AustLit
MY FAMILY ON BOTH SIDES has its roots in the United States dating back to the eighteenth century and perhaps earlier. They formed part of the great westward expansion in the nineteenth century until they were stopped by the Pacific Ocean. I was born in Long Beach and grew up in Los Angeles. Later, I was to pick up where my grandfathers had left off and continue moving west to Australia.
I received my tertiary education at Michigan State University, where I studied Literature and Economics and earned a BA and an MA. Although my studies and my involvement in student writing as fiction editor of the university magazine were ideal for a career in publishing, it was my intention to become an academic. While in graduate school, however, I began working part-time for the Michigan State University Press in the warehouse packing books. The Director of the Press, Lyle Blair, was an Australian who had come to the Press a few years earlier after a short but distinguished publishing career in London with Jonathan Cape immediately after the war.
To my profound amazement, after a rather lengthy drinking session at a local bar, during which Blair had described life in academia as an exercise in taking in each other’s laundry, he offered me a publishing job at Michigan State University Press. Thus began my career as Assistant to the Director and four turbulent years of hard-edged training in all aspects of publishing. These years were so intense, so frustrating and so fraught that even today, forty-five years later, I remember them with a combination of terror and pleasure.
I owe Lyle Blair an enormous debt of gratitude. Not only did he give me the training to ply my trade professionally and confidently, but it was at his suggestion and with his blessing that I climbed aboard a Qantas Constellation in September 1958, a couple of days after my twenty-sixth birthday, to start a new life in Australia.
Aside from a short stint teaching at Manly Boys High School, my first Australian job was as a shop assistant at Angus & Robertson. I didn’t like it much and as I banged books together, wielded the feather duster and put the titles in alphabetical order I dreamt of going home. But I learned a lot about bookselling in spite of myself. After six months I was transferred to publishing. Through a combination of unlikely events, I found myself with John Ferguson running the entire production department. We were both rather ignorant about production technicalities, but with 150 titles pumping through a year we learned fast.
I was very happy but broke. Angus & Robertson had a certain Scottish Presbyterian reluctance to expose its staff to the temptations of wealth, and so in 1960 I left to become Prentice-Hall’s first Australasian tertiary marketing representative. As a result of contacts made while visiting the University of Queensland, I was invited to apply for the position of Manager of the University of Queensland Press and Bookshop and I served in this capacity for the next twenty-two years.
I left UQP in 1983 to become General Manager of Rigby Publishers in Adelaide. Contingent on the sale of Rigby to Kevin Weldon and its transfer to Sydney, I left Adelaide in 1985 and moved to Canberra to become the Publishing Manager for the Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. In 1986 I joined the Australian Government Publishing Service as Director of Publishing and Marketing, a position I held in one form or another until my retirement in 1993. In 1994 I was made an Honorary Life Member of the Australian Book Publishers Association for my contributions to literary publishing and to the Association, having been President in 1971/72 and a member of its Board for fifteen years.
My appointment to the Press in April 1961 was the direct result of a committee of inquiry into the operations of the Press and Bookshop which began in 1959 under the chairmanship of Reg Gynther, head of the Department of Accounting. The committee had concluded that most of the problems were confined to the Bookshop and were the result of a lack of professional management. Although I suspect the members of the selection committee were aware my real interest lay in publishing rather than bookselling, they felt my limited experience as a bookstore shop assistant and subsequent work as a tertiary textbook representative was sufficient to tackle the Bookshop problems.
In fact, those problems while severe were reasonably simple to solve. I culled the dead stock, opened the shop up to browsers and made it more user friendly, called on every academic I could find, making notes of their complaints, and created the position of Buyer and hired a professional bookseller to fill it. The first person in this position was Ron Dingley who had been my boss in the technical department at Angus & Robertson s bookshop. He was succeeded eighteen months later by Frank Sandison who came from a distinguished career at the Queensland Book Depot. From that time on, thanks to Ron’s and Franks superb professionalism, apart from the occasional hiccup now and then the Bookshop ceased to be a major problem.
The Press was a much bigger challenge. It was a very small operation in 1961. Prior to my arrival it was run part-time by the Reader in Entomology, Athol Perkins. Indeed, the entire staff consisted of Perkins and his departmental secretary and they ceased all connection with the Press on my arrival. In the preceding year only three books had been published and sales were well under $15 000. Most of the Press publishing was confined to scientific papers and official publications, such as faculty handbooks and the university calendar. Perhaps because of its low profile there was a rather poor opinion of the Press among many academics, particularly within the senior ranks. This rather depressing attitude was even more widely held in the university’s administration. Early strong advocates for the Press were scarce on the ground and in fact I can recall only three: Professor T. G. H. Jones from Chemistry, who was Chairman of the Publications Committee, Reg Gynther in Accounting, and perhaps most importantly Sir Fred Schonell, the Vice Chancellor.
It was also rather lonely professionally with only one other publishing house in the entire state. This was Jacaranda and its founder and driving force, Brian Clouston, became a lifelong mate. Without those long lunches with Brian where he dispensed advice and encouragement and without his willingness to lend valuable staff to assist in the inevitable early crises, I am certain my life and the future of UQP would have been much bleaker.
On my arrival I found not only did I literally have no staff, except Bookshop staff, but I had no place to put a desk and a chair. Furthermore, travel (essential in publishing) was not considered by the administration to be part of my job; the entire Press and Bookshop organisation was committee- ridden and little could be done without the permission of the Publications Committee which met infrequently; there was no publishing philosophy; and, worst of all, there were no manuscripts. I was still very excited about my new job, but I was beginning to realise it was not going to be easy. It was at this point that I received the best advice I ever had. Reg Gynther said to me, ‘Universities are run on precedent. You don’t know yet what the precedents are. I suggest you start running as fast as you can until they stop you.’ I wrote to the Registrar, by hand, explaining that I needed somewhere to sit and a secretary. I was given the auditors office but told I would have to vacate it when the auditor returned in a month’s time. I wrote again, in a badly deteriorating hand, that I needed a secretary. Silence. The third memo was barely readable except for the word ‘secretary’ and my name. The Registrar rang me and said I was being difficult. I told him that if he gave me a secretary with a degree I would train that person to be an editor. To my profound joy they not only listened but transferred Ann Lahey to the Press. Ann possessed not just a degree but editorial experience with Readers Digest as well. Although she had to do some office duties until I managed to get an actual secretary, Ann became our first editor and one of our finest.
Before the auditor returned a small office was found for us in the General Purposes Hut. The students’ weightlifting club was in the next room and Ann and I often found our concentration broken by grunts, oaths and assorted noises as well as the rich pong of sweat on steamy Brisbane summer afternoons.
Early on I had been encouraged by Sam Ure Smith to join the Australian Book Publishers Association and I made sure the Press became a member shortly after my arrival. I had noticed that if one said more than a few words at meetings, one ended up on a committee and committee members had their fares paid to attend meetings. So, by the end of 1961 the travel problem had been solved.
The Publications Committee itself was a more difficult problem. It was used to having its way and the virtual running of the Press was firmly in its hands. After a couple of meetings, it was clear I was going to have difficulty gaining control of the Press. I started with the selection of readers for manuscripts, a prerogative the Committee had always seen as its own. I pointed out that because the academic community leaked like a sieve, it was likely authors knew who were reviewing their manuscripts. Since readers could not be assured of anonymity, they were unlikely to submit reports which were unfavourable or, at least, strictly objective. My argument was reinforced by a rather heated feud which had broken out between a reader and an author not long before. I also told them that a well-known reader with a big reputation did not necessarily guarantee a useful and timely report. I suggested that since I had no vested interest other than the welfare of the Press the choice of readers for all manuscripts be mine and that, while the reports would be tabled at Committee meetings, the identity of the readers would be known only to me and the Chairman of the Committee. After a good deal of heated discussion, they bought it. (No doubt I was aided by the fact that I had taken the trouble to discuss the idea with the Chairman prior to the meeting.)
