions of Letty Fox: Her Luck (with a foreword by Carmen Callil) and For Love Alone (with a foreword by Drusilla Modjeska).

Stylish new editions and canny endorsements or introductions designed to lure new readers seem to be an integral (and, it seems, effective) part of the publisher’s bag of tricks when relaunching forgotten or neglected classics – literally making the old new again.

Books on film

Another Australian classic, Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright (1961), enjoyed a resurgence thanks to these tricks (an introduction by Peter Temple and afterword by David Stratton) when the 1971 film was restored and re-released in 2009. The film attracted a wave of media coverage and allowed an accompanying film tie-in edition (again, from Text Publishing, who had also published a 1993 edition).

Barbara Creed, head of culture and communications at the University of Melbourne, told The Age that she agreed with Heyward about the need for more Australian novels on the screen. She said, ‘Whenever a novel is adapted to screen … there is a boost in sales of the book as a result.’

Young appetites for Oz lit

Creed also said that a dedicated Australian literature course was back on the university’s syllabus this year. Last year, a group of students had started their own Australian literature studies, in the absence of such a subject. (‘An unusual situation,‘ Creed said.)

This enthusiasm from students so actively keen to steep themselves in Australian writing is, at least, a good sign.

The Wheeler Centre will run a free series of ten events entitled ‘Australian Literature 101' from next month. Details will be released, along with our February-April programme in full, next Friday 3 February.

Book Fair in the Desert Blooms

2012-01-23T12:42:45+11:00

Emerging Writers' Festival director and avid traveller Lisa Dempster reports on the growth of contemporary literary culture within and around the Sharjah International Book Fair, which in 2011 celebrated its thirtieth anniversary.

The Sharjah International Book Fair takes place over ten days and is unique in many ways. In the west we are used to our literary events looking a certain way – our writers festivals are about discussion and debate (and selling retail books); our book expos focus on publishers, distributors and agents (and selling rights); and our writers’ conferences focus on industry skills development (and selling manuscripts). The Sharjah International Book Fair is a combination of all these elements.

A book trolley from Sharjah International Book Fair. (Photo: Lisa Dempster)

Traditionally, the core of what the Fair has done is act as a large public-facing book sales outlet. Hundreds of publishers come to sell their books direct to readers, and the public come and buy books in the thousands – often buying a year’s worth to take advantage of the retail discounts. (The book trolleys are one of the best things about the Fair!) A robust schools programme has been in place for many years, with schools visiting the Fair on weekdays. And, informally, publishers and distributors have had a chance to meet and network.

But in the past two years – which I have been lucky enough to attend – Sharjah has added other elements to the Book Fair: in 2010 it featured its first literary discussions and panels, including a cookery corner, and in 2011 it scheduled a professional programme aimed at bringing publishers and agents together from around the world to sell and buy rights. The Fair also awards literary prizes, including the one million dirham Etisalat Prize for Arabic Children’s Literature, and in 2011 set up a $300,000 translation fund. But why the mixed bag of offerings?

For one, Sharjah is currently incredibly dedicated to developing a literary culture where there currently isn’t much of one, and its book fair is the centrepiece of that development. (Of course, the region has one of the longest histories of literary culture in the world – when I talk about a ‘developing’ culture, I am speaking about commercial publishing and bookselling.)

A large audience gathers during the 2011 fair. (Photo: Lisa Dempster)

In general, the writing and publishing culture in the UAE – and, more broadly, the Middle East – is far less developed than what we enjoy in Australia. Fewer publishers, less bookshops, and difficulty in distributing work due to cultural and geographic fragmentation in the market means that there are less writers and readers – and yes, less literary infrastructure. There are currently two major literary festivals in the UAE – Sharjah Book Fair and the Emirates Literary Festival in Dubai – and no writers’ centres or other institutions. Digital publishing is basically non-existent. A similar situation exists throughout the Middle East.

