AustLit
D’Arcy Randall, formerly UQP fiction editor, has had her poetry, articles and reviews published in Australian, Canadian and US journals and newspapers. She co-founded the journal Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and is now a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin.
Biography from The Writer's Press, 1998.
After completing her PhD, D'Arcy Randall became Associate Professor of Instruction in the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. As well as her focus on engineering communications, she continues to teach reading and writing poetry.
I BEGAN WORKING FOR the University of Queensland Press in early 1980. I was hired by Frank Thompson as in-house editor, a title that made me the reader and editor for the fiction list, the copy editor for several scholarly titles and textbooks, and the chief paper-pusher for the Russian Writing Series and the Asian and Pacific Writing Series. As time passed, I took on more administrative duties, including working with the Literature Board of the Australia Council and UQP’s agents for foreign rights, but my job became more and more focused on literature. When Laurie Muller took over as Manager, I continued running the fiction list, but also became the in-house liaison for Barbara Ker Wilson's new Young Adult Series and helped coordinate the paperback reprint series. Such was my job when I left UQP in 1989.
For me, my career at UQP was a fortunate fluke. When I started working there, my family and I had only recently migrated to Australia from the United States, and I knew next to nothing about contemporary Australian literature. On the other hand, I had grown up in a bookish publishing family and had worked with the Louisiana State University Press, so the literary culture of passionate affinities and bitter squabbling was nothing new. Moreover, the ‘Australian renaissance’ of the 1970s and 1980s — the obsessive artistic drive to explore Australia’s past and to re-present its many faces to the world — resonated powerfully with me. Unlike most migrants, I had strong familial ties to Australia, through an Irish Australian grandfather. Although this grandfather died well before I was born, he was a mythic presence in my childhood. My mother had told me many stories about his youth in Western Victoria of the 1880s and 1890s, hunting with Aborigines [sic], winning footraces and breaking horses. A great uncle had survived Gallipoli, and family gossip whispered that some of our in-laws had harboured Ned Kelly, so during my Australian years I would see variations of my own family history and mythos realised in book after book.
However, I soon discovered that UQP’s position in the Australian literary renaissance was complex. In fact, I spent much of my first year or so puzzling over what was specifically ‘Australian’ about the famous fiction list that I had inherited. Of course, Roger McDonald’s 1915 reimagined the Anzac tragedy at Gallipoli, and some of Peter Carey’s stories and David Malouf’s Johnno brooded on certain features of Australia’s psychic landscape, but my first, overwhelming impression of the list was its eclectic worldliness.
During the 1970s, UQP’s fiction list had developed largely around short stories, and the most influential story writers like Michael Wilding, Murray Bail, Peter Carey and Barry Oakley — not to mention the guiding absence of Frank Moorhouse — had created a list of sharp, urbane tales that clearly targeted a readership not just in Sydney and Melbourne but also in London and New York (especially New Yorkers). UQP even hosted a New Yorker writer on its list: John Updike. Frank Thompson had purchased an Australasian edition of The Coup, a title that meant a lot to UQP at the time. Lined up on the publishing list above ‘John Updike’, the names of the other UQP writers looked just fine. This ‘American Dream’ of publishing took on a surreal dimension during the Updike promotion, when for a month or so the central hallway between our offices sported a life-sized cardboard image of Updike in tennis gear, posed as if to lob any number of UQP writers over the net and into the court of the New Yorker itself.
This dream was, in one sense, not so far-fetched. Frank had spent much of the 1970s trying to educate American and other foreign publishers about Australian writers, and by 1980 he was justly proud of UQP’s part in the writers' successes: Carey, Bail, Malouf and McDonald had found US and/or London publishers; their worldly careers were starting to take off.
One complication in this picture of ambitious internationalism was the Asian and Pacific Writing Series. This series, initiated by Frank in the early 1970s and edited by Michael Wilding and Harry Aveling, insistently positioned Australia as a South Pacific country with crucial, emerging ties to its Asian neighbours. Aside from its visionary purpose, many of the titles, like Nick Joaquin’s Tropical Gothic or Ninotchka Rosca’s The Monsoon Collection, were simply brilliant books to read, and everyone who worked on the series bemoaned its slow sales. One particular pride of the series was its edited anthologies: Ulli Beier’s Black Writing from New Guinea, Bonnie S. McDougall’s Paths in Dreams: Selected Prose and Poetry of Ho Ch’i-fang, Harry Aveling’s Contemporary Indonesian Poetry and James Kirkup and A. R. Davis’s Contemporary Japanese Poetry. In 1997 I was pleased to see the Asian and Pacific Series win points for integrity when the Kirkup and Davis was praised by Marjorie Perloff in her Boston Review account of the Araki Yasusada ‘hoax’, a scandal that recently stirred American poetry circles. Less immediately relevant to Australian culture, but still intriguing, was the Russian Writing Series, of which the house favourite was Vladimir (‘the other’) Rasputin's pair of novellas, Money for Maria and Borrowed Time, later republished in the UK by Quartet.
