By the end of 1974, some $2,520,000 had been allocated in grants to writers and subsidies to publishers by the new Literature Board of the Australian Council for the Arts in its first two years of operation. This injection of finance can be seen as part of the Labor Government’s ‘new nationalism’, supporting Australian creative products. Paradoxically, the dominant impulse in the new writing in Australia now is an internationalist one. The nationalist period, the consciously ‘write Australian’ period with its preoccupation with defining the nature of ‘Australian life’, belongs to a past era; it is preserved in some of the literary prizes, the Miles Franklin award for a novel ‘which necessarily presents Australian life in any of its phases’, and the award established in 1974 by the Melbourne Age for a work that ‘best expresses the Australian identity.’ But the younger writers are concerned with being writers, with creating verbal artefacts, with relating to other writers, in California and Argentina and Europe and New York and Asia.

The contradictions lie deeper however than this opposition of a nationalist political platform and an internationalist writing movement. The control of book publishing and distributing in Australia is international—despite the Labor party’s nationalism; and the internationalist Australian writers are not getting adequate exposure or distribution either in Australia or internationally.