However, the current emir of Sharjah, Sheikh Dr. Sultan al Qasimi, in addition to being a writer himself, is a great lover of books and literature. It’s with his support, teamed with the energetic direction of Festival Director Ahmed al Amri and festival patron publisher Sheikha Bodour al Qasimi, that Sharjah’s Book Fair is diversifying and becoming larger. Thus the rapid growth and expansion of the fair, and also – I felt – the experimentation in trying out different programming elements to see what will work. There is a recognition that to sell books and get people reading, there needs to be a strong local industry in place. (Many of the books sold at the Book Fair are imports – from the Middle East, India and the West, largely – with few titles available from Emirati authors; simply because there aren’t many published.)

Sharjah’s Poetry House. (Photo: Lisa Dempster)

As a visiting Australian it was fascinating to look at the developing literary culture in Sharjah, and how the Book Fair is uniquely both creating and responding to the needs of its citizens. Post 2010, after the Fair first introduced a social media team (which I was on), there was a rise in the sense of community around book readers and writers in the UAE. On my return in 2011 I discovered that in the past year, more than one book club had been set up; at least two books had been self published; a locally-organised and very well attended 100 Thousand Poets for Change event had taken place, and through the @shjintlbookfair Twitter account, many people had connected with each other to talk books. A flow-on result was much larger attendance at the Book Fair last year – as an audience member I noticed a definite rise in the number of people attending the discussion panels to hear authors talk about their work.

Sadaf Syed’s photo documentary iCOVER. (Photo: Lisa Dempster)

Attending the Sharjah International Book Fair has been eye-opening. Excitingly, I got to meet and speak with writers from around the world, and appreciate the truly global literary outlook that the region has (in Australia I get frustrated that we spend so much time looking to the West.) It also confirmed something that I have long suspected – that, despite the doom and gloom we sometimes go on about, Australia is an unnaturally friendly place for writers.

But most vitally, it was fascinating as a festival director to see how Sharjah is taking shape as a force for literary culture in the UAE (it is an ambition I share for the Emerging Writers’ Festival!). It was refreshing and inspiring to visit a Fair that seems familiar in many ways, but has its own modes of operation, and unique ideas about what it can and should do. What is a literary festival? What should it be? What could it be? Sharjah International Book Fair is asking these questions, and shaping up to be a unique – and powerful – force for literature, in the Emirates and beyond.

Ship Happens

2012-01-17T14:45:32+11:00

When Captain Cat beseeched his deceased lover Rosie Probert to “let me shipwreck in your thighs” in Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, we truly doubt he meant anything resembling the fate of the Costa Concordia cruiseship which ran aground on 13 January. The disaster has claimed 11 lives so far, with more confirmed deaths expected.

The somewhat odd behaviour of the ship’s captain, Francesco Schettino, remains the subject of widespread speculation. Was he a cowardly deserter or, as he claims, did he merely slip off the deck and into a lifeboat? And what of the heated exchange between Schettino and Port Authority commander Gregorio de Falco?

The listing Costa Concordia off Italy’s Tuscan coast, via Roberto Vongher/Wikimedia Commons.

Locally, Federal Opposition leader Tony Abbott was today under fire for making light of the tragedy on breakfast radio, remarking, “Well, that was one boat that did get stopped, wasn’t it?” He has since conceded that his comments may have been inappropriate.

David Newland, writing for Macleans.ca, has reimagined the shipwreck as an Italian opera. He casts a hero in Hungarian violinist Sandor Feher, who helped a group of children to safety before perishing whilst trying to retrieve his violin, becoming the first of the dead to be identified.

If maritime drama is your thing but you prefer your shipwrecks fictional, The Guardian’s list of their Ten Best Literary Shipwrecks may float your boat.

A Black Day for Free Speech

2012-01-19T15:25:06+11:00

Today, lazy music writers and smartphone-toting trivia cheats can commiserate over a common problem: Wikipedia has blackened the English-language version of its encyclopaedia for 24 hours.

