AustLit
Sandra Phillips is a University of Queensland graduate and has taught at the University of Technology Sydney, the Sydney University Koori Centre and Tranby Aboriginal College. In Sydney she co-edited Racism, Representation and Photography (1994). She worked as an editor for UQP before moving to Australia Council as a program manager.
Biography from The Writer's Press, 1998.
Associate Professor Sandra Phillips earned her PhD in literary studies from QUT in 2012, and worked as a lecturer with the University of the Sunshine Coast and with QUT. In 2019, she was appointed Associate Dean for Indigenous Engagement in the Humanities and Social Sciences Faculty at The University of Queensland.
[Interviewed by Louise Poland, May 1997]
SANDRA PHILLIPS was interviewed by researcher Louise Poland in Melbourne at The Australian Reconciliation Convention in May of 1997. It was a moment of reflection for Sandra after two years with UQP and, as it turned out, just one month before she moved into arts administration with the Australia Council in Sydney. Sandra is now living with her young family in Singapore.
Some of the titles Sandra worked on at UQP were: Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington, Warrigal's Way by Warrigal Anderson, Our Land Is Our Life edited by Galarrwuy Yunupingu, Dreaming in Urban Areas by Lisa Bellear, Talking About Celia - Community and Family Memories of Celia Smith by Jeanie Bell, Plains of Promise by Alexis Wright, and Steam Pigs by Melissa Lucashenko.
Sandra, what makes Aboriginal publishing distinctive?
In publishing you make a lot of value judgments about content, material, style, process, outcome, targets. With Aboriginal publishing, you’re making all those value judgments on appropriate criteria, which include culturally appropriate criteria, as well as industry expectations. Aboriginal people need to be centrally involved in that publishing process, and non-Indigenous people involved in the publishing of Indigenous work also need to be sensitised to the relevant issues.
Sandra, you worked at Magabala prior to UQP. What are the major differences in what appear, from the outside, to be quite different publishing houses?
With a house like UQP which is not small and not big, a medium-size press, there are departments which can sometimes fall into a bit of bureaucratic rigidity. From my experience of working at those two quite different presses, probably the biggest thing that comes up is deadlines — the rigidity of the overall publishing program and schedule. At UQP the Indigenous titles are scheduled alongside every other title with the same time frames attached to them. My Aboriginal authors are usually working on their first titles. It’s very necessary to establish that relationship of trust and dialogue in the development of the creative work for publication. A small Indigenous press could shape its processes to suit those needs better. I think at UQP, in the editorial department, there is a very good understanding about those processes because the Press would have to be the most prolific publisher of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers. Magabala Books, IAD Press and Aboriginal Studies Press produce many collaborative works with non-Indigenous writers holding the pen. These oral stories are recorded, transcribed, edited and then published. Usually linguists or anthropologists shape the texts. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to do the writing, the initiation of the concept, the execution, the refinement, the development, and then to take their books through the whole maze of the publishing process, that’s quite different. UQP makes this challenge a priority.
Who shapes the list for the Black Writers’ Series at UQP?
The David Unaipon Award is UQP’s annual award for unpublished Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers. Between 20 and 30 manuscripts are entered each year. This award has been going since 1989, so we’ve had more than 160 manuscripts entered since then. That’s 160 manuscripts by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people that may never have seen the inside of a publishing house otherwise. That channel provides the primary source of manuscripts for appraisal. Of course the award itself is judged externally by three Aboriginal judges and their decision stands whatever their choice of winner or commended entries. UQP guarantees publication to the winner with possible publication to the highly commendeds. The Press has a chance to look at all the entered manuscripts and offer publication to some additional works.
That’s something you decide then?
In-house editors are pivotal to that whole process of manuscript appraisal, and especially for manuscripts written by Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander authors.
If we can look at Aboriginal publishing over the last fifteen years, what do you think are some of the most important steps and maybe some of the most contentious ones?
Obviously the thing that comes to mind is the success of Sally Morgan’s My Place. The schools listing of My Place was a significant factor in the sales success of that book and I think it proved for the wider non-Indigenous community a means of accessing a story from Indigenous Australia. I think it was a palatable story from an Indigenous Australian person. The palatability led to schools listing it, eventually, and led to people saying ‘Ah, have you read My Place?’ or ‘Oh, I’ll buy this for my grandmother’ ... The grandmothers can read it, the grandfathers can read it. That’s fairly significant. It shows a lot about style, reception, the factors that lead to commercial success for some titles.