This was the first of many such battles and it took a number of years of incremental changes until the Publications Committee became, under the enlightened chairman ship of Deputy Vice-Chancellor Jim Ritchie, a Board of Directors with overall responsibility for policy formulation and financial monitoring, and I was given total freedom to make all publishing decisions. It was not easy and it meant putting my job on the line more than once. I was fortunate in that I could truthfully say I was hired as a professional publisher and I could not do my job without making everyday publishing decisions free from interference by people who were not professional publishers. During one heated exchange I told one of the professors of medicine I didn’t tell him how to do brain surgery and in turn it was not his job to tell me what to publish or how to publish. It was perhaps not the smartest or most tactful remark I ever made, but to my eternal gratitude the university managed to tolerate my youthful brashness and I, in turn, came to respect and admire the university. Indeed, I believe the University of Queensland learned faster and understood better than its sister universities the value of a good press. This encouragement and support helped to ensure our success.
I was concerned neither the Press nor the Publications Committee had any clear-cut philosophy on what we should be publishing. It seemed to me that without such a philosophy (or what would be called these days a mission statement) I was vulnerable to the whims of the Committee which, like most university committees, frequently changed its composition. There were, of course, some givens in that we published scholarly books, official publications, some occasional papers and a number of journals. I discussed the problem with the Chairman and suggested to him that I formulate a statement which we could discuss at the next committee meeting.
My problem was I needed something which would satisfy the scholars within the academic community, but which would also be broad enough to give me the freedom to move into other areas. As an American I had been accustomed to university presses publishing beyond the narrow confines of academia. Michigan State University Press, for example, had been the first American publisher of the distinguished Indian novelist R. K. Narayan. The argument I brought to the Committee was that all Australian universities were (at that time) funded by taxpayers and therefore had a wider community responsibility, that part of this responsibility lay in encouraging cultural initiatives, and that one way of doing this was to publish in cultural areas neglected by commercial publishers. A fairly broad and flexible philosophy was necessary because cultures were dynamic and such areas of neglect changed over time. To my relief the Committee endorsed my words which were (from memory): ‘The University of Queensland Press is dedicated to publishing works of a scholarly nature as well as books of general cultural interest to the community at large.’ This became our philosophical guideline during the whole time I was at UQP.
There was still one big problem. We had no manuscripts and no one was particularly interested in offering us their work because no one outside of the University of Queensland knew we existed. I decided to attack the problem on two fronts. On the scholarly side I knew from my time at Prentice-Hall that there was a reluctance on the part of academics to submit their work to their own Press for fear it would appear they couldn’t get published anywhere else. I also knew, however, that most academics had a yellowing PhD thesis or an esoteric study mouldering in the bottom drawer of their filing cabinet which they would dearly love to see published. One of my first tasks, therefore, was to find out where the academics drank and socialised and to join them over a convivial glass or two. This turned out to be The Royal Exchange Hotel in Toowong, affectionately known in those days as The Grey Ghost. As a result of this networking, we soon had a few manuscripts on offer. I knew they wouldn’t sell in great quantities, but I also knew if the content was good and I did a good editing, design and production job we would get favourable reviews in the scholarly journals which in turn would bring us to the attention of possible future authors. The first tide was Nick Tarling’s Anglo-Dutch Rivalry in the Malay World 1780-1824. I hasten to point out that this was, in fact, an excellent book and not only was it reviewed widely and favourably, but we sold an edition to Cambridge University Press in the UK.
My second plan of attack was to push into those creative cultural areas I had persuaded the Publications Committee to accept. I had been very taken with Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, it being the first Australian play I had seen following my arrival in this country. I had also been told it signalled a revival of Australian drama, yet with the exception of a few plays rather grudgingly published by Angus & Robertson there appeared to be no effort to get new Australian plays in print and easily available. I thought unless something were done about the so-called Australian drama revival, it would not last long. We were extremely fortunate in having one of the great scholars of Australian drama in the English Department. Eunice Hanger was not just well versed in the scholarly study of Australian plays, she was also an enthusiastic champion of contemporary Australian theatre and very active in the Brisbane theatre scene. We teamed up and the series Contemporary Australian Plays was begun. Our first play, produced in a cheap, early-Penguin- style paperback format, was Ray Mathew's A Spring Song which was published towards the end of 1961 — my first year at the Press. It was a good play and is still going strong. (My wife and I saw an excellent performance in Canberra in 1995.) This was followed by David Ireland’s first published work, a play called Image in the Clay, which has been reprinted several times. Many more titles followed over the years until I tried to sign up David Williamson for one of his first successful plays, Don’s Party, only to find that Katharine Brisbane from Currency Press had got in ahead of me. I reasoned that if a publishing house had emerged solely to publish drama it was probably time to move on to more neglected areas.
In the early 1960s few publishers were interested in doing art books, probably because of the high production costs involved. Sam Ure Smith was the only mainstream publisher working in that field and most of his resources were focused on his journal Art and Australia. My friendship with Sam and the informative discussions I had with him about Australian art led to my interest in the subject, and this was heightened through my close friendship with the then university architect, Jim Birrell. Jim had written a critical biography of the architect Walter Burley Griffin, and we worked closely together to produce in 1964 what I still think was one of UQP’s most significant books. When we weren’t working on the book, we were arguing about art, and I discovered not only did Jim know a lot about contemporary Australian art, he also personally knew many of its creators.
In 1965 we published Ian Fairweather’s The Drunken Buddha which was his translation of an early Chinese fable illustrated with twelve magnificent paintings done especially for the book. Through Jim Birrell I had met Laurie Thomas who was then the Director of the Queensland Art Gallery. Laurie had given me great encouragement to push on with The Drunken Buddha despite its cost and its difficult author. In those days Fairweather was not as well known as he is now and the Sunday tabloids portrayed him as a loony hermit who lived in the bush on Bribie Island and thought he was an artist. I am very proud to have published The Drunken Buddha and I hope it assisted in its small way to encourage an appreciation of what a great artist Ian Fairweather was.
Jim also introduced me to another artist who became a lifelong friend, Charles Blackman. Charles and Barbara had arrived back from several years in London in early 1966 and were living in an old Queensland house not far from the university. In talking to Charlie it occurred to me that a number of artists had their start in Queensland, as he had, or had come from Queensland originally. Yet for the most part this was either not acknowledged or was passed over as unimportant. Out of this I developed the idea for a series on Artists in Queensland which we called our Focus series. Appropriately, in 1967 the first title to be published in the
series was Focus on Charles Blackman, written on commission by another eminent Queenslander, Tom Shapcott. We followed with titles on Andrew Sibley, Milton Moon, Ray Crooke and, branching into poetry, Judith Wright and David Rowbotham. We continued to publish art books until I left the Press in the 1980s, but by that time it had become a crowded field.
The Artists in Queensland concept was in fact part of a larger view I had about the role of university presses, particularly those located away from the major publishing and population centres. The cultural life of any nation is greater than what takes place in its largest cities, but because of market size mainstream publishing tends to ignore regional interests. I felt one of the major contributions the University of Queensland Press could make to its immediate community was to publish books about Queensland. Although the Focus series was the only regional series, as such, we published, we actively sought and commissioned works of interest to the Queensland community. As a result, we produced a large number of Queensland-oriented titles over a very broad spectrum including the applied sciences, the social sciences, economics, biography and especially history.