The action is part of a wider campaign against two controversial bills being considered in the US – the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). Both bills are strongly supported by motion picture and music industry anti-piracy lobbyists.

Users attempting to view Wikipedia’s English articles are instead shown a blacked-out screen, offering information about the SOPA/PIPA legislation. Source: en.wikipedia.org, accessed January 18, 2012

But critics argue that whilst many may support the bills' legitimate intentions to curb piracy, they bestow upon US authorities unprecedented powers to censor online media with a ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ approach, infringing the rights of innocent parties in the process. The legislation – if passed – would also affect sites beyond US borders. Last November, Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt labelled SOPA “Draconian”.

Salman Khan (founder of khanacademy.org, which hosts 2,700 free educational videos on topics ranging from advanced algebra to the Cuban missile crisis) has produced an eleven-minute video explaining the proposed legislation and its startlingly broad impact. Khan provides a clear, highly visual elucidation of the laws and the ways they could empower authorities to effectively destroy websites like Facebook, YouTube or any which allows users to post comments (including yours truly).

The New York Times meanwhile has offered an open-ended discussion on the issue, with Room for Debate posing the question, ‘What’s the best way to protect against online piracy?’. Those offering their considered responses include representatives from the Motion Picture Association of America, Copyright Alliance, Cato Institute and BrainPickings.

Wired.com ‘censored’ its website with black redaction marks. Source: wired.com, accessed January 18, 2012.

With the bills to be considered by the House and Senate in coming weeks, some politicians have already changed their stance. But whether or not the laws progress further, the tense relationship between freedom of speech and protection of intellectual property is unlikely to be resolved simply.

A list of protesting sites can be found at Mashable, or by visiting SopaStrike.com, who coordinated the protest. You can scroll through a gallery of blacked-out pages at GigaOm. For a more irreverent take on the blackout, see The Oatmeal’s protest: we don’t want to spoil the surprise, but it’s an animated GIF featuring Oprah, a koala and a whole lot of love.

Word on the Street

2012-01-17T17:07:56+11:00

Some time ago, we reported on a tiny phone booth library located in Somerset, England. We even pondered whether it may be the world’s smallest. But it seems the field is thicker with competition than one might first think. In the US, Portland writers and ‘Street Librarians’ Laura Moulton and Sue Zalokar run Street Books, a library run from a bicycle (well, it’s really a tricycle) in various city locations. And in La Gloria, Colombia, Luis Soriano’s Biblioburro travels on the backs of two donkeys — charmingly named Alfa and Beto.

Colombia’s Biblioburro via Diana Arias/WikiCommons

Clearly, the Americas do well in this game, boasting the Little Free Library project (now spreading worldwide) and the Corner Libraries. But they’re also home to the library that was not only compact, but compacted. The ‘People’s Library’ that emerged in New York’s Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations was raided and dismantled after dark, its 5,000 books apparently sacrificed to the dumpster, prompting the Twitter hashtag #BloombergBibliocide and a tweeted reprimand from Salman Rushdie. It’s now smaller by necessity, its remaining volumes transported by laundry cart.

Moving away from the (small) space race, the variety of unusual libraries on offer around the world is equally compelling. The Department of Libraries, Archives and Museums of Chile has installed libraries in metro stations around Santiago, as well as Bibliotrenes (book trains) located in two city parks. Not to be outdone, Japan’s Akishima Library in western Tokyo is run from a converted ‘0 series’ Shinkansen bullet train, whilst Bangkok’s street children have also borrowed books from a train since 1999, profiled in the documentary Children of the Trains.

High design stakes its claim on the library too. The Netherlands' BiebBus is an expanding mobile library designed by architect Jord den Hollander and hosts over 7,000 books along a 100-metre bookshelf. But the coolest feature may not be its selection of books; the trailer’s two rooms can slide one over the other, with a transparent window between them. Elsewhere, Tel Aviv’s Levinsky Library is a handsome backlit bookshelf built in a shallow garage located on a busy thoroughfare.

