AustLit
Michael Wilding is the author of a dozen volumes of fiction including four UQP titles: Aspects of the Dying Process (1972), Living Together (1974), The West Midland Underground (1975) and Wildest Dreams: A Selective Memoir (1998). His other titles include Pacific Highway (1982), The Paraguayan Experiment (1984), This Is for You (1994), and Somewhere New: New & Selected Stories (1996). He holds a personal chair in English and Australian Literature at Sydney University and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Biography from The Writer's Press, 1998.
Michael Wilding retired from his position as Professor of English and Australian Literature (which he had held since 1993) in 2000, and became Emeritus Professor. His recent works include the 'Plant' series of novels, beginning with National Treasure (UQP, 2007). He published a collection of essays on books and writing, Wild about Books in 2019.
FOR SERIOUS WRITERS in Australia, the early 1970s were much like now. Publishing was dominated by foreign interests — not as large and powerful as the current transnationals, but no less greedy and accountant driven. What local publishing had sprung up in the 1950s and 1960s had pretty well all succumbed to foreign takeovers. And the beginning of the takeover of independent distribution by overseas publishing groups was under way. Globalisation was in process. It was a bleak scene for local writing.
The origins of UQP’s fiction list are somewhat hazy, though no less so than is the continuation and development. It must have involved meeting Frank Thompson over a drink or two, but whether in Brisbane or Sydney I don’t remember. Memory has tended to blur it into one long continuous drink or two. It was Peter Edwards, with whom I had worked at Sydney University before he took up the chair of English at Queensland, who introduced my fiction to Frank. UQP had begun publishing poetry and their Paperback Poetry series was making an impact, certainly among the poets who in those days were nothing if not vocal. So the obvious thing to suggest to Frank was, if there was a Paperback Poetry series, why not a Paperback Prose series?
The argument went something like this. Since poetry was perceived as unprofitable by commercial publishers, a number of academic presses in the United States had begun to publish it in order to preserve the tradition. Wesleyan was the example always cited. But fiction, especially short stories, was also being perceived as non-commercial. Literary fiction was in as vulnerable a situation as poetry, and needed a visionary publisher.
Frank rose to the occasion. He didn’t really have to be persuaded. Even as I was arguing the case he had already seen it. What was exciting about working with him in those days was his intuitive response and his adventurous spirit. He could see the need, see the opportunity, and he did it. Of course, it all took a bit longer than that. There were press boards and vice-chancellors and distributors who needed to be given a solid case. But he made it.
For some reason a series was decided on. Maybe those were the days of series. Maybe it was a matter of containment. Anyway, a series was decided on, I sent up my manuscript, and the next thing that happened was I was sent down the manuscript of Rodney Hall’s The Ship on the Coin.
Rodney was the first of the poets who was switching to fiction: David Malouf and Tom Shapcott later followed him. I took a dim view of this, believing poets should stick in their own ghetto. They tended to turn to fiction with no sense of the constraints and disciplines and traditions, seemingly writing it off the top of their heads and consequently doing quite well at it. But even in those days I was shrewd enough to realise that if there was to be a series it needed titles, and if titles were not recommended there would be no series and I would be without a publisher. And so it happened that the first two UQP Paperback Prose volumes were my Aspects of the Dying Process and Rodney’s Ship on the Coin. We launched them at Jim Thorburn’s Pocket Bookshop in Sydney. The reporter from Vogue couldn’t get her mind round it. ‘So tell me, is this academic fiction? Are these university novels?’ Brian Kiernan in the Australian wrote about the series as a workshop for new fiction. ‘It promises to fulfil a valuable role that the underground poetry press and the theatre workshops have already performed for younger poets and playwrights.’ I remember being rather offended by this and I was provoked to develop the less than positive idea of the sheltered workshop for new fiction in The Short Story Embassy. I viewed the UQP titles as fully finished, professional books with real commercial potential, and they didn’t need to be put in any special category. It was hard not to feel embattled. A reading was arranged at the University of New South Wales to promote the first two titles. Rodney Hall and I turned up. But there was not one person in the audience, just the student organiser. She has since gone on to big things. Well, so has Rodney. But on this occasion the future didn’t look so rosy.
And it hadn’t been as simple as that either. These were the days of change. Australia had been living in a very protected, repressive environment of official censorship under the old Liberal—Country party coalition. The list of banned books contained titles by Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence, Leonard Cohen, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, James Joyce and many more. It was a grotesque situation and it put Australia in the category of Ireland and South Africa and Franco’s Spain. But that was the dominant environment.
