Literature,
small publishers
and the market in culture
Mark Davis looks at the problems and prospects for
independent publishing.
T here’s been a fundamental change over the past
few years in the way that Australian literary
culture is understood and debated. No longer is lit-
erature something that magically falls into the arms
of critics, teachers, the public. Instead, literary pro-
duction is now widely understood as a commercially
mediated process. Everyone, suddenly, seems to be
talking about the publishing industry and the role
it plays in producing literary and national culture.
Newspapers are full of it and blogs are alive with it.
Few have anything positive to say, to the point where
the publishing industry of late has become something
of a scandal.1
Yet the terms of recent debate about literary
publishing have so far been framed in ways that
tend to forestall meaningful analysis. Some com-
mentators are naïve about the primarily commercial
objectives of most publishing companies. Others use
the industry as a template on which to rehearse old
ideological debates: for or against free markets; for
or against cultural nationalism, protectionism and
the literary canon. Some still seem to conceive its
role in ways that recall the standard assumptions of
traditional literary studies, as if publishing should
offer a transparent conduit bringing works of cultural
value before the public. Others have descended to
personal attacks.
In what follows I want to think through some
possibilities for the reinvigoration of literary publish-
ing that I tentatively pointed towards at the end of a
previous essay, ‘The Decline of the Literary Paradigm
 overland 190, 2008
in Australian Publishing’.2 In so doing I want to focus
on the role of small publishers in the industry. While
many see small publishers as beacons of hope in an
industry dominated by global conglomerates, I want
to suggest, without idealising them, that they also
play a useful role in signalling the possibility of non-
market cultures and values that undercut prevailing
ideological assumptions about how free-market
societies function. At the same time, I want to raise
questions about how the relationship between liter-
ary culture and market culture has been understood
in the debate so far.
Defences of literature and hostility to market culture
have tended to go together in recent debate. An ex-
ample is the article by Rosemary Neill published in
the Australian in mid-2006 that assessed the effects
of Nielsen BookScan on literary publishing. In what
has been something of a trend in this debate thus
far, the article personalised the argument. ‘Is This
the Most Feared Man in Australian Literature?’ was
the cover headline, emblazoned across a full-page
photo of Nielsen’s Australian CEO, Michael Webster,
looking suitably sinister.3 Amidst its discussion of
Webster’s manner (“slightly refrigerated”) and its
championing of literary publishing, which I support
(disclosure: I provided several quotes for the article,
and know Neill and Webster professionally), there
was little real canvassing of the wider ideological
pressures driving the marketisation of culture, or
the commercial realities that affect the publishing
industry. Hardly surprising, perhaps, in a newspaper
feature article written for the Saturday morning
breakfast table rather than a sociology seminar. But
the way such articles reference certain ‘structures of
belief’ says much about how cultural production is
imagined and the limitations of the debates about it.
Such articles are arguably less about providing sub-
stantial analysis of the way the publishing industry
works than mobilising anxieties over the decline of
national cultures.
I know Neill well enough to vouch for her genu-
ine passion for literature and sincere concern about
the future of literary publishing. But such articles
are framed by the contexts in which they appear.
‘Cultural disaster stories’ that reference the demise of
some aspect of traditional culture highlight a stand-
ard paradox in the Murdoch press – and in radical
conservatism generally – where support for the purest
forms of laissez-faire sits alongside panics about the
decline of national cultural values, and campaigns
for their reimposition, without any recognition that
one might ultimately corrode the other. Other exam-
ples include the Australian’s long-running campaign
against ‘critical literacy’ in the teaching of English
literature and in support of a return to ‘reverence’
for literature,4 or the ‘literature summit’ organised
by Imre Salusinszky, the Australian’s state political
correspondent and chair of the Australia Council’s
Literature Board, to promote putting Australian
literature back on the curriculum. Whether or not
one is sympathetic to such causes, they tend to suffer
from a blindness to the corrosive effects that markets
have had on education. It’s the classic double-bind of
modern authoritarian populism from Thatcher on-
wards: the pursuit of freedom via markets versus the
paternalist enforcement of moral-cultural values.
