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Looking Inwards Again: End of the Australia-Asia Literary Award

JA February 25

Many of you would have heard by now about the cancellation of the Australia-Asia Literary Award earlier this month. The ALAA was set up back in late 2007 by Alan Carpenter of the then Western Australian Labor government. At $110 000, it not only topped the Prime Minister’s Literary Award as the richest literary prize in the country, but also proclaimed that it would have a grand, international focus, allowing entries either set in Australia or Asia, or else written by their residents. In 2008, David Malouf was announced as the inaugural winner for The Complete Stories but, as it turns out, his will be the only name on the honour roll – the AALA was announced as being ‘under review’ for 2009, and then officially dumped as of 2010.

Culture and the Arts Minister John Day explained the decision like so:

Given the economic pressures, the AALA does not represent the most prudent use of funds and is unsustainable. The Premier’s Book Awards have a long and proud history and, with some additional support, can maintain the outward looking vision of the AALA. The AALA will be discontinued immediately so we can free up some of those funds for an improved Premier’s Book Awards.

Of course no one is going to dispute that channelling extra funds into the Premier’s Book Awards is a fundamentally good thing (the main Premier’s Prize will now stand at $40 000). Yet it seems to me that there’s a bit of artful footwork going on here. The website statement not-so-subtly tried to couch the announcement of the dumping within the grander rhetoric of the pumped up Premier’s Prize: ‘Literary review strengthens Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards’. On Saturday, the Weekend Australian’s Review wrote that the ALAA was ‘never really going to work the way it was set up’:

‘Good on the former WA government for trying to break through our ignorance of, and resistance to, writing from Asia, but it’s going to take more strategic planning and commitment to achieve that… The decision to “free up some funds for an improved Premier’s Book Awards” is sensible.

This may be true to some extent, yet I can’t help but feel disappointed that the ALAA has fallen with such a resounding thud. I remember reading Beth Driscoll’s essay ‘The Politics of Prizes’ (Vol 68/1) last year and feeling, as she said, that the ALAA had huge potential. Here was a prize that not only acknowledged that the literature of Australia could be viewed in tandem with that of Asia, but also recognised the influence of digital media. The fact that the ALAA was open to ‘works published electronically’ may have been in part a publicity stunt, but still, it opened doors for ebook authors and had the potential to further realise the legitimacy of online publishing. What’s more, it tried to take risks, and perhaps could have offered up something in contrast to the canon so regularly championed by prizes like the Miles Franklin. Even David Malouf commented upon winning: ‘There is certainly no other literary prize where Australia is the initiator which takes in Asia like this does, do it’s a very good thing that we’re looking outwards rather than inwards as we tend to do’.

Beth Driscoll hit the nail on the head in her follow-up Newreel piece (Vol 68/2) after it was announced that the prize was suspended:

It looks to me like the prize was a casualty of politics… I saw a palpable loss of enthusiasm between the launch of the prize by the Labor government and, some months later, the announcement of the winner by the newly elected Liberal government… I loved the regional sweep of the prize and the openness to different literary forms it advocated. However, it may be that the prize aimed too high and was undone, Greek tragedy-style, by hubris. State governments are rarely so outward looking, and when times are tough it’s perhaps natural for politicians to retreat to a simple, more parochial model of cultural promotion.


 

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