For those of us beginning our writing careers then, these restraints were idiotic. Lawrence and Joyce had been writing forty years ago. Copies of most of the banned books circulated. In our own practice we disregarded the taboos on four-letter words and sexual incidents. It meant, of course, that there were constant skirmishes with printers, publishers, editors, magistrates and such like. Frank, taking another look at my manuscript, decided it was tricky enough publishing fiction with a university press without being impaled for pornography as well. The climate in Queensland at the time was less than progressive. He decided to show the manuscript to the vice-chancellor to ensure that he had support before going ahead.
I can see why Frank did it, though the consequences annoyed me at the time. The then vice-chancellor, Zelman Cowen, took a dim view of the book. Two stories he particularly objected to: ‘The Phallic Forest’ (which Peter Carey always insisted was the best thing I’d written) and ‘The Image of a Sort of Death’.
I remember sitting lugubriously with Frank in the University of Sydney club as he, with some obvious anxiety, delivered the message. It was probably the time the manager came up to me and told me I was no longer a financial member and was not entitled to be there, having been on leave and forgotten to renew my subscription. It just added to the general sense of being outside the law. The Queensland vice-chancellor had been some sort of legal academic.
The message, briefly, was to cut out the offending material from the stories. I was outraged, of course. I often was in those days. My deathless prose to be mutilated! It was unthinkable, unacceptable. How could writing still be treated like this in the 1970s? This was the sort of thing that had driven Lawrence into exile fifty years earlier. I already was in exile. The whole splendid enterprise seemed to be thwarted before it had even begun. It was one of those long beery evenings with Frank of which I have no clear recollection. Indeed, no recollection at all. He was amazing in that he would always put up with long difficult sessions with his authors. Especially over a drink. In the end he made me see reason. I didn’t withdraw the book. Where after all would I have withdrawn it to? Rather than rewrite and amputate and otherwise deface and dismember the two stories, I took them out altogether. The book went ahead. Frank swore me to silence, since he didn’t want the series jeopardised by scandalous rumours of interference and compromise. Some years later I mentioned what had happened to Elizabeth Wynhausen and she ran the story in the press. But by then the censorship days were over, for a while.
The series established, Frank and his fiction editor Craig Munro began scouting around for further titles. The same censorship problem had come up with Frank Moorhouse. Moorhouse and I were closely linked in literary terms in those days, and Frank Thompson could see very good reasons for getting Moorhouse onto the list. Moorhouse offered him the stories that later provided the basis for the Dusan Makevejev movie The Coca-Cola Kid. But once again the vice-chancellor demurred, and the project came to nothing. It was a pity. UQP was attempting an innovative list and was in a position to have cornered the best new talent around. But, as always, the creative are thwarted by the uncreative.
There were endless battles in the early seventies over four-letter words and sexual content. Looking back on it all now, this issue seems to have been pretty much a diversion. The libertarians focused on taboo words, while substantive issues of political and economic change were displaced from attention. The censorship battles were a smokescreen behind which late industrial capitalism globalised. At the time, however, I was swept along in the anti-censorship struggle along with many others. Having had our fiction rejected as disgusting and unacceptable, we decided to try to promote it under just those labels. I assembled a collection of so-called Disgusting and Unacceptable Stories at the invitation of Ron Smith of Horwitz. Needless to say they didn’t publish it. But when Craig Munro phoned me to say UQP had a spare subsidy or spare slot or spare something for another title in the Paperback Prose list and did I have any ideas, I sent up the collection. It contained stories by Moorhouse, Vicki Viidikas, myself and Peter Carey, who had written ‘Life and Death on South Side Pavilion’ especially for the volume, or so he said. Craig, too, decided against the anthology but leapt on the Peter Carey stories with acuity and avidity and ended up securing a volume of them for the series. At that stage Carey was unknown. Moorhouse and I had been publishing his early work in Tabloid Story (where Craig first read him) and I’d been publishing him in Jon Silkins UK journal Stand, for which I was Australian editor. I thought his stories were marvellous, though the blurb that appeared over my name on his second book, War Crimes, was written by Peter himself and read out to me over the phone for my approval late one night. I never felt it caught my idiom, but as Peter disarmingly put it to me once, his skills were not verbal. But he seemed like a talent worth encouraging. ‘You’ll regret it,’ said Moorhouse darkly. Peter’s stories appeared as The Fat Man in History, together with my novel Living Together. A year later Murray Bail’s Contemporary Portraits was published, along with David Malouf’s first novel, Johnno. The reviews were all good, the sales were all good, the series was established.