The paradoxes of neoliberal understandings of
cultural value versus market value were illustrated
in a recent article by Salusinszky in the Australian
which strongly criticised my earlier argument that the
decline of literary publishing was an effect of neo-
liberal globalisation. According to Salusinszky, I had
“donned the garb of a defender of literary tradition”,
something he supposed was at odds with my Leftist
“cultural studies” affiliations. Matthew Arnold and
people like me, he says, made strange bedfellows. My
error, he argued, is that I blame “the free enterprise
society”, “economic rationalism” and “neoliberal-
ism” for the state in which literature finds itself, when
the real culprit is neo-Marxists and cultural studies
types who have forsaken their role as “indispensable
stewards of the literary and cultural heritage”.
Frankly, even though I am an exponent of the
dreaded cultural studies, I see no fundamental para-
dox in defending literature. I reject the opposition
(dated, clichéd, a relic from the culture wars) that
is the basis of Salusinszky’s thinking.5 But redux
culture wars polemic aside, Salusinszky has no
argument, no real explanation for the phenomenon
I outlined, merely a determination to defend Arnol-
dian cultural value and markets in the same breath,
and a fundamental paradox that he can’t overcome:
in a technocratic society where the market is the
measure of all things, there is little room for the
values he espouses.6
The same bias appeared in an article Salusinszky
published after the literature summit, in which he
again blames the decline of literary studies in schools
on those who would politicise literature. He is un-
able to acknowledge that the pressures that produce
overwrought, jargonistic curriculum ‘outcomes’ are
precisely the pressures of market society to itemise,
rank and tabulate educational processes, and turn the
humanities into a proto-science that has quantifiable
uses (‘generic skills’) in the market.7
Tom Ford, also writing in the Australian, displays
a similar faith in free markets. Nevertheless, he high-
lights the paradoxes of Salusinszky’s position. Ford
is critical of the Salusinszky-hosted literary round-
table, not least because it resulted in a communiqué
that argued for protectionism and the shielding of
Australian literary classics from the open market.8
As Ford points out, this immediately raises difficult
questions about who should or shouldn’t be included,
and harks back to a crudely nationalistic conception
of literature. Yet Ford’s proposed solution to the
decline of literary publishing is to drop the GST, a
simplistic idea that shows little curiosity about why
people do or don’t buy literary texts: book sales in
other categories haven’t been hurt by the GST. Cul-
tural nationalism and state support, Ford can’t admit,
have historically been indispensable to the success of
literary publishing.
But a more profound problem with his argument,
as Nathan Hollier has pointed out, is its fallacious
assumption that markets are value-neutral.9 Ford
seems to think that an economic ‘level playing
field’ will somehow cancel out all the cultural and
social assumptions that otherwise underpin literary
consumption and production – as if markets are
overland 190, 2008 
 natural and beyond politics, and not themselves a
social construction.
For Hollier, this embrace of market forces is of a
piece with Ford’s anti-canon, anti-nationalist bent,
all of which he derides. As he has argued elsewhere
(in a foreshadowing of the communiqué from
Salusinszky’s literary round-table, except from the
Left), Hollier is an advocate of protectionism: not
merely for Australian literary classics, but for literary
publishing per se. Tariffs, grants, protection from
imports, educational settings, even the reconfiguring
of Nielsen BookScan as a mechanism for targeted
state assistance, get a run: “The identification of a
drop in sales of poetry could as easily be seen as a
sign of the need for the government and publishers
to invest in the production and reading of poetry
than as a sign that poetry is rubbish and doesn’t
deserve to survive.”10
There’s some merit in these ideas – local literary
publishing can’t prosper without state support of
some kind – but taken together as a blanket defence
of protectionism, they are less convincing. One
problem with arguments for protectionism – and you
don’t need to be an apologist for economic reform
to see it – is that the recent success of the Australian
publishing industry refutes them. Fifty years ago
there were only three Australian publishing houses
producing more than ten titles per year: Angus &
Robertson, Melbourne University Press and F.W.