At a build cost of €300, the less extravagant Otets Paisiy public library in Bulgaria may not dazzle the eye in quite the same way, but takes resourceful advantage of a disused trolleycar in the town of Plovdiv.

Finally, closer to home, the Benjamin Andrew Footpath Library has already opened branches in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, with plans to make books available to the homeless and marginalised in other cities around Australia soon.

The Summer of Hate

2012-01-17T14:43:30+11:00

Earlier this week, anti-porn activist Melinda Tankard Reist sought legal advice from a defamation lawyer after a blogger labelled her a “fundamentalist Christian”, The Sydney Morning Herald reports. ‘'Why does being a blogger exempt you from the laws of defamation?’‘ she questioned.

While The Guardian last year reported a rise in defamation claims levelled at Twitter users and bloggers in the UK, it could be said that the increase is in litigious outcomes rather than in the nature of opinionated expression itself. So argues Meghan Daum in an article titled ‘Haterade’, published in this month’s issue of The Believer.

In 2004, when Marieke Hardy began writing the provocative blog Reasons You Will Hate Me under the pseudonym ‘Ms Fits’, she could barely have anticipated how appropriate a title she’d chosen as a storm of criticism, some of it rather unseemly, lingered in the distance — fed by both anonymous and prominent fellow users of the printing press/internet.

This storm struck hardest in November last year. Spurred by feminist blogger Sady Doyle’s #mencallmethings Twitter campaign aimed at naming and shaming anonymous male commenters for their hateful and misogynistic slander, a rightfully offended Hardy mistakenly outed one Joshua Meggitt as the man responsible for a concerted (and undeniably nasty) five-year-long campaign of abuse posted on a blog under the name ‘James Vincent McKenzie’. An apologetic blog post (now inaccessible) and a $13,000 settlement payment to Meggitt later, Hardy’s hater has recommenced the campaign whilst none are any wiser to his identity.

As any seasoned blogger or online columnist would be well aware, slanderous comments and hate blogs are commonplace and geographically widespread. While those proffering an opinion online are most frequently maligned, also susceptible are businesses critiqued by user review sites. The urge to retaliate against our critics can take many forms, taking the Ocean Avenue Books vs Yelp incident as but one example.

In ‘Haterade’, author and essayist Daum traces the online put-down through its historical antecedents: yet more pseudonyms, political interests and public figures including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.

Whilst “the goal is to be heard, to inspire reaction and generate discussion”, Daum — like Hardy and so many others — has “a stable of regulars [who] have become so personally invested in their dislike” for her that their smears have wandered well into the terrain of her personal life. This behaviour, she argues, has rendered much comment less about “joining the conversation” and more like watching a dogfight.

But, Daum offers, if harsh and ill-considered judgement is the cost, valid criticism is the “priceless” benefit. “When ideas are given their due — that is, treated as living, breathing, imperfect things rather than written off as glib reactions to preexisting ideas — something rather magical can happen. There can be a second of silence during which we, as readers, think before chiming in. There can be a gasp of recognition that reminds us why we read or write in the first place.”

Click to read the full article.

Liveability Is ... Staying Alive

2012-01-12T16:15:00+11:00

David Nichols concludes his series on urban liveability with a visit to Baltimore.

Liveability is a lot about perspective. Melbourne may well be a terribly liveable city from some points of view; a glib reading might even suggest it’s a better place to be homeless than, say, Anchorage. The biggest problem with ‘liveability’ is, of course, the failure of imagination of the majority of people who it.