Yet another good companion of those early days was a young ABC television producer working at the local Brisbane studio. His name was Roger McDonald and we used to meet often after work over a few pots at the Royal Exchange for heated arguments about writing. As we got to know each other better, Roger showed me some poems he had been working on. I had done a lot of work as a graduate student on F. Scott Fitzgerald and I was fascinated by the way Roger’s imagination was triggered by his feel for Australian history just as Fitzgeralds had been by American history. Ashamed of my ignorance of Australian history, I had monitored Roger Joyces Australian history course and had read extensively in the area, somewhat discouraged by how boring most of the then published material was. Roger McDonald’s poetry excited me and showed me that Australian history was not so dull after all. It also rekindled my interest in poetry. I told Roger that if he could produce enough poetry to make a book, he had a publisher. It was to be several years before he had accumulated enough poems that passed his stringent standards of quality and we were able to publish our first poetry volume, Citizens of Mist, in 1968.
In fact, 1968 was a banner year for us in poetry publishing because we also published Rodney Hall’s and Tom Shapcott’s anthology of contemporary poetry, New Impulses in Australian Poetry. It was a highly significant book because it heralded the renaissance of poetry in this country. Its success took us all by surprise. Both Hall and Shapcott had been extremely annoyed by the delay in publishing while we waited for a Commonwealth Literary Fund grant, no publisher in those days being willing to take a punt on poetry without a grant because the accepted wisdom was poetry did not sell. They were convinced the delay had ruined any sales we might make, because, they argued with some justification, the impulses were no longer new. But in fact the sales of New Impulses forced us into a reprint within a remarkably short time, and into a paperback reprint at that — an unheard of occurrence. Even Citizens of Mist sold out and we were launched on one of the major voyages of the University of Queensland Press.
Our entry into poetry publishing could not have been better timed. Few publishers were interested in handling poetry because of the difficult economics involved. Angus & Robertson had what little market there was and most of the well-known names. But almost all of these names belonged to an older generation which had come of age either before or during the war. Aside from our friendly rivals in the city, Jacaranda Press, very few publishers had attempted more than the occasional volume by a younger poet. There were good reasons for this. The poetry market was seen as small, and conventional wisdom dictated lavish design, paper and binding to help make the comparatively high retail price, necessitated by a small print run, more palatable. The few publishers chancing their arm with poetry (the Press included) also insisted on a Commonwealth Literary Fund grant as a hedge against the inevitable loss poetry incurred. There were, however, some real problems connected with CLF grants which in fact militated against their avowed purpose of encouraging cultural publishing. First, they were very slow in approving grants, which made it difficult to catch the wave of interest a young writer might be receiving, and a publisher ran the risk of either losing a good manuscript or losing a potential market opening. Second, the grants were made as a subsidy against loss which meant the book had to be priced at a level that allowed a return to the CLF should it sell sufficient quantities to break even. This encouraged the slim expensive volume mind-set and the self-fulfilling prophecy that poetry books did not sell.
Few realised the market had changed. In 1969 David Malouf came to see me with a poetry manuscript. I was very excited by it and really anxious to publish, but David was adamant that it had to be a paperback. I feared we would end up with an expensive paperback that would be rejected by a market used to paperbacks at very cheap prices. David remained stubbornly rock solid. What to do? It occurred to me we had several poetry manuscripts under consideration and we had recently purchased an IBM typesetting typewriter which was capable of passable imitations of conventional typefaces. I called in our production manager and asked her what the per-copy production cost would be if we set the manuscripts in-house ourselves and printed 1000 copies of four titles simultaneously. After some scribbling on the back of an envelope (in those pre-calculator days), she came up with 25 cents a copy. I told David we had a deal, and Paperback Poets were born at a retail price of $1.00. They were an instant success and sold in their thousands to a young market rebelling against the Vietnam War and eager to read and listen to the words of their peers rather than their elders.
By the end of the 1960s the Press had certainly grown beyond what the university at the beginning of the decade had envisaged. We were publishing close to forty book titles a year and we had a staff of fifteen. One of the most important additions to our staff in terms of impact on our reputation as a literary publisher was Roger McDonald. Before Citizens of Mist was published in 1968, Roger had been transferred to Hobart. He wrote to me and said he felt it was time to leave the ABC and would like very much to get into publishing. Did I know anyone in the business who would be willing to give him a go? I did and his name was Frank Thompson. It looked to me as if poetry could become a significant part of our list and Roger would make the perfect poetry editor. Unfortunately, the university was not
as convinced as I was that poetry was important enough to justify an editors salary. I knew if I put up the creation of a poetry editor position it would be knocked back. However, I also knew the university was keen on new technology and I could convince them that new ways of imparting information was an important next step for us. Who better to become the new audio-visual editor than the bright young ABC television producer in Hobart? Roger, in fact, filled both roles with distinction. Not only did we develop, largely through his efforts, the best poetry list in Australia, but we also became early and major players in non-book publishing.
In 1964 John Strugnell from the English Department asked me if I would be interested in helping him form a course in American Literature. Although my degrees were in English Literature, I had taken a large number of courses in American Literature at both undergraduate and graduate level. I also had some experience as a tutor in English at Michigan State University and as a teacher at Manly Boys High School. Given the direction I was trying to take the Press, it was a terrific opportunity and I jumped at it, although it meant increasing my workload by about 50 per cent in the early years. Together John and I decided which authors we each felt best qualified to teach and divided the lecturing load fairly evenly between us. The ten years or so I spent teaching American Literature turned out to be one of the most enjoyable experiences of my life. It meant I was in constant contact with my market, the young generation of readers and thinkers who were buying and reading the kinds of books I was publishing. As an added bonus the course attracted a large number of young writers — like Roger McDonald, Tom Shapcott, Rodney Hall, Craig Munro and others — which helped my networking no end and kept me intellectually in touch with what was going on in Australian letters.
Unfortunately, the course became so popular that coping with it and the main game of the Press became increasingly difficult. We started with only a small number of students and were able to run the lectures almost like tutorials with lots of give and take, but by the mid-1970s class numbers were huge and the lectures had become formal affairs with the same lecture being given several times a week in large lecture halls, with little student contact. I was also by then often travelling overseas for weeks at a time and John was constantly having to fill in for me. There were now people in the English Department better qualified to do what I had been doing and in the end I was not sorry to give it up.
The Press expanded so rapidly in the 1960s it was difficult to keep up with the volume of work being generated by such a wide-ranging and large list. When I started in 1961, trained staff (if one were allowed to hire them) were difficult to find because there were so few active publishers in Australia. To a large extent I trained the staff myself and most times it was the classical case of the pupil surpassing the master. At least I chose the raw candidates well’ One student of mine who had impressed me with his quiet abilities and genuine feel for writing, perhaps partly due to his being a trained journalist, was Craig Munro. After Craig finished his degree in late 1971,1 offered him a job in editorial which was feeling the strain in the literary area of having to cope without Roger McDonald who was away on a well-earned sabbatical in England. Craig became an excellent literary editor and continues to be one of the major figures at the Press.
Presentation involving good design and exacting production standards are very important in all publishing and essential in literary publishing where clever design can mask the economies necessary in low-print-run work. This was difficult to find in Brisbane in the 1960s. Many of our earlier books were designed in Melbourne by Rick Ressom and printed at Wilkes. Occasionally we used designers from Jacaranda, but it became increasingly obvious we would have do something ourselves. Production and design are demanding disciplines and require more time than I was able to give them. One of our young shop assistants, Cyrelle Birt, was an artist who drew and painted in her spare time, I
offered her a job in publishing as a production assistant and trained her myself in production and book design. I also arranged for her to spend several weeks with Wilke Printers in Melbourne and Halstead in Sydney. She became in time our production manager and chief designer. She proved to be a much better designer than her teacher, went on to win a number of design awards, and was certainly one of the leading members of the team which made the Press the distinguished publishing house it has become.