Cheshire. Among them A & R was so dominant that
it exercised virtual monopoly power. Most Australian
authors published overseas. British-based publish-
ers dominated a trade that was heavily protected in
their favour (especially in limiting the sales of rights)
and saw Australia in narrowly colonial and crudely
exploitative terms. Through the 1960s, 1970s and
1980s, the local industry grew partly on the back of
government support (the book bounty, educational
settings, sales tax exemption, grants), and some forms
of protection (from parallel imports, for example)
remain, but as most protections were stripped away
through the 1990s and into the 2000s, local publish-
ers thrived. Despite fears (which to some extent I
share) that globalisation and cultural homogenisa-
tion amount to the same thing, in the case of book
publishers the opposite has happened. The market
share of Australian-originated books has increased
to the point where they now hold 60 per cent of
the market (compared to less than 10 per cent of
music and 5 per cent of films). An industry that was
 overland 190, 2008
worth $2 million in 1960 was worth $1.353 billion
in 2003–04 (the most recently available figures);
it published 8602 new titles per year, and sold an
estimated 128.8 million books.11
Paradoxically, while deregulation has meant con-
solidation at the top end of the industry, it has also
benefited small publishers. Many have commented
on the proliferation and recent successes of small to
medium-sized independent publishers in Australia
such as Text, Scribe, Hardie Grant, Melbourne Uni-
versity Publishing and Black Inc. Most tend not to
realise the degree to which this success is also due
to deregulation, namely the 1991 Copyright Act and
the introduction of the thirty-day rule which gives
publishers thirty days from overseas publication of a
title to publish a local edition before it becomes legal
for anyone to import stock of the overseas edition.
Scribe and Hardie Grant, for example, built their
success on the back of rights buy-ins of US titles that
would previously have been impossible, and others
have copied the strategy. Similarly, Text exploited the
changes to consolidate its literary list on the back of
strong overseas rights sales. This deregulation has by
no means been the only factor in the recent success of
small publishers – digitisation and changing econo-
mies of scale, and improved access to distribution
networks are among other factors – but it remains
true that the renaissance in Australian independent
publishing can be dated more or less from the rule
change.
Straightforward protectionism, in other words,
isn’t the answer. To reintroduce straightforward
protectionism would breach international treaty
commitments and would almost certainly lead to
retaliatory action against Australian books.
But for all the differences between the positions
taken in the debate about the future of Australian
literary publishing, and the contradictions within
them, perhaps the most revealing thing is an as-
sumption that all share which bears crucially on
the very project of ‘rescuing’ literary publishing.
All fail to ask: “What is literature for?” Is it just a
museum? Is it a middlebrow pastime of the leisured
and self-consciously cultured? Is it simply a forma-
tion that academics defer to in order to sustain their
research careers? Is it the stuff of cultural nostalgia,
or the stuff of social reform? No-one (apart from
Salusinszky, who has a half a crack at it) seems able
or willing to say – or even to think it a question
worth asking. In the recent debate about literary
publishing, the term ‘literature’ has circulated as a in an accessible form that is relatively affordable to
given. Literature is valuable because it is literature; make and consume. Shared across time and space,
no more need be said. literary texts are indispensable to the construction
Nor has there been much room for ambivalence or of social memory and meaning and, complexly, to
complexity. The divisions, instead, are tribal, and tend a meta-narrative of meaning through which histori-
to name-calling and type-casting rather than analysis cal changes in belief systems, subjectivities, cultural
or problem-solving in good faith: you’re either for assumptions, social practices and systems of social
literature, or against it. The reason for this, I think, organisation can be tracked and extended. Texts tend
maps onto the culture at large. For many opponents to be designated as ‘literary’ in so far as they do this
of market-driven economic ‘reform’, literature now kind of work, and especially in so far as they do it
functions primarily as an oppositional term for self-consciously. Literature is a specific type of social
markets. Literature is all we stand for (culture, value, information that performs a set of tasks that, taken
belief) and markets are all we stand against. Just together, no other genre performs.
about all the recent debate about literary publish- Yet literature is not somehow separate from mar-
ing is a de facto debate about the role of markets in kets. Literature doesn’t simply come into the world.
society. It rarely moves beyond regurgitating in crude It is produced and managed as a cultural formation
forms the Arnoldian programmatic of literature as by a range of institutions and their affiliate figures
a binding social corrective against godlessness and – publishers, editors, reviewers, academic critics
markets. But, as the above points about protection- – who are paid to think about it. The logic of genre,
ism suggest, the opposition between literature and or the logic of taste and the accumulation of cultural
markets can sometimes be misleading. capital, as Pierre Bourdieu has demonstrated, aren’t
Most contributions to the debate also share a cul- so easily disentangled from the logic of markets as
tural nostalgia. Revisiting the policies and practices some assume, which isn’t to suggest that there is a
of the past (protectionism, school settings, cultural simple deterministic relationship between the two.12
nationalism) and abandoning the economic, business Publishing, in short, has always been a commercial
and educational practices of the present (the GST, business.