Writing in Australia in the late 1960s, there were two major problems. First was getting into print, given the paucity and unsatisfactoriness of local publishing and the lack of much connection with the English-language publishing centres of London and New York. The other was getting your work noticed once it was in print, the problem of how to showcase it. Apart from a reputation for cheap fortified wines, Australia was primarily perceived as a land of sport, a suitable place for the Olympic games. The UQP series Asian and Pacific Writing grew out of a venture I had worked on with Frank Moorhouse that had come to nothing. We had conceived of a southern-hemisphere, English-language literary magazine. We would challenge Paris Review and London Magazine on their own terms, by producing a world-quality magazine from the south. The models we had in mind were el corno emplumado, an avant-garde literary review that came out of Mexico City, and the US New American Review, that sold as a paperback. We tried various backers without success. But I had done a lot of research on English-language writers and translators in the region. In large part the project had been influenced by a visit I had made to the Philippines in 1966 with a Sydney colleague, Peter King. I had encountered a wealth of English-language writing and publishing unknown to readers in Australia, Britain or the US, much of it in Frankie Jose’s marvellous Solidaridad bookshop in Manila. Frankie’s enthusiasm, lively conversation and range of contacts was a major inspiration.
So when Frank Thompson asked, having settled the Paperback Prose proposal, whether I had any other ideas, I revived and adapted this one. A magazine no longer seemed the best way to run. Magazines were not in UQP’s sights at that time. But what about a series of books drawing on contemporary writing in the region — Asia and the Pacific? My argument was that there were amazing and exciting things there. The stories of the Filipino writer Nick Joaquin were every bit as striking and original and magical as the Latin American writings of Borges, Cortazar, Fuentes and Carpentier that were currently in vogue. Here were new and invigorating approaches that would vitalise and cross fertilise new Australian writing. My focus on all this was that of a writer in Australia — this could be the next avant-garde, the next new wave. My interests were literary, not anthropological or political or economic or geographical. These other interests could be served by the series; they would provide an additional market to the ubiquitous and never especially convincing ‘general reader’. But they would be a bonus. They were not areas in which I could claim any expertise. It was my basic conviction that there was exciting work coming out of the region that anyone with an interest in contemporary writing would want to read.
The political agenda of Australia as part of Asia had yet to be vocalised. In that regard the series was ahead of its time, and that meant being ahead of the market. I had great visions for the series, international co-publishing and such like. Some of it indeed eventuated. A number of the titles were accepted into the UNESCO translations series. A number were sold internationally — Modern Japanese Poetry (translated by James Kirkup) became an Open University set text in the UK. Kiran Nagarkar was published in the US. Antonio Enriquez won a prize for his volume of stories in the Philippines. Padma River Boatman has been made into a feature film. Ninotchka Rosea went on to write a biography of Marcos for a US publisher.
Asian and Pacific Writing was always hard to administer, though probably not especially more so than any other publishing list. Translators and editors were endlessly delayed, deadlines had continually to be revised. There was not much of a tradition of literary translation in Australia, and not much at all from Asian languages. Many of the translations were by people who knew the original languages well but who were not especially literary in orientation themselves — many were anthropologists, academics, political advisers, journalists. Consequently a lot of detailed work on the texts was necessary. Some titles took years to develop. Some projects came to nothing, despite endless correspondence, discussions and meetings.
The first two volumes were a collection of Nick Joaquin’s stories, which he called Tropical Gothic, and an Indonesian novel, Atheis by Achdiat Karta Mihardja, translated by R. J. Maguire, a sub-editor on the Australian. Joaquin s stories I had discovered in Frankie Jose's bookshop on my visit to the Philippines. The Achdiat novel had come to UQP independently, but was obviously appropriate for the series. And this was how the series progressed; some titles I sought out, others came through UQP’s own network. Once the series was established and the first titles were published, it attracted material from throughout the region. It made a considerable impact among writers in Asia, and I continue to meet people who remember it enthusiastically.
One of the virtues of the series was that it was eclectic. Its only agenda was that of finding good writing, and we found it in all sorts of areas. Ulli Beier was a German writer and academic, internationally famous for the work he did in developing writing in English in Nigeria. His work there, and that of the writers he had encouraged, was widely published, but his later work in Papua New Guinea, where he had moved in the 1970s, was scarcely known. I wrote asking if he would do a book for us, and the resulting Black Writing from New Guinea was one of our great successes. The English poet James Kirkup’s translations of contemporary Japanese poets had been appearing in literary journals, notably in Grace Perry’s Poetry Australia, so I wrote to him for a volume. He was eager to provide the translations, but diffident about writing a contextualising introduction and suggested finding an academic in the area to cooperate with him. A. R. (‘Bertie’) Davis was professor of Chinese and Japanese at the University of Sydney. He had edited a comparable volume of modern Chinese poetry for Penguin, working with the translators. He undertook the Kirkup collaboration with vigour and enthusiasm, immersing himself in contemporary Japanese poetry and engaging in a massive editorial and research project. It took a long time but the resulting volume was well worth it. Bonnie McDougall’s splendid anthology of the work of the Chinese writer Ho Ch’i-fang was based on a doctoral thesis she had recently completed in Bertie’s department. She is now professor of Chinese at the University of Edinburgh.