Another vital element in any successful publishing organisation is marketing and sales. I had had some marketing training at Michigan State University Press but my really intensive training was with Prentice-Hall. This had left me with no illusions about the importance of effective marketing. As we began to grow, our lack of any coherent marketing was becoming more and more obvious. We were not large enough to justify sales staff outside of order processing, so I arranged a deal whereby our marketing was done by Ure Smith. Our list, on the whole, fitted nicely with theirs in that it didn’t directly compete but filled gaps which enabled their sales people to present a well-rounded package to the trade. Eventually in the mid-1960s we reached a stage where our publishing was large enough to require the talents of a full-time sales manager, and we were successful in persuading Larry Chapman, Ure Smiths New South Wales sales
representative, to join us. Larry and I had been close friends since my first day at Angus & Robertson in 1959 where he had been a bookseller under the great Hedley Jefferies, and we made a good marketing team at the Press.
Because of my interests as a university student and my subsequent stint lecturing in American literature, it had always been a dream of mine that we would someday publish serious fiction. Our success with Paperback Poets had led me to think we might be able to do something similar with prose fiction. I had met Michael Wilding sometime before at the Newcastle in George Street where I often drank when I was in Sydney. Michael had introduced me to Frank Moorhouse and I knew they were both writing short stories and publishing them in ‘men’s’ magazines such as Chance. In fact, through knowing them I was acutely conscious of how difficult it was to get short fiction published. It seemed to me that if Chance was prepared to take them on there must be some kind of market out there for serious young fiction, and I thought we might be able to do something akin to Paperback Poets in production terms to make it affordable for that market.
A more difficult problem was the political situation in the university. The anti-Vietnam War demonstrations were reaching their peak and students were rebelling on campuses all over Australia. The Queensland government was also
particularly exercised by its perception of what constituted pornography and tended to see it everywhere. Cyrelle had been threatened in 1970 with legal action over a poster she had designed for a student performance of Lysistrata in which she had used an Aubrey Beardsley drawing. The police had arrested the cast of Alex Buzo’s play Norm and Ahmed for obscenity on the strength of one four-letter word. Michael Wildings and Frank Moorhouses work exploring explicit sex and drug taking was not going to be easy to sell to a university administration shell-shocked by attacks from left -wing students and right-wing governments who held the purse strings. I was determined to push on with my plan to publish contemporary fiction, but in the end it was made clear to me, to my everlasting regret, that if I were to persist with Moorhouse s The Americans, Baby it would be the last fiction we would publish. Our first two titles in the new Paperback Prose series published in 1972 were, therefore, Michael Wildings Aspects of the Dying Process and Rodney Hall’s The Ship on the Coin. They were both good books and I am proud of them, but I shall always regret that the brilliant Frank Moorhouse never became a UQP author.
This was also about the time we began to publish hardback fiction. David Malouf and I over a dinner to celebrate the publication of Bicycle and Other Poems in the inaugural Paperback Poets series began talking about the poems in the book. I told him how much I liked a poem entitled The Year of the Foxes’ and he pointed out it was a poem about his mother wearing a fox fur, a style much in vogue during the war years. This led us into a discussion about the Brisbane of David’s youth, and I was absolutely enthralled by his vivid descriptions of life in what seemed a far off but fascinating time. I particularly remember him describing the prostitutes sitting on the verandahs in the sultry summer evenings with Rita Hayworth hair styles and the smell of frangipani pervading the night air. I suggested we do a Brisbane book based on his recollections. He would supply the text and we would do the picture research. We parted still excitedly discussing this new project.
A few months later I was at Sydney University seeing Michael Wilding in the English Department where David was a tutor. We encountered each other in the hall and David said, ‘Oh, by the way, that Brisbane book has turned into a novel.’ I must confess my heart sank. I thought, ‘Oh, God, another poet who thinks he can write prose fiction! Hopefully, David never saw my disappointment as I smiled and made as many encouraging remarks as I could. Of course, the novel turned out to be Johnno, surely the best novel ever written about Brisbane and the first novel by one of Australia s greatest living writers. It was also our first fiction title published initially only as a hardback.
Because Australian fiction writers had been starved of publishing outlets for so long, there were actually not many young talented writers looking for publishers. With the success of Paperback Prose and our hardback fiction well launched, we needed quality manuscripts to keep up the momentum we had created in the marketplace. Michael Wilding suggested looking further afield than Australia and after some discussion we agreed to form a series devoted to Asian and Pacific writing. Like me, Michael did not have any Asian languages and what he had read came from translations which were often hard to find. Later he suggested we enlist Harry Aveling who was fluent in Indonesian, a good judge of writing and most importantly had Asian connections. Eventually the Asian and Pacific Writing series was co-edited by Wilding and Aveling. This series later led to another under the general editorship of Kevin Windle called Contemporary Russian Writing.
These later scenes reflected a change in our marketing emphasis. Towards the end of the 1960s Ure Smith had merged its marketing operation with Horwitz. The Horwitz list with its emphasis on school texts and mass market paperbacks was not very compatible with ours. We were also rapidly reaching a difficult position in that we had achieved all the market penetration possible through using agents. If we were to expand penetration, we would need to do it
ourselves. Furthermore, I realised it would be difficult to retain literary authors if we did not have international marketing. It seemed to me the best plan would be to establish a national marketing operation on our own and form an alliance with a multinational publisher to represent us overseas. Up until this point I had served as the front person making policy and as the contact for our marketing agents, with Larry Chapman doing the really hard work of making sure it all came together as well as covering Queensland as a sales representative. It took some time to put all the elements of a new marketing operation together, but eventually I believe we found the right mix.
The key to our international thrust was Prentice-Hall who agreed to act as our marketing agent throughout the world excluding North America. Although our list was not completely compatible with Prentice-Hall’s (theirs being oriented mainly towards tertiary-level textbooks), there were enough synergies to ensure we were well represented and sales while not spectacular were satisfactory. It had the added advantage that I personally knew many of the overseas representatives through my time at Prentice-Hall.
The United States remained a problem. We just could not afford to do nothing in New York and expect to retain our authors. As President of the AB PA I had represented Australia in Paris at UNESCO’s Year of the Book in 1972 and while
there had met Ted Crane, the former President and owner of Van Nostrand. Ted had recently sold Van Nostrand and had formed a publishing/consulting company, Crane Russak, in New York. I had some preliminary talks with him following our Paris meeting about North American representation, and I was able to follow these up in New York later in the year after a meeting in Toronto in September which founded the International Association of Scholarly Presses. Ted convinced me that we could do nothing in the United States without an agent working on our behalf. This was a fairly expensive option for us at the time, but I felt it was a case of investing for the future. Our first agent was Penny Warren and she did much of the early groundwork before leaving us to join Pitman Together she and I found a replacement in Pearl Bowman who proved to be a real winner. Pearl helped put in place a distribution operation working out of Massachusetts and through her championing of Australian literature became one of the most respected American sources for information on contemporary Australian writing. Although Pearl herself was not enthusiastic about selling rights, her efforts in finding the best rights contacts for me on my periodic visits to New York enabled us to sell North American rights to US publishers and heightened our credibility with our authors. Pearl also became a point of contact for our authors visiting the US and she acted as a
benevolent Godmother to many Australians encountering the Big Apple for the first time.
In writing of Pearl it reminds me that UQP’s success and personality are the work of many hands, and I am sorry I cannot mention them all in a chapter primarily devoted to setting the scene. It was my privilege to work with a number of very dedicated and talented people who were the real creators of this wonderful publishing house. It was an exciting place to be and a lot of fun. It was also a lot of hard work and there were times when we all suffered from burn out. I left in 1983 to take on new publishing challenges. I left with considerable regret and I shall always be rather sorry I did, but it was time someone else took the Press into fresh fields. I had the privilege of leading it for twenty-two years, and this has been a small and rather selective account of those years.
Frank Thompson has spent virtually all his working life in book publishing. From Michigan State University Press, he migrated to Australia and was production manager at Angus & Robertson, a marketing representative for Prentice-Hall International, manager at UQP, general manager of Rigby Publishers, publishing manager at the Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, and, before his retirement, director of publishing and marketing at the Australian Government Publishing Service.
Biography from The Writer's Press, 1998.