Yet despite their worthy aims, these various series and initiatives were quite time consuming, and distracted from my more pressing concern: the direction of the fiction list. UQP had developed its dynamic reputation largely because of its willingness to support new, unproven writers at a time when a new generation of Australian readers was seeking them and few other publishers responded. However, by 1980 UQP’s competition among other fiction and poetry publishers, both Australian and foreign, was starting to grow.
A small but significant part of the competition came from British publishers. The fact that several high-profile writers first published by UQP sent their next manuscripts to London concerned all of us, not just because we had ‘lost’ authors, but because the pattern led other writers to speculate that maybe UQP was a good place to publish a first book, but after that it was ‘time to move on’. Assuming the modest role of literary launching pad was a fate taken for granted by many small presses, but it was a fate UQP management resisted. Both Frank Thompson and, later, Laurie Muller were determined that UQP would not remain small, but would grow up with its writers.
Fortunately for UQP, this resistance was supported to an extent by some unglamorous but significant changes in US-British publishing law. Since 1947 the British Traditional Market Agreement had neatly divided the worlds English-language marketing territories between American and British publishers, who controlled the sales in the post-war Commonwealth countries, including, of course, Australia. The Market Agreement had virtually forced ambitious Australian writers to sever whatever early ties they had with Australian publishers and send their manuscripts overseas. This artistic brain-drain had consequently impoverished (in both senses of the word) Australia’s cultural life. On a more mundane level, Australians had to wait months, even years, to buy important ‘new’ books locally. However, in 1976 a suit filed by the US Justice Department eventually terminated the Traditional Market Agreement in favour of a Consent Decree, which stipulated that traditional ‘Commonwealth’ rights could no longer be licensed automatically. This summary certainly oversimplifies the whole story, but the point is that in the late 1970s a separate ‘Australasian’ or ‘Australian and New Zealand’ publishing territory became at last a theoretical option for ambitious writers and their publishers. Because few writers anywhere bother to keep up with the details of international publishing law, Frank’s purchase of the John Updike edition can be seen, in retrospect, as a creative performance demonstrating serious new publishing possibilities. John Updike (or rather his publisher, or agent) could — and did — bypass the British and sell Australasian rights directly to a publisher like UQP.
Of course, for UQP and other Australian literary publishers, the real opportunity offered by the Consent Decree was less the option of purchasing prestigious (and expensive) American titles than it was the possibility of keeping their ‘own’ successful writers. Ideally, Australian writers could enjoy international careers through British and US houses while at the same time maintaining their ties at home; the Australian publishers need not be left behind. The example of Peter Carey, whose novels were published very successfully by UQP in Australia, Faber in the UK and Knopf in the US, illustrated this ideal. Penguin took over UQP’s distribution in 1984 making it possible for UQP to publish even the trade paperback editions of Carey's immensely successful novels.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s UQP faced another more constructive challenge in the greater willingness of other Australian publishers to risk taking on new writers. The resignation of Beatrice Davis from Angus & Robertson in 1973 had closed one great era in that publisher's history, but A&R subsequently published Frank Moorhouse, giving it a significant stake in UQP’s ‘territory’. Fremantle Arts Centre Press had come out with Elizabeth Jolley’s first story collection in 1976 and her second in 1979. In 1980 Penguin’s splashy paperback publication of Blanche D’Alpuget’s first novel Monkeys in the Dark impressed many writers. But the list I really coveted was that of McPhee Gribble, which included first works by Helen Garner and Beverley Farmer, whose novel Alone had me teary-eyed for days. This list drew attention to an evident bias at UQP: its overwhelming emphasis at that time on male writers.
UQP did list works by two prominent women novelists, Thea Astley and Barbara Hanrahan, but Thea was already well established when she first submitted a manuscript to us. My concern and frustration over the masculine aura of the ‘new writers’ list grew as I sifted through the pile of unsolicited manuscripts (it, too, contained work mostly from men) and spoke with women writers who had sent their first work elsewhere. Meanwhile, of course, excellent new male writers — such as Angelo Loukakis, James McQueen and Victor Kelleher — continued to send in work that I was proud to include on the list.
