AustLit

'The construction boom in West Australia’s mining industry a few years ago resulted in a lot of new money sloshing around Perth, the much commented upon demographic of CUBs (Cashed Up Bogans) and their vulgar conspicuous consumption rashing the landscape. Less commented upon but just as important was a flourishing cottage industry of small poetry presses which cropped up like a carpet of wildflowers on a neglected reserve. For an all too brief couple of years, West Australia’s quiet toiling poets found themselves spoilt for choice for publication. Mulla Mulla Press, Sunline Press, Regime Books, along with a number of in-house anthologies of very mixed quality from the handful of writing centres around Perth (Katharine Susannah Pritchard, OOTA, Peter Cowan), as well as the mainstays of Westerly, UWA and Fremantle Press, meant a bit of schmoozing, a bit of hustling was all it took for many of us to get a book or two published in that time. Now that the roaring days are over and austerity is biting hard, many of those lovely wildflowers have died off (though Mulla Mulla, under the proprietorship of Kalgoorlie literary doyenne Coral Carter still continues). It’s interesting to reflect that most of the activity was poetry. There was a bit of prose, but almost no criticism. There is something naked and unprotected about poetry in its wild state, so it was inevitable the phenomenon would pass quickly. It remains for historians (all poets are historians) to examine some of the flowers that were pressed.' (Introduction)