Frank Thompson was made an honorary life member of the Australian Booksellers and Publishers Association on his retirement in 1993, and his significance to Australian publishing in the 1960s and 1970s has been the subject of a number of works. Mostly recently, Nicholas Jose, in his 2018 Fryer lecture, speaks of Thompson's work at UQP, describing one of his most 'courageous, visionary' pieces of publishing, The Drunken Buddha, as 'a tribute to him and a talisman for me'.
MY FAMILY ON BOTH SIDES has its roots in the United States dating back to the eighteenth century and perhaps earlier. They formed part of the great westward expansion in the nineteenth century until they were stopped by the Pacific Ocean. I was born in Long Beach and grew up in Los Angeles. Later, I was to pick up where my grandfathers had left off and continue moving west to Australia.
I received my tertiary education at Michigan State University, where I studied Literature and Economics and earned a BA and an MA. Although my studies and my involvement in student writing as fiction editor of the university magazine were ideal for a career in publishing, it was my intention to become an academic. While in graduate school, however, I began working part-time for the Michigan State University Press in the warehouse packing books. The Director of the Press, Lyle Blair, was an Australian who had come to the Press a few years earlier after a short but distinguished publishing career in London with Jonathan Cape immediately after the war.
To my profound amazement, after a rather lengthy drinking session at a local bar, during which Blair had described life in academia as an exercise in taking in each other’s laundry, he offered me a publishing job at Michigan State University Press. Thus began my career as Assistant to the Director and four turbulent years of hard-edged training in all aspects of publishing. Those years were so intense, so frustrating and so fraught that even today, forty-five years later, I remember them with a combination of terror and pleasure.
I owe Lyle Blair an enormous debt of gratitude. Not only did he give me the training to ply my trade professionally and confidently, but it was at his suggestion and with his blessing that I climbed aboard a Qantas Constellation in September 1958, a couple of days after my twenty-sixth birthday, to start a new life in Australia.
Aside from a short stint teaching at Manly Boys High School, my first Australian job was as a shop assistant at Angus & Robertson. I didn’t like it much and as I banged books together, wielded the feather duster and put the titles in alphabetical order I dreamt of going home. But I learned a lot about bookselling in spite of myself. After six months I was transferred to publishing. Through a combination of unlikely events, I found myself with John Ferguson running the entire production department. We were both rather ignorant about production technicalities, but with 150 titles pumping through a year we learned fast.
I was very happy but broke. Angus & Robertson had a certain Scottish Presbyterian reluctance to expose its staff to the temptations of wealth, and so in 1960 I left to become Prentice-Hall’s first Australasian tertiary marketing representative. As a result of contacts made while visiting the University of Queensland, I was invited to apply for the position of Manager of the University of Queensland Press and Bookshop and I served in this capacity for the next twenty-two years.
I left UQP in 1983 to become General Manager of Rigby Publishers in Adelaide. Contingent on the sale of Rigby to Kevin Weldon and its transfer to Sydney, I left Adelaide in 1985 and moved to Canberra to become the Publishing Manager for the Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. In 1986 I joined the Australian Government Publishing Service as Director of Publishing and Marketing, a position I held in one form or another until my retirement in 1993. In 1994 I was made an Honorary Life Member of the Australian Book Publishers Association for my contributions to literary publishing and to the Association, having been President in 1971/72 and a member of its Board for fifteen years.
My appointment to the Press in April 1961 was the direct result of a committee of inquiry into the operations of the Press and Bookshop which began in 1959 under the chairmanship of Reg Gynther, head of the Department of Accounting. The committee had concluded that most of the problems were confined to the Bookshop and were the result of a lack of professional management. Although I suspect the members of the selection committee were aware my real interest lay in publishing rather than bookselling, they felt my limited experience as a bookstore shop assistant and subsequent work as a tertiary textbook representative was sufficient to tackle the Bookshop problems.
In fact, those problems while severe were reasonably simple to solve. I culled the dead stock, opened the shop up to browsers and made it more user friendly, called on every academic I could find, making notes of their complaints, and created the position of Buyer and hired a professional bookseller to fill it. The first person in this position was Ron Dingley who had been my boss in the technical department at Angus & Robertson s bookshop. He was succeeded eighteen months later by Frank Sandison who came from a distinguished career at the Queensland Book Depot. From that time on, thanks to Ron’s and Franks superb professionalism, apart from the occasional hiccup now and then the Bookshop ceased to be a major problem.
The Press was a much bigger challenge. It was a very small operation in 1961. Prior to my arrival it was run part-time by the Reader in Entomology, Athol Perkins. Indeed, the entire staff consisted of Perkins and his departmental secretary and they ceased all connection with the Press on my arrival. In the preceding year only three books had been published and sales were well under $15,000. Most of the Press publishing was confined to scientific papers and official publications, such as faculty handbooks and the university calendar. Perhaps because of its low profile there was a rather poor opinion of the Press among many academics, particularly within the senior ranks. This rather depressing attitude was even more widely held in the university’s administration. Early strong advocates for the Press were scarce on the ground and in fact I can recall only three: Professor T. G. H. Jones from Chemistry, who was Chairman of the Publications Committee, Reg Gynther in Accounting, and perhaps most importantly Sir Fred Schonell, the Vice Chancellor.
It was also rather lonely professionally with only one other publishing house in the entire state. This was Jacaranda and its founder and driving force, Brian Clouston, became a lifelong mate. Without those long lunches with Brian where he dispensed advice and encouragement and without his willingness to lend valuable staff to assist in the inevitable early crises, I am certain my life and the future of UQP would have been much bleaker.
On my arrival I found not only did I literally have no staff, except Bookshop staff, but I had no place to put a desk and a chair. Furthermore, travel (essential in publishing) was not considered by the administration to be part of my job; the entire Press and Bookshop organisation was committee-ridden and little could be done without the permission of the Publications Committee which met infrequently; there was no publishing philosophy; and, worst of all, there were no manuscripts. I was still very excited about my new job, but I was beginning to realise it was not going to be easy. It was at this point that I received the best advice I ever had. Reg Gynther said to me, ‘Universities are run on precedent. You don’t know yet what the precedents are. I suggest you start running as fast as you can until they stop you.’
I wrote to the Registrar, by hand, explaining that I needed somewhere to sit and a secretary. I was given the auditors office but told I would have to vacate it when the auditor returned in a month’s time. I wrote again, in a badly deteriorating hand, that I needed a secretary. Silence. The third memo was barely readable except for the word ‘secretary’ and my name. The Registrar rang me and said I was being difficult. I told him that if he gave me a secretary with a degree I would train that person to be an editor. To my profound joy they not only listened but transferred Ann Lahey to the Press. Ann possessed not just a degree but editorial experience with Readers Digest as well. Although she had to do some office duties until I managed to get an actual secretary, Ann became our first editor and one of our finest.
Before the auditor returned a small office was found for us in the General Purposes Hut. The students’ weightlifting club was in the next room and Ann and I often found our concentration broken by grunts, oaths and assorted noises as well as the rich pong of sweat on steamy Brisbane summer afternoons.
Early on I had been encouraged by Sam Ure Smith to join the Australian Book Publishers Association and I made sure the Press became a member shortly after my arrival. I had noticed that if one said more than a few words at meetings, one ended up on a committee and committee members had their fares paid to attend meetings. So, by the end of 1961 the travel problem had been solved.
The Publications Committee itself was a more difficult problem. It was used to having its way and the virtual running of the Press was firmly in its hands. After a couple of meetings, it was clear I was going to have difficulty gaining control of the Press. I started with the selection of readers for manuscripts, a prerogative the Committee had always seen as its own. I pointed out that because the academic community leaked like a sieve, it was likely authors knew who were reviewing their manuscripts. Since readers could not be assured of anonymity, they were unlikely to submit reports which were unfavourable or, at least, strictly objective. My argument was reinforced by a rather heated feud which had broken out between a reader and an author not long before. I also told them that a well-known reader with a big reputation did not necessarily guarantee a useful and timely report. I suggested that since I had no vested interest other than the welfare of the Press the choice of readers for all manuscripts be mine and that, while the reports would be tabled at Committee meetings, the identity of the readers would be known only to me and the Chairman of the Committee. After a good deal of heated discussion, they bought it. (No doubt I was aided by the fact that I had taken the trouble to discuss the idea with the Chairman prior to the meeting.)