Of all the cities I visited in the USA, Baltimore is the one which most intrigued me; if the rest of the world outside the US fell into the sea (which, for a large percentage of Americans, may as well have already happened) there’d be worse places to live than Baltimore. But that of course is me, middle-class and riddled with assumptions about what a life I can expect to lead in the west should consist of. Baltimore would be amazingly liveable – if you had a good job, lived near the light rail for your commute, had a car to get out to other places, and knew where ‘not to go.’

Baltimore is, like a good many similar American cities, racially divided. I stayed in a neighbourhood whose inhabitants seemed simultaneously relieved and embarrassed that it remains a ‘white enclave’. That this is a city in rather acute crisis is evidenced by the many inner city streets (such as Broadway) on which block after block of elegant row houses stand, but maybe only one or two are occupied.

Row houses in Baltimore via Finin/WikiCommons

Randy Newman, on probably his least impressive 1970s album Little Criminals, sang a fairly humdrum song called ‘Baltimore’. He sang of a place where it was “hard … just to live”. Baltimoreans have probably long ago gotten over that well-meaning slur, although they’ll be dealing with The Wire for some time to come. There is a pervasive ambience of difficulty in Baltimore. Its surface is tough, barely scratchable. To live here, no doubt, you need the long view.

I did hear testimony – credible testimony – that many find compensation for the poverty and other tribulations of Baltimore in its community life. I also saw some of the humble delights of a city which has kept some of its institutions from long ago: for instance, I visited one of the most delightful, run down, deco cinemas I’ve seen since the 70s, still functioning as a single-screen, apparently fairly unrenovated cinema. It’s called the Senator, and it features remarkable painted foyer decorations, including an extraordinary image of a young man in medieval garb using a large film camera to record a stationary owl. It also boasts despondent teenage staff who – when we turned up to see J Edgar on time to find it had already started – had no special advice to offer other than we had better go in. In a high sheen nation full of obsequious courtesy and replicated, predictable experiences, this was refreshing. And I was lucky enough to visit The Book Thing, a huge (three room?) book redistribution centre. It distributes free second-hand books on Saturdays and Sundays for anyone who wants them, and plenty do.

Later, I chanced upon a downtown church book sale and picked up a remarkable tome from the early 20th century on the growing and marketing of celery, as well as a copy of George Bernard Shaw’s The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. I was blessed to have a guide keen to show me some of the city’s various delights, such as a vegan soul-food restaurant, the Goldstein’s bagel house in Pikeville; additionally, a museum of ‘outsider’ art. Which only goes to show the dangers of popping into a city for a few days with one’s curiosity intact and a still-not-quite-yet-maxed credit card.

Baltimore’s Peabody Library, courtesy Friends of the Johns Hopkins University Libraries

But there’s more to Baltimore than the doldrums. The city has held onto – even despite a little bit of pomo eye-rolling – many of its pop culture icons and sumptuous facilities from its industrial glory days. The opulent Peabody Library is by any measure one of the world’s finest.

What Baltimore actually suffers from the most is that it’s in the United States of America, a nation where out of sight is out of mind, and movement of capital is so heartless it’s hard to believe it’s controlled by actual humans. Piecemeal solutions to problems abound: the city’s crushing difficulties are, however, so extensive as to be insurmountable. Liveability? In Baltimore the emphasis is more on staying alive.

Liveability Is ... A Personal Trainer

2012-01-12T16:13:44+11:00

On the liveability trail, our intrepid scout David Nichols finds himself nestled amongst dogs, babies and bagels in the biggest smoke of all.

New York

New York is like some kind of enormous share house, with 2.3 degrees of separation and no way of getting away from other people. Step into Central Park and the elegant, arcane setting is riddled with exercisers, cyclists, infants with nannies or nanas, strollers, joggers, runners. Two women pushing baby carriages are urged by a third woman – their trainer, presumably paid for this bollocks – to stretch their arms and twirl their hands as they push their hapless toddlers down a small hill: “Take advantage!” she cries. “Take advantage!”