quantitative sales measuring, ‘critical theory’) will, To point to this complicity between literary pro-
it is hoped, reanimate the past itself. There has been duction and markets isn’t necessarily to suggest that
little serious thinking about how literary publishing markets determine everything. Nor is it to believe
might be affected by changes in reading practices, that they pretend to some kind of perfect democracy
in the role of the education system and the expecta- that unproblematically reflects what people want
tions of students and parents, in the business and – the charge that Hollier has made against me for
economic contexts in which publishers operate, or daring to suggest that in the present era of neoliberal
in the location and status of literature as a social and globalisation, multinationals publish less literature
cultural practice. because they look to markets more than to a sense of
cultural obligation and (dwindling) subsidies.13 It is,
Literature is a form that can be defended without rather, an invitation to nuance and complexity that
needing to have recourse to cultural nationalism, goes beyond the tribalism and ad hominem attacks
high-culture snobbishness and class fetishism, or the that have characterised the debate thus far.
idea that literature is some kind of secular religion. But just because the arts and markets are hope-
Literary texts offer a unique place to experiment lessly entangled doesn’t mean that the arts can’t also
with and take pleasure in linguistic form, and to provide a space for the critique of markets. This is
raise new ideas and set agendas with a subtlety and perhaps especially the case as traditional hierarchies
power that eludes other media and other genres of of symbolic capital have begun to collapse and lit-
written text. Literature can do things that no other erature finds itself an outlier form. Often the sorts
medium or genre can – not cinema, not the web, not of things that literature does best don’t have much
television, not onscreen gaming – because it offers the market value and, as literary production becomes
opportunity to play out (often very) complex ideas, ever more clearly a volunteer effort, the motivations
metaphors, evocations of belief, states of being, nar- that drive it tend not to include the accumulation of
ratives of events, people, places and selves, at length, financial capital (though most don’t say ‘no’ to a little

overland 190, 2008 

 cultural capital when they can get it). For example,
as a report recently written by Kate Freeth for the
Small Press Underground Networking Community
(SPUNC) shows, many of the forty-six small and
independent publishers she surveyed don’t expect to
make a profit. They are motivated, rather, by social
and cultural values that are pursued irrespective of
their ultimate market worth. The wilful altruism
of small publishers cuts across the belief, central to
economic libertarianism, that people are motivated
primarily by rational self-interest. As Ian Syson of
Vulgar Press has said: “Whenever anyone asks me
if they should set up a publisher, I tell them not to,
but to do it anyway. It’s a form of madness, but it’s
a lovely form of madness.”14
Small publishers, in other words, provide a useful
example of how positions for critique and the articu-
lation of non-market values and motivations remain
possible even from within a commercial context.
Literature might be a hopelessly market-bound form,
but it isn’t necessarily just a market-bound form. It’s
perhaps no accident that small publishers such as
Text, Scribe, Black Inc. and Melbourne University
Publishing have carved out a niche for themselves
publishing self-consciously serious books with social
agendas at a time when major publishers have be-
come increasingly formulaic. Similarly, in Australia,
independent booksellers have increased market share
when conventional wisdom is that chains and dis-
count department stores are preferred. The boom in
independent publishing and bookselling, I suspect,
is itself evidence of a desire for meaning on the parts
of publishers and readers that isn’t canvassed in the
market-centric publishing strategies of the majors.
But if literary publishing is worth defending, then
what might an enlightened, practical set of policies
designed to support it look like? After all, if there’s
actually no such thing as a truly free market, inter-
vention and a policy framework of some sort will be
required. Rather than blanket protectionism, what’s
needed are strategic, closely targeted policies with
clearly articulated objectives. One reason for the
success of the 1991 amendments to the Copyright
Act is that they fostered enterprise rather than sim-
ply rewarding business for maintaining the status
quo. A carrot-and-stick arrangement, the thirty-day
rule provided protection (exclusive local rights on
overseas titles) for those willing to take commercial
risks (buying rights and publishing early). Perhaps
similar risk-taking can be encouraged by a system
 overland 190, 2008
that would, say, underwrite grants for a given author
should a publisher be willing to commit to them
over three or more books. Text publisher Michael
Heyward recently suggested a fund to train editors
to work in the area of finding and developing new
writers.15 The editors are already being trained (by
courses such as the one I teach in), but why not fund
them to work with new writers in conjunction with
experienced mentors, in programs that could be
sponsored either by government or industry? Such a
program could extend on the biennial Elite Editorial
Mentorship Program presently run by the Australian
Publishers Association (APA) in conjunction with the
Literature Board of the Australia Council.