This was the first of many such battles and it took a number of years of incremental changes until the Publications Committee became, under the enlightened chairman ship of Deputy Vice-Chancellor Jim Ritchie, a Board of Directors with overall responsibility for policy formulation and financial monitoring, and I was given total freedom to make all publishing decisions. It was not easy and it meant putting my job on the line more than once. I was fortunate in that I could truthfully say I was hired as a professional publisher and I could not do my job without making everyday publishing decisions free from interference by people who were not professional publishers. During one heated exchange I told one of the professors of medicine I didn’t tell him how to do brain surgery and in turn it was not his job to tell me what to publish or how to publish. It was perhaps not the smartest or most tactful remark I ever made, but to my eternal gratitude the university managed to tolerate my youthful brashness and I, in turn, came to respect and admire the university. Indeed, I believe the University of Queensland learned faster and understood better than its sister universities the value of a good press. This encouragement and support helped to ensure our success.
I was concerned neither the Press nor the Publications Committee had any clear-cut philosophy on what we should be publishing. It seemed to me that without such a philosophy (or what would be called these days a mission statement) I was vulnerable to the whims of the Committee which, like most university committees, frequently changed its composition. There were, of course, some givens in that we published scholarly books, official publications, some occasional papers and a number of journals. I discussed the problem with the Chairman and suggested to him that I formulate a statement which we could discuss at the next committee meeting.
My problem was I needed something which would satisfy the scholars within the academic community, but which would also be broad enough to give me the freedom to move into other areas. As an American I had been accustomed to university presses publishing beyond the narrow confines of academia. Michigan State University Press, for example, had been the first American publisher of the distinguished Indian novelist R. K. Narayan. The argument I brought to the Committee was that all Australian universities were (at that time) funded by taxpayers and therefore had a wider community responsibility, that part of this responsibility lay in encouraging cultural initiatives, and that one way of doing this was to publish in cultural areas neglected by commercial publishers. A fairly broad and flexible philosophy was necessary because cultures were dynamic and such areas of neglect changed over time. To my relief the Committee endorsed my words which were (from memory): ‘The University of Queensland Press is dedicated to publishing works of a scholarly nature as well as books of general cultural interest to the community at large.’ This became our philosophical guideline during the whole time I was at UQP.
There was still one big problem. We had no manuscripts and no one was particularly interested in offering us their work because no one outside of the University of Queensland knew we existed. I decided to attack the problem on two fronts. On the scholarly side I knew from my time at Prentice-Hall that there was a reluctance on the part of academics to submit their work to their own Press for fear it would appear they couldn’t get published anywhere else. I also knew, however, that most academics had a yellowing PhD thesis or an esoteric study mouldering in the bottom drawer of their filing cabinet which they would dearly love to see published. One of my first tasks, therefore, was to find out where the academics drank and socialised and to join them over a convivial glass or two. This turned out to be The Royal Exchange Hotel in Toowong, affectionately known in those days as The Grey Ghost. As a result of this networking, we soon had a few manuscripts on offer. I knew they wouldn’t sell in great quantities, but I also knew if the content was good and I did a good editing, design and production job we would get favourable reviews in the scholarly journals which in turn would bring us to the attention of possible future authors. The first tide was Nick Tarling’s Anglo-Dutch Rivalry in the Malay World 1780-1824. I hasten to point out that this was, in fact, an excellent book and not only was it reviewed widely and favourably, but we sold an edition to Cambridge University Press in the UK.
My second plan of attack was to push into those creative cultural areas I had persuaded the Publications Committee to accept. I had been very taken with Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, it being the first Australian play I had seen following my arrival in this country. I had also been told it signalled a revival of Australian drama, yet with the exception of a few plays rather grudgingly published by Angus & Robertson there appeared to be no effort to get new Australian plays in print and easily available. I thought unless something were done about the so-called Australian drama revival, it would not last long. We were extremely fortunate in having one of the great scholars of Australian drama in the English Department. Eunice Hanger was not just well versed in the scholarly study of Australian plays, she was also an enthusiastic champion of contemporary Australian theatre and very active in the Brisbane theatre scene. We teamed up and the series Contemporary Australian Plays was begun. Our first play, produced in a cheap, early-Penguin-style paperback format, was Ray Mathew's A Spring Song which was published towards the end of 1961 — my first year at the Press. It was a good play and is still going strong. (My wife and I saw an excellent performance in Canberra in 1995.) This was followed by David Ireland’s first published work, a play called Image in the Clay, which has been reprinted several times. Many more titles followed over the years until I tried to sign up David Williamson for one of his first successful plays, Don’s Party, only to find that Katharine Brisbane from Currency Press had got in ahead of me. I reasoned that if a publishing house had emerged solely to publish drama it was probably time to move on to more neglected areas.
In the early 1960s few publishers were interested in doing art books, probably because of the high production costs involved. Sam Ure Smith was the only mainstream publisher working in that field and most of his resources were focused on his journal Art and Australia. My friendship with Sam and the informative discussions I had with him about Australian art led to my interest in the subject, and this was heightened through my close friendship with the then university architect, Jim Birrell. Jim had written a critical biography of the architect Walter Burley Griffin, and we worked closely together to produce in 1964 what I still think was one of UQP’s most significant books. When we weren’t working on the book, we were arguing about art, and I discovered not only did Jim know a lot about contemporary Australian art, he also personally knew many of its creators.
In 1965 we published Ian Fairweather’s The Drunken Buddha which was his translation of an early Chinese fable illustrated with twelve magnificent paintings done especially for the book. Through Jim Birrell I had met Laurie Thomas who was then the Director of the Queensland Art Gallery. Laurie had given me great encouragement to push on with The Drunken Buddha despite its cost and its difficult author. In those days Fairweather was not as well known as he is now and the Sunday tabloids portrayed him as a loony hermit who lived in the bush on Bribie Island and thought he was an artist. I am very proud to have published The Drunken Buddha and I hope it assisted in its small way to encourage an appreciation of what a great artist Ian Fairweather was.
Jim also introduced me to another artist who became a lifelong friend, Charles Blackman. Charles and Barbara had arrived back from several years in London in early 1966 and were living in an old Queensland house not far from the university. In talking to Charlie it occurred to me that a number of artists had their start in Queensland, as he had, or had come from Queensland originally. Yet for the most part this was either not acknowledged or was passed over as unimportant. Out of this I developed the idea for a series on Artists in Queensland which we called our Focus series. Appropriately, in 1967 the first title to be published in the series was Focus on Charles Blackman, written on commission by another eminent Queenslander, Tom Shapcott. We followed with titles on Andrew Sibley, Milton Moon, Ray Crooke and, branching into poetry, Judith Wright and David Rowbotham. We continued to publish art books until I left the Press in the 1980s, but by that time it had become a crowded field.
The Artists in Queensland concept was in fact part of a larger view I had about the role of university presses, particularly those located away from the major publishing and population centres. The cultural life of any nation is greater than what takes place in its largest cities, but because of market size mainstream publishing tends to ignore regional interests. I felt one of the major contributions the University of Queensland Press could make to its immediate community was to publish books about Queensland. Athough the Focus series was the only regional series, as such, we published, we actively sought and commissioned works of interest to the Queensland community. As a result, we produced a large number of Queensland-oriented titles over a very broad spectrum including the applied sciences, the social sciences, economics, biography and especially history.