Finally, a female presence was established at UQP, not, as it turned out, by trendsetting women in their twenties, but by two older (trendsetting) women who had been writing for years: Olga Masters and Elizabeth Jolley. The manuscript of Olga Masters’ The Home Girls arrived via Craig Munro. I have written at length about my and UQP’s relationship with Olga Masters, so will not repeat myself here, but the influence of her personality and exceptional talent on me — and UQP’s list — was profound. When her first collection of stories, The Home Girls, along with Dimitris Tsaloumas’ The Observatory won a National Book Award the following year, the twin victory was like a blessing on UQP’s new decade of publishing. The manuscript of Elizabeth Jolley’s Miss Peabody’s Inheritance arrived, I think, about that time. I had been very interested in Jolley's work and in 1981 had visited her in Western Australia. When her novel arrived, I read it quickly, and delighted in its multiple voices and exquisite pacing. I hoped that the presence of Masters and Jolley would encourage other women to submit manuscripts.
Then, in early 1983, Frank Thompson and head editor Merril Yule suddenly resigned. They left before the university could seek and hire people to replace them, so for a while other staff members and I struggled to resolve any problems that arose.
During this period I tried hard to read promising new manuscripts, but could not spare the time for any that needed work or that I didn’t understand. All of a sudden, professional presentation counted: Marian Eldridge’s immaculate manuscript of Walking the Dog invited me to slow down long enough to explore, and admire, her beautifully cultivated sketches of Australian domestic life. Still, the pile of unsolicited fiction manuscripts began to lean dangerously, like Peter Carey's horses about to fall into the pool.
One morning I received a note from one of the writers, Kate Grenville. She had submitted a manuscript and wondered what had happened to it. She was very polite, causing me to feel extremely guilty, although her manuscript was one that I had set aside to take home.
For me that week, taking manuscripts home was running a serious risk. Despite our collective crisis management, the offices of UQP offered me a daily haven of grown-up order. Going home was the real challenge. My husband was temporarily working in another city, leaving me in charge of our preschooler, who at 6 pm would unfurl the larrikin nature she had repressed all day at the sitters. Then, a friend from out-of-town descended on my 1 1/2 bedroom house with her husband and two toddlers, one of whom kept me awake with his croupy cough and tore into my daughter’s toys after we’d left in the morning. Fortunately, I do not remember the details of that particular evening, except that at around 11.30 pm everyone at last went to bed and I finally got to ‘Bearded Ladies’.
I kept reading well beyond midnight. Like a good filmmaker, Grenville set up a scene, delivered the goods and moved on efficiently. In a few stories, however, her powerful imagination broke through the discipline. I finally collapsed into a weird dream state after finishing the brilliantly nightmarish ‘Country Pleasures’. I could think of no writer who evoked so well the horror of a bad relationship — and from a young woman’s point of view I was even more impressed a few years later, when in Lilian’s Story and Joan Makes History she expanded her range, telling stories as intense and light as her earlier work is intense and dark.
During the 1980s and 1990s no one complained any more about the lack of women writers at UQP. In addition to three novels by Thea Astley and eight by Barbara Hanrahan, we published five books by Olga Masters, three by Elizabeth Jolley, three by Kate Grenville and two by Marian Eldridge. Later, these writers were joined by Janette Turner Hospital, Marion Halligan, Margaret Coombs, Beverley Farmer, Lily Brett, Suzanne Edgar, Lolo Houbein and Gillian Mears. Ironically, the new UQP ‘Collected’ series of short stories is almost entirely composed of women, Peter Carey being the ‘token’ male writer.
From 1981, the fiction list also developed another discernible direction which would become known as ‘multicultural’ or ‘migrant’ fiction. Writing in the 1990s, I find the term ‘multiculturalism’ sometimes confusing to contemporary readers; even during its heyday some writers resisted it as a label. However, at the time the term was meaningful. The growth of UQP’s fiction list, along with the growth of the academic specialty ‘Australian Literature’, had been driven not only by males, but by Anglo-Irish males. Meanwhile, the ethnic background of Australia had changed dramatically after World War II, when migrants from Southern and Eastern Europe moved into the major Australian cities and quickly began to influence cultural life. Australia not only gained mature artists like Dimitris Tsaloumas and Maria Lewitt, but the children of this generation were beginning to write and publish. The second generation had grown up in two worlds, hearing (if not speaking) two languages, struggling with two sets of values: it was not surprising that many sought artistic expression of these tensions.
Meanwhile academics began to question just who/what was an ‘Australian’ writer, and educators in secondary and primary schools became concerned that their texts reflect more accurately the multicultural origins of their students. This trend was also supported politically when the Literature Board of the Australia Council added funding specifically directed toward multicultural writing, and the prestigious New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award added a prize for multicultural fiction.