The Vogel Prize has been one of the great suc-
cess stories of Australian literary publishing. Why
not emulate it with an award for young editors or
publishers, with a prize in the form of a paid fellow-
ship with an established publisher (that is, a locally
focused version of the Beatrice Davis scholarship
which sends an experienced author to New York each
year)? The annual National Young Writers’ Festival
in Newcastle, NSW has been a huge success since it
was inaugurated in the late 1990s, not least because
it is developing new audiences as well as new writers.
Would it be possible to extend its model, to turn some
of its energies into more concrete outcomes?
The formation of the Australia Council by the
Whitlam government in 1973 helped spark a boom
in Australian literary writing, but its funding has
recently stagnated. If literary publishing is to prosper,
then specialised agencies will almost certainly be a
primary vehicle for success. The Australia Council
should be funded accordingly. Its approach might
be extended, too, to supplement the existing grants
model with new models for funding and development
that work closely with established and emerging
publishers, as well as creative writing and publishing
courses, with the Council acting in a brokerage role
to build more partnerships similar to the above-
mentioned mentorship program run in conjunction
with the APA.
Much of the energy for renewal will come from
– is coming from – the grass roots. The SPUNC
report itself shows the diversity and energy of small
publishers. It also shows they face common prob-
lems, especially to do with marketing and the cost
of distribution. The report recommends that presses
collaborate to solve their marketing problems by
producing shared catalogues, and also help address
 All fail to ask: “What is literature for?” Is it just a museum? Is it a
middlebrow pastime of the leisured and self-consciously cultured? Is it
simply a formation that academics defer to in order to sustain their research
careers? Is it the stuff of cultural nostalgia, or the stuff of social reform?
distribution problems through shared e-commerce
sites. The formation of SPUNC as a representa-
tive body is itself a move towards addressing small
publishers’ difficulties (most members don’t feel
their needs are met by the APA), but the initiatives
of small publishers deserve further support because
of the special role they play in literary publishing.
Although large publishers continue to publish liter-
ary novels, as the SPUNC report shows, when the
large publishers shed risk it’s small publishers who
increasingly do the work of discovering and nurtur-
ing new authors, who ensure that local content has a
market presence, and who are largely responsible for
the survival of the short story and poetry as literary
forms.16 As one report respondent said, “Small and
independent presses are crucial to the diverse life of
any country’s culture.”17
They deserve support too, because the people
who found them and volunteer to work in them will,
as well as those they publish, become the authors,
editors and publishers of the future. This was the
great legacy of the small press boom of the 1970s,
and will almost certainly be again.18 Again, rather
than blanket protection, assistance could target
those who take risks. Perhaps small publishers of
promise could be given preference in tendering to
publish some of the myriad one-off government and
semi-government publications that appear each year.
Special attention, in the form of a program of direct
or indirect assistance, could go to those specialising
in forms neglected by larger publishers. Those that
rely on volunteer staff could be given tax breaks on
the same basis as larger companies get concessions
for staff training.
But none of these ideas directly addresses an
ongoing problem that is unlikely to go away, which
is that literature is no longer a pre-eminent cultural
form. Obviously it can still produce bestsellers and
even ‘stars’ – Zadie Smith, Peter Carey, Ian McEwan,
Cormac McCarthy – but it no longer has the cultural
pre-eminence that it once did, and, for the reasons
that I outlined in my earlier essay, is unlikely to re-
gain it. Not only have the economic circumstances
changed (which, as that essay concluded, isn’t to
suggest that such changes are inevitable and can’t
be reversed), but so have a range of social contexts
that fostered literary production.
The idea that literature is a secular religion was
key to its emergence as a major form in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, but is unlikely to resonate
again, any more than the idea that literature should
be promoted for nationalist reasons. The Australia-
nisation of school curriculums through the 1950s
provided a vital springboard for literary production
that, as Anne Galligan has said, “laid the crucial
groundwork for the later nationalist stirrings of the
1960s, the creative output of the 1970s, and the
professionalism of the 1980s, so often highlighted
in surveys of Australian literary and publishing
culture”, but it is unlikely to be repeated.19 The
Australiana boom of the 1960s was pivotal to the
financial growth of the local industry even as it helped
underwrite cultural and literary nationalism. The
Australian film resurgence of the 1970s and 1980s
provided a pop-culture impetus for the parallel boom
in ‘Ozlit’, and as Jenny Lee has said, it’s unlikely that
one would have happened without the other.20
Since then, parents’ and students’ expectations of
the education system have changed. In the current
technocratic environment, more want concrete job
skills rather than the generalised vocational skills
that a literary degree brings. Literature now competes
with a range of other media, and as the tastes of
cultural consumers have become more horizontally
stratified, so the class system that naturalised its sta-
tus as a ‘superior’ form has to some extent broken
down. Everywhere it is surveyed, literary reading is
in decline.