Harry Aveling sent in a volume of Contemporary Indonesian Poetry and a collection of stories by Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Pramoedya had been in gaol in Indonesia for years as a political prisoner. His case was hardly known in the West at that time. We published one of the stories in Tabloid Story and Frank Moorhouse and I wrote a letter to the Australian about his treatment. Harry’s translations marked the beginning of the public recognition of Pramoedya’s situation. Later, after the series had closed down, Penguin published a trilogy of Pramoedya’s novels in a translation by Max Lane. Another lively Indonesian writer we published was W S. Rendra: Harry translated some of his poems for the Contemporary Indonesian Poetry volume, and Max Lane translated his play, The Struggle of the Naga Tribe, for the series.
Harry Aveling was a prolific and enthusiastic translator from Indonesian and Malay. I suggested he should join me as co-editor of the series and he readily agreed. From then on we shared the load of reading the manuscripts that came in, and searching out new titles. At some point Harry became a follower of Rajnish, changed his name to Aridas Anand, and started wearing orange robes. We had one editorial lunch in a Brisbane restaurant, but after Harry’s arrival in resplendent saffron I think Frank Thompson decided never to take us out in public again. He could disregard the name change, refuse to put it in the books and still write to Aridas as Harry, but he couldn’t ignore the yellow robes across the table unless he closed his eyes or kept them fixed on a jar of amber fluid. I think he chose the latter.
The series ran for ten years and twenty volumes. The problems came when UQP decided to cut back to one title a year. I felt it wasn’t enough to maintain the presence of the series. Worse, it meant either building up a lengthy backlog of titles waiting to appear, or rejecting manuscripts that were appealing but that would have had to wait two, three, four years for publication. The amount of reading for the series was becoming huge — and with only one title a year, frustrating. Overloaded with other commitments — by now I was running my own press, Wild & Woolley, with Pat Woolley — I regretfully resigned from the series. Frank left UQP not long afterwards, and in the reorganising the series was closed down. But it was marvellous while it lasted. I would do it again. Once in a while I meet Harry in Singapore or Canberra and we talk about reviving it.
They were exciting years in Australian publishing, the early seventies. Much of the writing had been done in the bottled-up years of the late sixties. I am not sure that the so-called Whitlam years were that creative. Certainly, the increased Australia Council funding and the more liberal climate meant things appeared that could not appear earlier. But even here the policies were ambiguous. Consistently the Literature Board refused to do anything about distribution. At a point when independent distributors were being absorbed by transnational publishers and when new small and independent presses could find no access to efficient distribution, the Literature Board did nothing. Publication subsidies were dispensed, publicity money splashed around, but a national distribution policy for all that funded writing was never drawn up. The Literature Board also always insisted on giving money readily to transnational publishers — unlike the Canada Council which restricted funds to Canadian-owned companies. In this as in so much else Australian governmental policy seemed to be in the pockets of the transnationals rather than trying to confront or mitigate their destructive effects.
UQP established itself valiantly in this hostile commercial climate. When it began its literary and Asian lists, it was perceived as a marginal, eccentric organisation. How could you have a publisher in Brisbane, publishers were all in Melbourne? But UQP showed the way. Soon its literary list began to take the centre ground, and small presses like Wild & Woolley and Outback set up as publishers of the alternative and the avant-garde. There was room for all of us, though I felt that Frank always looked askance at my involvement in Wild & Woolley. But we never saw ourselves in opposition or competition. The reality was that there was all this amazing, exciting, new Australian writing, and no one but UQP and the small presses was publishing it.
And even if distribution was a nightmare and sales a problem, the media responded. The media recognition of the new writing, the way it welcomed the new initiatives, showed that there was an interest in what was being done. That readers wanted to know about the material, even wanted to buy it. Effectively the transnationals were shamed into having to publish Australian writing, easier as it would have been just to keep on importing the overseas product and monopolising distribution channels. But it was only after UQP and the small presses showed the way that the transnationals developed their local literary lists in the 1980s. And that development was not in response to specifically Australian conditions, needless to say. They were doing the same in Canada, New Zealand, India, keeping the natives quiet, making it look like they were giving writers access to international markets, but in fact just providing a local reservation. But that is to move to the unsatisfactory decade, the eighties. I prefer to end with remembering those happy days in the seventies, sitting in the twilight on the verandah of the university staff club at St Lucia, cane toads hopping around at my feet, clambering up my legs, the endless flights of flying foxes slowly flapping down the Brisbane River. Those were magical times. Frank’s personal life by then was achieving a complexity of a rather Gothic or Baroque or Rococo flamboyance, one of those terms, anyway. But this was the seventies and that was what personal lives were all about in the seventies, it seemed. We would commiserate on the way in which things seemed to be lurching out of control and have another drink and watch another thousand flying foxes waft slowly past, and it seemed like it would all go on for ever.