Angelo Loukakis’ For the Patriarch was published just at the right time to take advantage of these academic, educational and political developments. I had a particular interest in this collection because it was one of the first I worked on at UQP, and Angelo later became a ‘second-reader’ and a good friend. The characters in his stories, mostly Greek migrants and their families living in Australian cities, also seemed like friends, and all of us at UQP were personally as well as professionally delighted when For the Patriarch and, later, Vernacular Dreams became successful in so many ways.
About the time UQP published For the Patriarch another, dramatically different migrant story arrived circuitously from Rosa Cappiello, who had moved to Sydney from Naples in the 1960s. Her first novel, Paese Fortunato, a scarifying but bracingly energetic account of some women migrants’ experiences in Sydney, had been first published in Italy by the famous literary publisher Feltrinelli. UQP’s Australian-English translation took a tremendous amount of time to organise and publish. Not everyone liked the Italian novel, and Cappiello herself was rightly concerned about who would translate her work. She eventually worked productively with Gaetano Rando, and the resulting novel, Oh Lucky Country, has become a favourite on Women’s Studies syllabi.
Despite my sympathy with the initial motivations of ‘multiculturalism’, as time passed I began to wonder what the word actually meant. For one thing, the prohibition on Anglo-Irish excluded writers like Victor Kelleher, whose world view and thoughtful, moving responses to an enormous range of reading and experience in England, Africa, New Zealand and Australia seemed to me truly ‘multicultural’. His writing and sensibility obviously owed much to his having moved, particularly as a young person, from one culture to a series of others. Yet aside from my own doubts, and some of the writers’ grumbling over ‘labels’, the multicultural ‘hook’ was ultimately a positive and useful device to promote talented writers. For the Patriarch, Oh Lucky Country, Spiro Zavos’ Faith of Our Fathers, Peter Skrzynecki's The Wild Dogs and Angelika Fremd’s Heartland won literary prizes and/or found their way to school and university reading lists. We also published three anthologies of multicultural writing, R. F. Holt’s The Strength of Tradition and Neighbours, plus Sneja Gunew and Jan Mahyuddin’s Beyond the Echo, and some of the new writers in these anthologies later went on to publish their own books.
By the mid-1980s UQP was indeed growing up with its writers, and in 1989 it had become a commercial as well as a critical success. The fiction list gathered its own momentum. UQP became at once more regional and more worldly, and we were finally able to add staff, both permanent and freelance, to help with the burgeoning fiction and trade non-fiction lists. For the fiction, Rosanne Fitzgibbon and Jena Woodhouse handled most of the copyediting and much related correspondence, while Clare Forster helped me with the initial reading and selection. Sue Johnson and Mary Roberts’ Latitudes, an anthology of Queensland writers, inspired me to write to Janette Turner Hospital, and before long we had another popular and internationally acclaimed writer. Latitudes also brought to my attention Matthew Condon and reaffirmed my and Craig Munro’s determination to keep nagging Gerard Lee for a new manuscript: hence, Troppo Man.
This momentum, however, created new kinds of demands on me and other UQP staff. Australian fiction was flourishing around the world, but the emotional investment we all had in the writers was beginning to exact a price. In 1984 Barbara Hanrahan had moved to a London publisher, a loss that hurt terribly. In 1985 Peter Carey was short-listed for the Booker Prize, sending morale to the outer stratosphere. The following year, 1986, Olga Masters’ sudden death slammed us back to earth. The expanding careers of writers like Kate Grenville and Angelo Loukakis caused pride; the loss of some writers to other lists caused grief, some deserved, some not. In 1988 it was as if the surges and troughs of the previous years repeated themselves, but with greater intensity and in shorter order: Janette Turner Hospital’s novel Charades was launched with great fanfare at the Brisbane Expo; Olga Masters’ last collection of stories was published, and the literary community mourned her loss and celebrated her memory; Peter Carey won the Booker Prize, suspending (momentarily) time and space ...
That year, my family and I decided to return to the United States, and as I prepared to leave UQP, some strange and wonderful things happened. Barbara Hanrahan returned. Two strikingly good new manuscripts from Liam Davison and John Clanchy appeared at about the same time. Then, out of the blue, Beverley Farmer, the writer I had least expected to see on our list, sent us A Body of Water. Its form, content and grace once again asked me what was ‘Australian’, and now, ten years later, I still cannot answer the question. As I prepare to send a copy of Farmer to a friend writing his own eclectic, literary montage, I will simply write: ‘Here is a brilliant book for you.’