One possibility often floated for the renaissance of
literary publishing is school settings. I’m enough of a
traditionalist to believe that the teaching of Austral-
ian literature should be encouraged in schools and
overland 190, 2008 
 universities, but it’s doubtful that they’re the literary
panacea that some seem to imagine. Many of us
who were force-fed My Brother Jack in Year Eleven
steered clear of Australian literature for the next dec-
ade or so. There appears to be little ripple effect from
educational settings, even for a given author.21 School
settings can keep some texts in print and function as
a de facto state subsidy, in that those titles that are
set and sell strongly because of it subsidise those that
aren’t. But there’s no evidence that they’ll lead to a
widespread resurgence of literary reading.
The problem is one of building readerships and
creating markets, and a fundamental factor is a lack
of institutional support. Governments, universities,
large publishing houses – all have to some extent
abandoned the programmatic backing for literature
that’s always been necessary to its survival. And it’s
for this reason that literary publishing is slipping out
of the hands of profit-makers and into the hands of
enthusiasts.
Literature, to gain readers, undoubtedly needs to
resonate and be relevant. The best-selling local liter-
ary authors of the past few years – Kate Grenville,
Richard Flanagan – have produced books that do
that. But literary texts need to gain institutional
purchase as well, and a reason for being taught, be-
ing funded, being published, that goes beyond mere
cultural obligation. This again will no doubt involve
state support, not merely by sticking a few old books
on reading lists and hoping that state-subsidised
literary nationalism will work its magic once again.
Rather, literature needs a new sense of its social role
and official backing for that role. Is it too optimistic
to suggest this as a not so remote possibility in an
era of ‘new humanisms’ where people are looking for
alternatives to and critiques of the ideas and language
of market culture, where there is a desire for meaning
and content that reaches beyond the glib, or where
histories and their narratives increasingly clash and
search for ‘working through’ and resolution, or
where the idea of ‘craft’ (to take Richard Sennett’s
meaning of the term, as a set of practices that disturb
the logic of the new capitalism) has growing cultural
resonance?22
Nostalgia for past institutional structures won’t
work any more than the uncritical embrace of mar-
kets. The task, rather, is to critique the idea that mar-
kets are the measure of all things. As I’ve suggested
above, the very existence of small and independent
publishers itself undercuts the presumptions of free-
10 overland 190, 2008
market economic ideology. Such publishers represent
precisely the sort of selflessness and civic purpose
that aren’t explained by those who see rational self-
interest as the fundamental human motivation. Nor
can they be dismissed as ‘rent seekers’ who want to
live off state subsidies as an alternative to chasing
profits (most, according to the SPUNC survey, don’t
even bother to seek subsidies).
In saying this I don’t mean to romanticise in-
dependent publishers, nor to suggest that they are
somehow non-market – any independent who says
they don’t want to make money is probably being
less than honest – nor to imply all over again that
meaningful cultural production and markets are in
eternal opposition to each other. What I do mean to
say is that the very existence of independent publish-
ing shows that there’s more to culture than markets
can anticipate.
Obviously the stakes in all this rise far above the
publishing industry. They bear on the broader ques-
tion of the relationship between markets and cultural
values per se. But if what’s at issue is the necessity of
human agency and intervention in market logic, then
we face some thorny questions. Who should decide
what such culture is? How should it be funded?
There’s no real sign that any of these questions
will be answered by those who occupy the largely
balkanised positions sketched out above. Nor do
any current ideological models, Left or Right, have
the potential to do so. All, in their own way, over-
simplify and seek to dodge difficult issues about the
relationship between markets and culture. But still,
collectively, as a society and a culture, if the pursuit
of non-market values is important, we do have to
answer these questions.