Joggers taking advantage of Central Park with a view to the Upper West Side, via Patrick Grubans/WikiCommons

There is no privacy in New York anyway, so New Yorkers have essentially persuaded themselves that privacy is a kink, overrated and unnecessary. They have loud and involved conversations loudly on the streets with each other in person or on mobile telephone devices. “I was essential to that company, I mean, empirically!” asserts one twentysomething dude on his cell.

Middle-class Australians reared on Woody Allen films no doubt have their own picture of the city (or at least of Manhattan), perhaps not realising that (1) Allen amplifies certain elements of the place for satirical affect and (2) Allen is of a generation soon to pass and (2[a]) a rarified class. But there are some elements of the city that do undoubtedly work and have done so for a century or so. The subways are quick, although they demand a little mental exertion (particularly the assumption that you know which line you’re on at all times, so that every other possible connection will be mentioned on the overhead boards when you alight at a station, but not the one you’re connecting from). Street food is often a joy, and I hold to that despite one particular morning’s disastrous hot, stale, cardboard pretzel. Thankfully bagels are everywhere.

We are often told that New York is not really America (this is, of course, a snob’s whimsy). Anyone who tries the standard coffee will know that, of course, it’s totally America: the coffee right across the USA invariably invokes the sensation of drinking a cup of hot water from a vessel that once contained coffee. That is, unless you can find a place that does espresso, in which case, you can pay top dollar for a teaspoon’s worth of actual coffee.

As we’ve found all week, however, the dog index is the one that seems most pertinent to judging New York’s liveability. Manhattanites love their dogs, and dogs big, small, huge and tiny can be found – always accompanied by doting human – on the streets at all times. They are often pampered like dollies, or perhaps – can this be true? almost certainly! – have been sculpted by a hairdresser to give them coquettish, Disneyesque faces. Where the humans – mostly – recognise they must abide one another, the dogs will occasionally have severe responses to each other. At such times, the owners don’t acknowledge each other. They just tug their errant charges away.

I have a bad feeling that there are many (new) urbanists who look at New York’s über-built-up apartment lifestyle as the ideal way to live. There are – quite clearly and undeniably – some who relish the place. Even I was settled in within just a couple of days: I was peeved just like a local when the Wholefoods near where my wife and I were staying in Upper East Side didn’t open its automatic doors with joy when I came by at 7:40am (it opens at 8, stays open ‘til 9).

But the point about a place like New York is obviously that there’s no place like New York. Nice place to visit. Surely no-one – aside from those 8 million self-selecting antpeople who already do – could possibly live there?

David Nichols' liveability series ends Monday with a look at Baltimore.

Liveability Is ... Charity Shops & Sm...

2012-01-12T16:10:39+11:00

David Nichols continues his series investigating what makes a city liveable with a visit to a town dubbed one of Britain’s ‘funkiest’, and a city built on reclaimed land in the Netherlands.

Hebden Bridge

Though not a city, Hebden Bridge – in England’s north (Yorkshire with a frisson of Lancashire) – nevertheless has many of those attributes often associated with successful cities. And yes, it does actually feature on some important lists: it was named in the British Airways magazine as the fourth ‘funkiest’ town in the world (Daylesford outside Melbourne was the funkiest). It also has, since the 70s, had the highest concentration of lesbians in Britain.

Naturally the combination of funk (translated, in some accounts, to ‘quirkiness’) and gayness has seen the town’s profile increase amongst yuppies espousing ‘tolerance’ (perhaps even of each other) and house prices rise accordingly.

It’s not only the price of real esate that rises. Imagine if, instead of dropping into the doldrums of a quasi-‘ghost town’, little Walhalla in Gippsland had thrived due to some obscure industrial specialisation (in Hebden Bridge it was knee-high clogs, apparently). The two places have the same kind of gully trap focus: a village in a valley, straddling a waterway. In Hebden Bridge’s case – just to emphasise its bridginess – there are two waterways: a sleepy canal riddled with picturesque boats and a wide but shallow stream. The houses seem to sit on top of each other like a mediaeval painting from before perspective was discovered.