Yet another good companion of those early days was a young ABC television producer working at the local Brisbane studio. His name was Roger McDonald and we used to meet often after work over a few pots at the Royal Exchange for heated arguments about writing. As we got to know each other better, Roger showed me some poems he had been working on. I had done a lot of work as a graduate student on F. Scott Fitzgerald and I was fascinated by the way Roger’s imagination was triggered by his feel for Australian history just as Fitzgerald's had been by American history. Ashamed of my ignorance of Australian history, I had monitored Roger Joyce's Australian history course and had read extensively in the area, somewhat discouraged by how boring most of the then published material was. Roger McDonald’s poetry excited me and showed me that Australian history was not so dull after all. It also rekindled my interest in poetry. I told Roger that if he could produce enough poetry to make a book, he had a publisher. It was to be several years before he had accumulated enough poems that passed his stringent standards of quality and we were able to publish our first poetry volume, Citizens of Mist, in 1968.
In fact, 1968 was a banner year for us in poetry publishing because we also published Rodney Hall’s and Tom Shapcott’s anthology of contemporary poetry, New Impulses in Australian Poetry. It was a highly significant book because it heralded the renaissance of poetry in this country. Its success took us all by surprise. Both Hall and Shapcott had been extremely annoyed by the delay in publishing while we waited for a Commonwealth Literary Fund grant, no publisher in those days being willing to take a punt on poetry without a grant because the accepted wisdom was poetry did not sell. They were convinced the delay had ruined any sales we might make, because, they argued with some justification, the impulses were no longer new. But in fact the sales of New Impulses forced us into a reprint within a remarkably short time, and into a paperback reprint at that — an unheard of occurrence. Even Citizens of Mist sold out and we were launched on one of the major voyages of the University of Queensland Press.
Our entry into poetry publishing could not have been better timed. Few publishers were interested in handling poetry because of the difficult economics involved. Angus & Robertson had what little market there was and most of the well-known names. But almost all of these names belonged to an older generation which had come of age either before or during the war. Aside from our friendly rivals in the city, Jacaranda Press, very few publishers had attempted more than the occasional volume by a younger poet. There were good reasons for this. The poetry market was seen as small, and conventional wisdom dictated lavish design, paper and binding to help make the comparatively high retail price, necessitated by a small print run, more palatable. The few publishers chancing their arm with poetry (the Press included) also insisted on a Commonwealth Literary Fund grant as a hedge against the inevitable loss poetry incurred. There were, however, some real problems connected with CLF grants which in fact militated against their avowed purpose of encouraging cultural publishing. First, they were very slow in approving grants, which made it difficult to catch the wave of interest a young writer might be receiving, and a publisher ran the risk of either losing a good manuscript or losing a potential market opening. Second, the grants were made as a subsidy against loss which meant the book had to be priced at a level that allowed a return to the CLF should it sell sufficient quantities to break even. This encouraged the slim expensive volume mind-set and the self-fulfilling prophecy that poetry books did not sell.
Few realised the market had changed. In 1969 David Malouf came to see me with a poetry manuscript. I was very excited by it and really anxious to publish, but David was adamant that it had to be a paperback. I feared we would end up with an expensive paperback that would be rejected by a market used to paperbacks at very cheap prices. David remained stubbornly rock solid. What to do? It occurred to me we had several poetry manuscripts under consideration and we had recently purchased an IBM typesetting typewriter which was capable of passable imitations of conventional typefaces. I called in our production manager and asked her what the per-copy production cost would be if we set the manuscripts in-house ourselves and printed 1000 copies of four titles simultaneously. After some scribbling on the back of an envelope (in those pre-calculator days), she came up with 25 cents a copy. I told David we had a deal, and Paperback Poets were born at a retail price of $1.00. They were an instant success and sold in their thousands to a young market rebelling against the Vietnam War and eager to read and listen to the words of their peers rather than their elders.
By the end of the 1960s the Press had certainly grown beyond what the university at the beginning of the decade had envisaged. We were publishing close to forty book titles a year and we had a staff of fifteen. One of the most important additions to our staff in terms of impact on our reputation as a literary publisher was Roger McDonald. Before Citizens of Mist was published in 1968, Roger had been transferred to Hobart. He wrote to me and said he felt it was time to leave the ABC and would like very much to get into publishing. Did I know anyone in the business who would be willing to give him a go? I did and his name was Frank Thompson. It looked to me as if poetry could become a significant part of our list and Roger would make the perfect poetry editor. Unfortunately, the university was not as convinced as I was that poetry was important enough to justify an editor's salary. I knew if I put up the creation of a poetry editor position it would be knocked back. However, I also knew the university was keen on new technology and I could convince them that new ways of imparting information was an important next step for us. Who better to become the new audio-visual editor than the bright young ABC television producer in Hobart? Roger, in fact, filled both roles with distinction. Not only did we develop, largely through his efforts, the best poetry list in Australia, but we also became early and major players in non-book publishing.
In 1964 John Strugnell from the English Department asked me if I would be interested in helping him form a course in American Literature. Although my degrees were in English Literature, I had taken a large number of courses in American Literature at both undergraduate and graduate level. I also had some experience as a tutor in English at Michigan State University and as a teacher at Manly Boys High School. Given the direction I was trying to take the Press, it was a terrific opportunity and I jumped at it, although it meant increasing my workload by about 50 per cent in the early years. Together John and I decided which authors we each felt best qualified to teach and divided the lecturing load fairly evenly between us. The ten years or so I spent teaching American Literature turned out to be one of the most enjoyable experiences of my life. It meant I was in constant contact with my market, the young generation of readers and thinkers who were buying and reading the kinds of books I was publishing. As an added bonus the course attracted a large number of young writers — like Roger McDonald, Tom Shapcott, Rodney Hall, Craig Munro and others — which helped my networking no end and kept me intellectually in touch with what was going on in Australian letters.
Unfortunately, the course became so popular that coping with it and the main game of the Press became increasingly difficult. We started with only a small number of students and were able to run the lectures almost like tutorials with lots of give and take, but by the mid-1970s class numbers were huge and the lectures had become formal affairs with the same lecture being given several times a week in large lecture halls, with little student contact. I was also by then often travelling overseas for weeks at a time and John was constantly having to fill in for me. There were now people in the English Department better qualified to do what I had been doing and in the end I was not sorry to give it up.
The Press expanded so rapidly in the 1960s it was difficult to keep up with the volume of work being generated by such a wide-ranging and large list. When I started in 1961, trained staff (if one were allowed to hire them) were difficult to find because there were so few active publishers in Australia. To a large extent I trained the staff myself and most times it was the classical case of the pupil surpassing the master. At least I chose the raw candidates well. One student of mine who had impressed me with his quiet abilities and genuine feel for writing, perhaps partly due to his being a trained journalist, was Craig Munro. After Craig finished his degree in late 1971, I offered him a job in editorial which was feeling the strain in the literary area of having to cope without Roger McDonald who was away on a well-earned sabbatical in England. Craig became an excellent literary editor and continues to be one of the major figures at the Press.
Presentation involving good design and exacting production standards are very important in all publishing and essential in literary publishing where clever design can mask the economies necessary in low-print-run work. This was difficult to find in Brisbane in the 1960s. Many of our earlier books were designed in Melbourne by Rick Ressom and printed at Wilkes. Occasionally we used designers from Jacaranda, but it became increasingly obvious we would have do something ourselves. Production and design are demanding disciplines and require more time than I was able to give them. One of our young shop assistants, Cyrelle Birt, was an artist who drew and painted in her spare time, I offered her a job in publishing as a production assistant and trained her myself in production and book design. I also arranged for her to spend several weeks with Wilke Printers in Melbourne and Halstead in Sydney. She became in time our production manager and chief designer. She proved to be a much better designer than her teacher, went on to win a number of design awards, and was certainly one of the leading members of the team which made the Press the distinguished publishing house it has become.