1. See Brian Castro, ‘Parleying Apocalypse: The Death of
the Novel and the Decline of Contempt’, public lecture,
University of Melbourne, 9 May 2005; Tom Ford, ‘Back
to Literature’s Bad Old Days’, Australian, 29 August
2007. Available: <www.theaustralian.news.com.au/sto-
ry/0,25197,22323708-13881,00.html>, viewed 12 August
2007; Nathan Hollier, ‘Public Funding Panic’, LeftWrites
blog, 5 September 2007, <www.leftwrites.net/2007/09/05/
public-funding-panic/#more-1107>, viewed 5 October
2007; Malcolm Knox, ‘The Ex-Factor’, The Monthly 54,
2005; James Ley, ‘The Tyranny of the Literal’, Austral-
ian Book Review 270, 2005, pp. 32–8; Rosemary Neill,
‘Who Is Killing the Great Books of Australia?’ Australian,
Review, 18 March 2006, pp. 4–6; Rosemary Neill, ‘The
Bibliofiles’, Australian, Review, 22–23 July 2006, pp. 4–5;
Imre Salusinszky, ‘Left for Dead Over Lit Crit’, Weekend
Australian, Review, 13 January 2007, p. 36; Imre Salusin-
szky, ‘Literature as Porridge’, Weekend Australian, Review,
 1 September 2007, p. 40.
2. Mark Davis, ‘The Decline of the Literary Paradigm in
Australian Publishing’, Heat 12 (new series), 2006, pp.
91–108. Also available at: <eprints.infodiv.unimelb.edu.
au/archive/00003634/>. See also: ‘The Decline of the
Literary Paradigm in Australian Publishing’ (updated and
revised), David Carter and Anne Galligan (eds), Making
Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing, University of
Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2007, pp. 116–31.
3. Rosemary Neill, ‘The Bibliofiles’, Australian, Review,
22–23 July 2006, pp. 4–5.
4. See Kevin Donnelly, ‘It’s Wrong if You Can’t Write’,
Australian, Inquirer, 27 May 2006, p. 26; Kevin Donnelly,
‘Weird and Wacky But Not Terribly Scientific’, Australian,
15 May 2006, p. 14; Kevin Donnelly, ‘Go Back to Basics,
and Put Literacy Teaching on the Same Page’, Australian,
Inquirer, 13 May 2006, p. 29; ‘Giving Out Bad Marx’,
Australian, Leader, 22 April 2006, p. 16; Kevin Donnelly,
‘The Muffled Canon’, Australian, Inquirer, 22 April 2006,
p. 20; Giles Auty, ‘Top Marx for our Educators’, Austral-
ian, 21 April 2006, p. 14; ‘The Bard Unmoored’, Austral-
ian, Leader, 17 April 2006, p. 7; Allan Luke, ‘Knowledge,
Not Just the Bottom Line’, Australian, Higher Education,
29 March 2006, p. 26; Kevin Donnelly, ‘Critical Literacy
is on a Dumb Trajectory’, Australian, 23 March 2006,
p. 12; ‘Back of the Class’, Australian, Leader, 23 March
2006, p. 13; Kevin Donnelly, ‘Unsound Approach Won’t
Take Us Far’, Australian, Inquirer, 19 November 2005, p.
26; Bernard Lane, ‘ATSIC Website in Exam “An Insult”’,
Australian, 21 October 2005, p. 1; Kevin Donnelly,
‘Literacy Lagging Behind’, Australian, 21 October 2005,
p. 14; Kevin Donnelly, ‘Exploding the Literary Canon’,
Australian, Inquirer, 8 October 2005, p. 23; Michael
McKenna, ‘Principal Defends Top Results from Pop Syl-
labus’, Australian, 27 September 2005, p. 6; ‘The English
Patient’, Australian, Leader, 15 September 2005, p. 11;
‘Educational Idiocy’, Australian, Leader, 27 August 2005,
p. 16; Kevin Donnelly, ‘Ideologues at School’, Australian,
19 August 2005, p. 16; Luke Slattery, ‘Nelson Joins Battle
for Plain Language’, Australian, 6 August 2005, p. 5; Luke
Slattery, ‘“Mumbo Jumbo” Teaching to End’, Australian,
4 August 2005, p. 1; Luke Slattery, ‘Put Literacy Before
“Radical” Vanity’, Australian, Inquirer, 30 July 2005, p.
