Feedback loops

The Australian federal government is asking for submissions to inform the development of a new National Cultural Policy. The last time the sector was consulted on cultural policy, the Morrison government initiated the process but the policy that eventuated, Revive, bore the imprimatur of the Albanese government. For writers, the most important outcome of that process was the establishment of Writing Australia, an overdue acknowledgement that the needs of the literary sector don't always align with those of the performing and visual arts. Policies designed to get audiences to attend in-person events, for example, aren't really relevant to most of us working in the literary sector, save those presenting in-person events. It took a mighty long time to launch Writing Australia, but it's already been a crucible for new initiatives that will actually help writers.

When submissions were invited in 2020, I drafted a lengthy submission under the aegis of the Sydney Review of Books and the Writing and Society Research Centre at WSU. This time the easiest way to make a submission is to write a 500w statement into an online form. It's also possible to upload a longer pdf. This makes contributing to the policy-making process simpler and probably more accessible, but it hardly looks like encouragement for individuals and organisations to attest to their experiences working within the Revive framework.

I've been reading the public consultation paper, and trying to suspend my profound cynicism about the Albanese Government's record on arts and culture. Tony Burke writes in his Minister's Message, "Revive recognised the essential work of Australian creatives, positioning arts workers as real workers who make substantial contributions to Australia’s economic and cultural life." How does this square firstly with the disinclination of Burke and his peers to increase meaningfully funding to Creative Australia? Real workers? What about real wage equity? The best way to recognise the value of cultural labour is to pay workers a fair wage. And of course this government's recognition of Australian creatives has hit hard limits on numerous occasions when those creatives have spoken up in defence of Palestine. Artistic freedom has unquestionably been eroded over the lifespan of Revive, but you wouldn't know it reading the consultation paper. There is something bewildering about reading a document that cheerfully insists we are living through a great Australian cultural resurgence when so many individuals and organisations have been seriously damaged in consequence of their positions on Gaza.

I wonder if the folks organising the consultation process know that they are likely to field a volley of submissions decrying the censorship of artists and organisations for their positions on Palestine, and the disastrous flow-on effects, and that is why the option to make a more succinct response is foregrounded.

I know that this is probably business as usual within government now, and I should get over it, but the note on how the Office for the Arts will use AI for submission management really pissed me off:

The department will utilise artificial intelligence (AI) tools for limited functions, including:

administrative processes ensuring all submissions are managed consistent with standing Australian Government naming and storage conventions

processes supporting the efficient handling of submissions, including creating summaries

the identification of common themes and issues.

I can live with using AI to adhere to naming and storage conventions - that seems like a sensible use of the tools. As for creating summaries and identifying common themes? Just read the fucking submissions, folks.

The convention with policy development processes is that you don't ask for money. Instead, you make good-hearted policy proposals that will allow the budget that does exist to be spent in a more effective manner. You're grateful for what you get. I dealt with this topic in a recent Griffith Review essay on literary funding in Australia; the core of this piece was that we all need to be far more ambitious in our calls for funding, rather than accepting austerity as inevitable. The essay is called Pay Writers Like Politicians because in the earliest days of the Literature Board, there was discussion around stipends for writers being equivalent to the salary of federal backbenchers. I wrote:

The audacity of this proposal made me gasp, as did the recklessness of the phrasing. I do believe that writers are as valuable to the flourishing of our democracy as politicians, but I’ve become so thoroughly assimilated to the paternalistic austerity of Australian cultural funding, to the abysmally low rates of pay that are now the standard for writers, that I wouldn’t dare to suggest they get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Now, our benchmarks are the poverty line and the minimum wage. Our expectations for government support of writers are modest. Be reasonable, we’re advised. Be realistic. 

Jane Sullivan wrote a generous wrap of this essay in her SMH column, and when I draft my submission to the National Cultural Policy Review, I intend to take my own advice, and advocate for more funding. At risk of overquoting myself:

Innovative cultural policy thinking and round after round of good-faith consultation will not get us out of the cul de sac of austerity. Rent-seeker is a term of derogation, but it also captures the objective guiding campaigns for better pay for writers and funding for the literary sector. Writers want to be able to pay their rent. Journals and publishers want to be able to pay their staff and their writers. Everyone is sick of talking about how broke Australian writers are, about how precarity is shaping the novels and poems and plays that are being written, about how abysmal pay keeps our literature white and middle class. If we’re resigned to a certain level of impoverishment for writers and arts workers being inevitable, this is where we will remain. 

The whole piece is behind the paywall at GR who, in addition to being lovely to work with, have always led the way in paying writers decent rates.

My intentions to write about the evolutions of the literary newsletter keep getting bumped; I will get there eventually. It's hard to get to thinking about what's in books newsletters or literary newsletters or whatever you want to call them without trying to wrestle with the apex predator, Substack. There's lots of good recent reporting on the money Substack makes from hosting Nazi newsletters. This year Substack launched a partnership with Polymarket, the prediction market that allows a person to bet on pretty much anything, including bombing raids. Their slogan: 'Journalism is better when it’s backed by live markets.' They've released a very detailed How-To on embedding Polymarket odds on your Substack. Every time I see a news story about disgusting Polymarket speculation on war and human suffering, I remember why I left Substack.

New writing from me: I wrote about Fourteen Ways of Looking by Erin Vincent for Guardian Australia. This is a small and intense book about grief; it was not an easy text for me either to read or to think about. Vincent experienced terrible, sudden loss as a young person; what's extraordinary about Fourteen Ways is not what happened to her, it's the book itself, and the free-wheeling experimental practice that made it.

I reviewed a very different novel about death and grieving, Circle of Wonders by Kathryn Heyman, also for Guardian Australia. This is a deathbed novel, one of those books that brings together family members who've long been estranged or separated, and forces them to deal with their shit. I'm too hard-hearted to enthuse about the slightly New Age-y process through which Heyman's characters come to terms with mortality, but I found so much to admire in the book, particularly the way the humanity of Heyman's brittle, angry characters emerges.

And one more review, this time of Kate Holden's new essay collection, The Ruin of Magic, which appeared in ABR. I love reading essay collections, and god knows it's hard for essay collections to get published in Australia; I've long been an admirer of Holden's work, but I did not love this book. The Ruin of Magic broaches urgent contemporary themes like exile, migration, belonging and the contested meanings of home.

Most of us, writes Holden, ‘have arrived from somewhere else’. The exigencies of the white Australian condition are the subject of the second essay of the collection, ‘Exile at Home’: ‘It is a century and a half since my ancestors first came to the continent, and it’s long enough that we have forgotten almost everything else.’ Holden describes an alienation born of not belonging on the sovereign lands of Indigenous people, yet having no tangible roots elsewhere. Not only does Holden experience her life in Australia as a kind of exile, her residence in the lush rainforest of the Illawarra also feels like a kind of exile from her chilly hometown of Melbourne; she summons thinkers of diasporic experience such as Edward Said and André Aciman to her cause. In our current epoch of utterly toxic migration rhetoric, I found Holden’s framing of her condition as ‘exile’ to be trite and unserious.

** I updated this post just after sending it out to my newsletter list. Although the invitation to make a 500w submission to the National Cultural Policy process is displayed very conspicuously, it turns out that it's also possible to submit a longer document in the form of a pdf. My mistake and I should have checked more closely before sending. I pulled snarky comments about the Morrison government taking feedback more seriously than Albanese and co, and also my speculation that the submissions would be capped for length to keep them from getting pummelled by angry, frustrated comments about artistic freedom.