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A way with words

June 01

This article - based on his closing speech at the Sydney Writers' Festival - by Richard Flanagan is just fantastic. Here's a taste of it.

'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.'


 

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Comments

by Paul
01 Jun 09 at 18:25

That is very inspiring. I wonder how many of those 15,000 people are writers?

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by parlance
03 Jun 09 at 11:25

I grew up in a time when writing was dominated by British publishing - yep, I'm that old - and it's been wonderful to see the growth of our own industry.

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