Another vital element in any successful publishing organisation is marketing and sales. I had had some marketing training at Michigan State University Press but my really intensive training was with Prentice-Hall. This had left me with no illusions about the importance of effective marketing. As we began to grow, our lack of any coherent marketing was becoming more and more obvious. We were not large enough to justify sales staff outside of order processing, so I arranged a deal whereby our marketing was done by Ure Smith. Our list, on the whole, fitted nicely with theirs in that it didn’t directly compete but filled gaps which enabled their sales people to present a well-rounded package to the trade. Eventually in the mid-1960s we reached a stage where our publishing was large enough to require the talents of a full-time sales manager, and we were successful in persuading Larry Chapman, Ure Smith's New South Wales sales representative, to join us. Larry and I had been close friends since my first day at Angus & Robertson in 1959 where he had been a bookseller under the great Hedley Jefferies, and we made a good marketing team at the Press.
Because of my interests as a university student and my subsequent stint lecturing in American literature, it had always been a dream of mine that we would someday publish serious fiction. Our success with Paperback Poets had led me to think we might be able to do something similar with prose fiction. I had met Michael Wilding sometime before at the Newcastle in George Street where I often drank when I was in Sydney. Michael had introduced me to Frank Moorhouse and I knew they were both writing short stories and publishing them in ‘men’s’ magazines such as Chance. In fact, through knowing them I was acutely conscious of how difficult it was to get short fiction published. It seemed to me that if Chance was prepared to take them on there must be some kind of market out there for serious young fiction, and I thought we might be able to do something akin to Paperback Poets in production terms to make it affordable for that market.
A more difficult problem was the political situation in the university. The anti-Vietnam War demonstrations were reaching their peak and students were rebelling on campuses all over Australia. The Queensland government was also particularly exercised by its perception of what constituted pornography and tended to see it everywhere. Cyrelle had been threatened in 1970 with legal action over a poster she had designed for a student performance of Lysistrata in which she had used an Aubrey Beardsley drawing. The police had arrested the cast of Alex Buzo's play Norm and Ahmed for obscenity on the strength of one four-letter word. Michael Wilding's and Frank Moorhouse's work exploring explicit sex and drug taking was not going to be easy to sell to a university administration shell-shocked by attacks from left-wing students and right-wing governments who held the purse strings. I was determined to push on with my plan to publish contemporary fiction, but in the end it was made clear to me, to my everlasting regret, that if I were to persist with Moorhouse s The Americans, Baby it would be the last fiction we would publish. Our first two titles in the new Paperback Prose series published in 1972 were, therefore, Michael Wildings Aspects of the Dying Process and Rodney Hall's The Ship on the Coin. They were both good books and I am proud of them, but I shall always regret that the brilliant Frank Moorhouse never became a UQP author.
This was also about the time we began to publish hardback fiction. David Malouf and I over a dinner to celebrate the publication of Bicycle and Other Poems in the inaugural Paperback Poets series began talking about the poems in the book. I told him how much I liked a poem entitled 'The Year of the Foxes’ and he pointed out it was a poem about his mother wearing a fox fur, a style much in vogue during the war years. This led us into a discussion about the Brisbane of David’s youth, and I was absolutely enthralled by his vivid descriptions of life in what seemed a far off but fascinating time. I particularly remember him describing the prostitutes sitting on the verandahs in the sultry summer evenings with Rita Hayworth hair styles and the smell of frangipani pervading the night air. I suggested we do a Brisbane book based on his recollections. He would supply the text and we would do the picture research. We parted still excitedly discussing this new project.
A few months later I was at Sydney University seeing Michael Wilding in the English Department where David was a tutor. We encountered each other in the hall and David said, ‘Oh, by the way, that Brisbane book has turned into a novel.’ I must confess my heart sank. I thought, ‘Oh, God, another poet who thinks he can write prose fiction! Hopefully, David never saw my disappointment as I smiled and made as many encouraging remarks as I could. Of course, the novel turned out to be Johnno, surely the best novel ever written about Brisbane and the first novel by one of Australia's greatest living writers. It was also our first fiction title published initially only as a hardback.
Because Australian fiction writers had been starved of publishing outlets for so long, there were actually not many young talented writers looking for publishers. With the success of Paperback Prose and our hardback fiction well launched, we needed quality manuscripts to keep up the momentum we had created in the marketplace. Michael Wilding suggested looking further afield than Australia and after some discussion we agreed to form a series devoted to Asian and Pacific writing. Like me, Michael did not have any Asian languages and what he had read came from translations which were often hard to find. Later he suggested we enlist Harry Aveling who was fluent in Indonesian, a good judge of writing and most importantly had Asian connections. Eventually the Asian and Pacific Writing series was co-edited by Wilding and Aveling. This series later led to another under the general editorship of Kevin Windle called Contemporary Russian Writing.
These later scenes reflected a change in our marketing emphasis. Towards the end of the 1960s Ure Smith had merged its marketing operation with Horwitz. The Horwitz list with its emphasis on school texts and mass market paperbacks was not very compatible with ours. We were also rapidly reaching a difficult position in that we had achieved all the market penetration possible through using agents. If we were to expand penetration, we would need to do it ourselves. Furthermore, I realised it would be difficult to retain literary authors if we did not have international marketing. It seemed to me the best plan would be to establish a national marketing operation on our own and form an alliance with a multinational publisher to represent us overseas. Up until this point I had served as the front person making policy and as the contact for our marketing agents, with Larry Chapman doing the really hard work of making sure it all came together as well as covering Queensland as a sales representative. It took some time to put all the elements of a new marketing operation together, but eventually I believe we found the right mix.
The key to our international thrust was Prentice-Hall who agreed to act as our marketing agent throughout the world excluding North America. Although our list was not completely compatible with Prentice-Hall’s (theirs being oriented mainly towards tertiary-level textbooks), there were enough synergies to ensure we were well represented and sales while not spectacular were satisfactory. It had the added advantage that I personally knew many of the overseas representatives through my time at Prentice-Hall.
The United States remained a problem. We just could not afford to do nothing in New York and expect to retain our authors. As President of the ABPA I had represented Australia in Paris at UNESCO’s Year of the Book in 1972 and while there had met Ted Crane, the former President and owner of Van Nostrand. Ted had recently sold Van Nostrand and had formed a publishing/consulting company, Crane Russak, in New York. I had some preliminary talks with him following our Paris meeting about North American representation, and I was able to follow these up in New York later in the year after a meeting in Toronto in September which founded the International Association of Scholarly Presses. Ted convinced me that we could do nothing in the United States without an agent working on our behalf. This was a fairly expensive option for us at the time, but I felt it was a case of investing for the future. Our first agent was Penny Warren and she did much of the early groundwork before leaving us to join Pitman. Together she and I found a replacement in Pearl Bowman who proved to be a real winner. Pearl helped put in place a distribution operation working out of Massachusetts and through her championing of Australian literature became one of the most respected American sources for information on contemporary Australian writing. Although Pearl herself was not enthusiastic about selling rights, her efforts in finding the best rights contacts for me on my periodic visits to New York enabled us to sell North American rights to US publishers and heightened our credibility with our authors. Pearl also became a point of contact for our authors visiting the US and she acted as a benevolent Godmother to many Australians encountering the Big Apple for the first time.
In writing of Pearl it reminds me that UQP’s success and personality are the work of many hands, and I am sorry I cannot mention them all in a chapter primarily devoted to setting the scene. It was my privilege to work with a number of very dedicated and talented people who were the real creators of this wonderful publishing house. It was an exciting place to be and a lot of fun. It was also a lot of hard work and there were times when we all suffered from burn-out. I left in 1983 to take on new publishing challenges. I left with considerable regret and I shall always be rather sorry I did, but it was time someone else took the Press into fresh fields. I had the privilege of leading it for twenty-two years, and this has been a small and rather selective account of those years.