Also I couldn’t go past mentioning some of the fine writers UQP has published, including Doris Pilkington’s fiction, Alexis Wright’s recent novel Plains of Promise, Melissa Lucashenko’s fiction, Jeanie Bell’s unique genre-blending history styles and voices of community and family, Lisa Bellear’s debut poetry collection, Mabel Edmund’s memoir ... the list goes on in terms of who has been achieving publication in the last fifteen years.
"Some of the titles Sandra worked on at UQP were: Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington, Warrigal’s Way by Warrigal Anderson, Our Land Is Our Life edited by Galarrwuy Yunupingu, Dreaming in Urban Areas by Lisa Bellear, Talking About Celia — Community and Family Memories of Celia Smith by Jeanie Bell, Plains of Promise by Alexis Wright, and Steam Pigs by Melissa Lucashenko."
'Some of the titles Sandra worked on at UQP were: Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington, Warrigal’s Way by Warrigal Anderson, Our Land Is Our Life edited by Galarrwuy Yunupingu, Dreaming in Urban Areas by Lisa Bellear, Talking About Celia — Community and Family Memories of Celia Smith by Jeanie Bell, Plains of Promise by Alexis Wright, and Steam Pigs by Melissa Lucashenko.'
Would it be fair to say that women’s autobiography has been an important part of distinctive Aboriginal writing?
I don’t know that you have to make the distinction between women’s and men’s autobiography. It was more about getting people to understand the Aboriginal experience of living in Australia. People have used their own lives and the telling of their lives as a vehicle for their own expression and healing and validation. Publication makes it available to a wider understanding. In the Australian Women’s Book Review I wrote that autobiography is a national obsession, biography is a national obsession, and I would suggest that it’s connected with our continuing definition of who we are as peoples. I think you can get very good biography, very good autobiography. And you can read text that doesn’t do much for you. It’s really important to have the full range of biographical telling from the Indigenous community, as there are different kinds of people representing our communities. Autobiography, those sorts of tellings have dominated, but there’s a whole range of ways for our people to explore the print media.
What do you think are the other key areas of publishing?
The other key area of writing is poetry. From the David Unaipon Award it is quite clear that poetry entries far outweigh anything else. Either it is the form most easily integrated into daily life, or it's connected with the song cycle of telling of things. There is poetry that achieves a lot for the individual writer and there is poetry that can transcend individual impact and make a difference to the readers or the listeners of that poetry. People get very emotional about what is good poetry, what is bad poetry — what is good writing, what is bad writing. That will always happen. It’s either something that touches you or it doesn’t.
Reading is obviously an intellectual activity but it is also about an emotional or philosophical engagement with what you are reading. So if you are responding to that on a number of different levels, then the work must be good. If you are not responding, it doesn’t necessarily mean the work isn’t good. I would recommend to non-Indigenous readers that they actually look at the impact that writing is having on them. This is especially relevant for reading across cultures. For example, if you feel too challenged by the contents, you may say the writer forgot that his or her task was to tell a story and not to beat the reader about the head; if you feel sympathetic, you may be afraid to criticise the work; if you feel angry, you may condemn the writing as entirely incompetent. If readers can allow for their emotional responses within such a rational appraisal, they can then avoid the extremes of interpretation.
Professor Tracey Bunda, Associate Professor Sandra Phillips, Mia Strasek-Barker, and Flic French: First Nations perspectives on Indigenous collections held in the Fryer Library at the University of Queensland, NAIDOC Week, 9 August 2020.
Professor Tracey Bunda, Associate Professor Sandra Phillips, Mia Strasek-Barker, and Flic French: First Nations perspectives on Indigenous collections held in the Fryer Library at the University of Queensland, NAIDOC Week, 9 August 2020.
Would those comments then inform the way you would define success as an editor? How do you, as an editor with your own list, define success? In a way, this ties in with another topic I’m interested in, that of commissioning. Anyway, what is success for you?
The bigger houses are now establishing the editorial inhouse function as a commissioning function. But with a press the size of UQP, we’re more than just commissioning editors. You work in detail on manuscripts, you appraise manuscripts, you take recommendations to your monthly publishing committee — so that’s the commissioning element perhaps. Commissioning to me implies that you have a lot of resources behind you with which to go out into the wider world. I think that we’ve got enough channels open, for example, between UQP and the Indigenous writing community, that there is a flow and there is communication, without necessarily having to go out to get somebody to write something that you consider is important.
So there are more important or useful methods where you are?
It’s about having a channel of communication. I think that’s what a lot of Australian publishers don’t have with Indigenous writers. Some of the bigger houses only accept manuscripts that come from a literary agent. So their contact with the overall writing community is fairly minimal, and their
accessibility to publishing projects from the Indigenous writing community is even more minuscule.