Image courtesy of the author

The populace – well, you know what the funksters are like – are clearly shopaholics, and the village has much to recommend it in the realm of charity shops, antique shops, book shops and a boutique rather amusingly called ‘Home… Oh!’ which my guide – from nearby Accrington – pointed out to me, then apologised for. The place drips with Doing the Right Thing: within minutes of arrival I saw a woman wipe her dog’s arse with a plastic bag and go searching for a turd while two friends tried to help by pointing.

When in doubt about what kind of society you might be encountering in a town, look to their gig guide. The last few months in Hebden Bridge have been humming with the obscure hits of rockers whose rise to semi-prominence 30 years ago rarely saw them top the pops. These include Lloyd Cole, Julian Cope and the redoubtable Spizzenergi, whose ‘Where’s Captain Kirk?’ was described by DJ John Peel as the best Star Trek-related single on its release in 1979. They also have burlesque. Of course they have burlesque.

I scoff, but of course if you put a gun to my head and said I had to live in England, this is precisely the kind of place I’d want to live. Good coffee, charity shops and always the possibility Spizzenergi might play again.

Almere

If I may draw from folk wisdom (i.e. what I was told by my Dutch hosts), the two new Dutch lands created decades either side of World War II were the idea of a man named Lely. He died in the knowledge that the dyke-pumping-draining scheme that he designed in his younger years, and for which he had been scorned, would earn him eternal fame (except for the fishermen of the Zuider Zee).

Not only were the two large open areas in the former Zee (now a more or less freshwater lake) available for farming; they were also now available for the building of new towns. Hence, Almere – not yet 30 years old and an experiment in creating a city at once livable and affordable.

Image of row houses in Almere via dysturb.net/Flickr

In Australia there’s enough bollocks spoken about the redolent history of streetscapes just over a century old. Imagine then the Netherlands, where a town hall might be half a millennium old and passed by with nary a glance. It would seem that there are plenty of Dutch people who shun a place like Almere for being cultureless, in the ‘if those walls could speak they might tell tales of being sacked by the Spanish or burnt by the French’ sense, or at the very least, occupied by the Germans. The only tale Almerean walls can tell is that of Dutch ingenuity and the fine spirit of a progressive nation willing to look for new solutions to old problems. I’m told housing in Almere’s clean and distinctive suburbs can be a third cheaper than similar housing in older towns or cities in the enormous, patchwork agglomeration of the Netherlands and beyond.

Although the city is still being built, it’s already the eighth-largest in the Netherlands. There are dedicated busways at key points on the edge of suburbs. The suburbs themselves are unashamedly experimental, though all seem to adhere to the conventional regional pattern of attached two- (or three-) storey homes. Some experiments are more successful than others, but encouragingly, newer developments are less car-centric and adhere more closely to the classic template of the community hub.

The centre itself is a cross between Canberra’s Civic and Melbourne’s Federation Square: it’s a carless series of open-air malls with carparking underneath. An enormous lake at one edge of the centre reinforces the Canberra-ness of the affair, as does the ostentatious embrace of cultural consumption mixed in with the material acquisitiveness. But this is not to deride Almere. The city is proactive. Whereas early campaigners for the Federal Capital – 110 years ago, in Melbourne, a gaggle of distinguished and semi-professionals and experts – considered the possibility of pumping hot water throughout the new best-practice Australian city, Almere has actually done it. While it may at present be for many not much more than an affordable dormitory town for those Amsterdam commuters, it is nonetheless both of those things in spades.

There are so many Dutch people in such a small space – they can’t get away from each other. So, they create solutions. It makes perfect sense, but it’s something Australians aren’t used to seeing that often in urban planning, where there’s no true sense of a broader communality. A plus for effort, Almere.

And the coffee is good. And the poffertjes rockin’.