32; Cath Hart, ‘Derided Theory a Headline Act’, Austral-
ian, 28 July 2005, p. 7; Luke Slattery and Paige Taylor,
‘Theory’s Influence in Schools Denied’, Australian, 26
July 2005, p. 3; Kevin Donnelly, ‘Teach the Simple Joys
of Reading’, Australian, 26 July 2005, p.13; Luke Slattery
and Paige Taylor, ‘Minister Plays Down Postmodernist
Role in Schools’, Australian, 26 July 2005, p. 4; ‘Schools
Should Foster the Love of Reading’ Australian, Leader,
25 July 2005, p. 6; Luke Slattery and Sid Maher, ‘States
Deconstruct Postmodern Trend’, Australian, 25 July 2005,
p. 3; Luke Slattery and Tom Richardson, ‘This Little Pig
Goes Post Modernist’, Australian, 23 July 2005, p. 1;
Luke Slattery, ‘Fading Theory Has No Place in Schools’,
Australian, 23 July 2005, p. 10; Luke Slattery, ‘Words
Without Meaning’, Australian, Inquirer, 23 July 2005, p.
31; ‘When Teaching Turns into Indoctrination’, Australian,
Leader, 10 February 2005, p. 10; Anne McIlroy, ‘Who’s for
Shakespeare?’, Australian, 10 February 2005, p. 11; Keith
Donnelly, ‘Cannon Fodder of the Culture Wars’, Austral-
ian, 9 February 2005, p. 13.
5. And frankly, in seventeen years as a student and staff mem-
ber in the department he derides, nor have I found much
evidence among the staff of the attitudes he describes, even
if few would see their role as being simply curatorial.
6. Imre Salusinszky, ‘Left for Dead Over Lit Crit’, Weekend
Australian, Review, 13 January 2007, p. 36.
7. Imre Salusinszky, ‘Literature as Porridge’, Weekend Aus-
tralian, Review, 1 September 2007, p. 40.
8. Tom Ford, ‘Back to Literature’s Bad Old Days’, Australian,
29 August 2007. Available: <www.theaustralian.news.com.
au/story/0,25197,22323708-13881,00.html>, viewed 12
August 2007.
9. Nathan Hollier, ‘Public Funding Panic’, LeftWrites blog, 5
September 2007, <www.leftwrites.net/2007/09/05/public-
funding-panic/#more-1107>, viewed 5 October 2007.
10. Nathan Hollier, ‘Diagnosing the Death of Literature’, Wet
Ink 6, 2007, pp. 11–15.
11. Anne Galligan, ‘The Culture of the Publishing House:
Structure and Strategies in the Australian Publishing In-
dustry’, in David Carter and Anne Galligan (eds), Making
Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing, University
of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2007, pp. 41–2; Australian
Bureau of Statistics, ‘Book Publishers, 2003–04’, Cat. no.
1363.0, Canberra, 2004, pp. 8, 7, 17.
12. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste, Harvard University Press, Boston,
1984 [1979]; Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Pro-
duction, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1993.
13. Suffice to say that in order to make his case, Hollier mis-
represents mine. The fundamental problem with his argu-
ment is that he thinks that I think markets are natural and
beyond social forces, having ignored (for reasons I don’t
understand) explicit and implicit arguments to the contrary
throughout the article, which understands the development
of markets as a ‘political process’. See Nathan Hollier,
‘Diagnosing the Death of Literature’, Wet Ink 6, 2007, pp.
11–15.
14. Kate Freeth, A Lovely Kind of Madness: Small and
Independent Publishing in Australia, SPUNC, Melbourne,
2007, p. 2.
15. Michael Heyward, ‘Word Wise, Book Poor’, Age, 8
September 2007, <www.theage.com.au/news/books/word-
wise-book-poor/2007/09/06/1188783410222.html>,
viewed 12 September 2007.
16. Freeth, p. 15.
17. Ibid., p. 16.
18. ������������������������
Galligan, pp. 41, 34–50.
19. ���������������������
Ibid., pp. 37, 34–50.
20. ����������������������
Private communication.
21. This statement is based on a preliminary assessment of
Penguin sales figures between 1965 and 1995, as part of an
ARC-funded research project, ‘Australian literary publish-
ing and its economies, 1965–1995’, being conducted by
John Arnold, David Carter, Ivor Indyk, Louise Poland,
Jessica Raschke, Bruce Sims and myself. Research by Jenny
Lee into university literature settings since the 1940s sug-
gests similar (private communication).
22. Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism, Yale
University Press, New Haven, 2006, p. 26.
Mark Davis is a writer of popular non-fiction. He is
the author of Gangland: Cultural Elites and the New
Generationalism. Since 2004 he has taught at the
University of Melbourne.
overland 190, 2008 11