What about the issue of reviewing?
Reviewing of Aboriginal writing is very important. I think too often judgments are made about those books without the reviewer having enough background or context, and without a willingness to engage with a form of writing that could be different. There don’t seem to be any consistent credentials for reviewers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander books. In order to understand them and in order to review them — to act as a mediator between them and the potential reading public — reviewers should have some specific cultural understanding or professional credentials. Most recently, with Plains of Promise by Alexis Wright you had the whole gamut from ‘this is not a great book’ to ‘this is an exciting, very exciting new writer who deserves Rolls Royce treatment’. So you’ve got the ends of the spectrum there. Ultimately it’s all about acknowledging that the writing is coming from a different source. The technique is similar, the whole medium is obviously the same, but the integrity and what informs the expression could be, and should be, and probably is in most cases, very different.
What is it about publishing that you find most challenging?
Well, I hate deadlines, but I love them as well. It’s great to work on a project and have an outcome. You develop intense creative relationships that lead to the fulfilment of the book and that’s all wonderful. I think you need to be a good communicator to be able to do that effectively. I think you need to have good language understandings, very strong language understandings and a love of language and a love of expression, a love of the written word as well. I think that I’ve moved into an area that few other Aboriginal people are involved in. It’s very satisfying and very challenging, constantly challenging. You can’t apply formula to process. You’re working as part of a team and able to act as a mediator. I am acting as a mediator between a community which I’m a part of— the Indigenous community — and the wider Australian community.
What are your hopes for the future of publishing and, specifically, the future of Aboriginal publishing?
The more publishing opportunities for Indigenous writers the better. I hope those publishers who enter the area recognise the potential difference required in the publishing of those writers. Indigenous writers who do get published need support and encouragement to engage and communicate regularly about the process so they don’t feel disempowered. In a smaller press it is essential to nurture your backlist and keep your titles in print. I hope publishers recognise this different journey taken by most of the books written by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. There can be little doubt that UQP is leading the way in publishing creative writing by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors. This publishing is amply facilitated by the Press’s commitment to the David Unaipon Award, but there are examples that existed before it, and there are examples that extend beyond just the opportunities afforded by it. UQP has actively fostered the writing careers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors, with some seeing the publication of their second and third books.
I can only hope that other publishing houses catch on, so that they too can be part of this uniquely Australian field of writing and publishing.
Would you say that it is ‘the coming of age’, if you’ll excuse the phrase, of Aboriginal publishing?
It’s not so much the publishing — you can’t publish something that hasn’t been written! It’s having the communication and then being prepared to put in the hard developmental work on those Indigenous writers. And that’s where a lot of the reviewers have no understanding of the relationship between the publisher and the writer from the word go. It is a developing canon. It is a new canon. And I’m not too sure if it’s ‘the coming of age’ or if it’s the ongoing journey of creative expression. Awards like the David Unaipon provide incentives. Respected writers such as Jack Davis and Oodgeroo have acted as mentors and role models. And the more creative writers we have the more there are going to be.
David Unaipon award winners:
- 1989 Graeme Dixon, Holocaust Island (poetry, published 1990)
- 1990 Doris Pilkington, Caprice: A Stockman’s Daughter (fiction, published 1991)
- 1991 Bill Dodd, Broken Dreams (memoir, published 1992)
- 1992 Philip McLaren, Sweet Water, Stolen Land (novel, published 1993)
- 1993 John Muk Muk Burke, Bridge of Triangles (fiction, published 1994)
- 1994 Rosalie Medcraft & Valda Gee, The Sausage Tree (memoir, published 1995)
- 1995 Warrigal (Edward) Anderson, Warrigal’s Way (memoir, published 1996)
- 1996 Steven McCarthy, Black Angels, Red Blood (novel, published 1998)
- 1997 John Bodey, When Darkness Falls (young adult, published 1998)
Highly commended entrants achieving publication:
- Joe McGinness, Son of Alyandabu: My Fight for Aboriginal Rights (memoir, 1991)
- Mabel Edmund, No Regrets (memoir, 1992)
- Herb Wharton, Unbranded (fiction, 1992)
- Eve Fesl, Conned! (nonfiction, 1993)
- Lisa Bellear, Dreaming in Urban Areas (poetry, 1996)
- Jeanie Bell, Talking About Celia (biography, 1997)
- Alexis Wright, Plains of Promise (novel, 1997)
- Melissa Lucashenko, Steam Pigs (novel, 1997)
Explore the BlackWords Unaipon Information Trail tracing the winners of the Unaipon award from its beginning to the present.