Road closed / Water over bridge / The turgid brown Hunter washes more valley away / This full rain has most times drenched this thin red earth in March

Hans-Ulrich Treichel is professor of German literature at the University of Leipzig. He has written five volumes of poetry and his flair for words is strikingly apparent in his writing. The ironic narrative voice of Lost, his first novel, that of a young boy, provides a darkly comic edge to a story emanating from the displacement of a family in Germany following the end of the Second World War. At first the young narrator believes his older brother starved to death when his parents fled the invading Russians in their flight from Prussia to Westphalia. But when he is old enough, his mother informs him she gave his brother away to another refugee when she thought she and her husband were about to be shot by the Russians. "I didn't have a dead brother. I had a lost one. That was hardly a plus for me," the narrator notes. His mother laments that she didn't even have time to tell the peasant woman to whom she entrusted her son his name, Arnold. The narrator suggests that maybe their baby boy was lucky and they named him Arnold again.

This paper has been prepared at the direction of the Committee of Management of the Australian Society of Authors (ASA). Faced with confusing and apparently contradictory information regarding the state of publishing from members and stakeholders, the Committee sought a comprehensive view of the Australian publishing industry and the different income streams available for authors. The Committee was concerned it lacked a broad overview of the current status of publishing in Australia as it related to a global context, analysis of the different segments and some forecasting of future directions. This paper attempts to address those concerns. The Committee was also concerned about flow-on effects on Australian culture with regard to reported cutbacks in the publishing of Australian fiction and other narratives.

Imagine for a moment you are a teacher preparing your student reading list for a university course on Australian realist writers of the 1940s and 1950s. You want a range of books representative of this interesting era when Australia began to transform from and agricultural monoculture to today's sophisticated multiculture. ... You send off your reading list to the bookshop and the text-buyer rings you next day to tell you they are all out of print. You cannot teach your course. The situation facing teachers of Australian literature is this serious. Too many Australian works of value and significance are out of print.

In these pages in December 2005 I described how Google was digitising in-copyright works held in United States university libraries without authorisation from the appropriate rightsholders. I mentioned that this had incurred the wrath of the American Publishers Association (APA) and the Authors Guild, as well as their international affiliates. These organisations instituted a class action against Google. Google set out to defend this action by claiming its actions were permissible under the doctrine of fair use in the United States (US) Copyright Act. This doctrine is not enshrined in statutory regulation, as is the case in Australian copyright laws. Because Section 107 of the US Copyright Act sets out four factors that need to be determined before a use can be considered fair, 'fair use' in the United States has developed over time through a substantial number of court cases. 'Fair use' is not recognised by the Australian Copyright Act, which instead grants certain exceptions to users, such as the statutory licence scheme for copying of work in educational institutions under which Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) acts as the declared collecting society. Google aimed to add its unauthorised copying of books to the range of 'fair use '. In order to accomplish a designation of its digitisation as 'fair use', Google would have had to have a US court determine that such use of copyright material could be justified in terms of its 'purpose and character, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for non-profit educational purposes; the nature of the copyrighted work; amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work'. This was always a tough call. Google has now chosen not to continue this course of action, though it denies it violated the copyrights of authors, publisher and other copyright holders. In doing so, Google has implicitly recognised that the digitisation of in-copyright works it undertook was 'unauthorised', and a settlement has been brokered with the APA and the Authors Guild.

Memoirs are remarkably personal yet also universal. Guilt, both personal and universal, about the inhumanity of war is the driving motif in this work by Uwe Timm, one of Germany's most noted contemporary writers and novelists. Uwe Timm's personal guilt concerns his brother, sixteen years older, who was a sapper in the Death's Head division of the SS. As a member of the SS, did he commit any atrocities when at war in Russia? Timm also feels a more universal guilt in relation to his brother. He is also baffled as to why so many otherwise well-meaning people can accept, even participate in, outrageous crimes against humanity. While he writes about Nazism, implicit in his concern are American warders in Iraqi gaols, suicide bombers and other inhumane creatures of the 21st century. Timm's only memory of his brother is a game of hide and seek where his brother lifts him into the air and he has the sensation of floating. This sense of being adrift drives the narrative structure of this moving work and allows Timm to move backwards and forwards between present and past. Timm wanted to write about brother, who died in October 1943 from injuries received on 19 September, but couldn't while any other members of his family were still alive. Once his mother and sister had died he felt free to express his thoughts. Even though it was forbidden, his brother had kept a diary while in action. The small notebook had been returned to Timm's parents with his brother's other effects. Timm read his brother's war diary reluctantly, afraid of what it might say. However, it is what it doesn't reveal that causes Timm most anguish. He finds no sign, except in a final, guarded sentence, that his brother ever questioned the brutality in which he was engaged. While his brother's diary is the key to this elegant narrative, Timm writes as well about his father, mother and sister. The long-lasting effects of the war on the family become apparent. Timm and his family were emotionally scarred by the events to which they were party.

By the time you will be reading this I will be dead... I'm speaking metaphorically, of course, the urge to channel Pauline Hanson running deep within me. Remember when she released that video claiming she would be killed as the victim of some weird conspiracy? That was before she showed her two left feet on 'Dancing with the Stars' and the 'Daily Telegraph' smeared egg over itself in the form of fake, raunchy pictures of Pauline. How disappointed we all were that the buxom babe was not Ipswich's favourite fish-and-chippie! Those were the days, my friend, I thought they'd never end, but they have. When I say I will be dead what I mean is that I will be dead as the Executive Director of the Australian Society of Authors. I have resigned and crossed over to the dark side and joined the world of academia to become a teacher of writing.

Writers expend considerable energy researching the details of time, place and character when developing their narratives. However, writers often neglect even most basic market research, to the detriment of publishing opportunities. When writing courses do not address fundamental issues related to writers making a living - contracts, copyright, legal issues - and do not encourage writers to consider themselves as part of an industry that survives on market forces they do students of writing a disservice. Writers need to know not only how to research a novel or a biography but also how to prepare a publishing proposal, what returns they are likely to get for their labours and the contractual obligations they'll be under. They also need to know how to avoid defamation or breaches of copyright. Professional organizations such as the Australian Society of Authors (ASA) provide this support. The ASA also researches and publishes information on the publishing industry. It uses this information to lobby for government support for writers and to develop opportunities for writers to develop extra income streams. The ASA is also making its pictorial and sound archives, which feature many prominent authors of the past 50 years, available for research.

Pup had run away, left home and hopped the train to the city when he was 16, because, despite what the state schools in Western Sydney tried to tell him, he didn't fit. He wasn't going to go from voc. ed. to dole queue and a stolen Commodore. He had the smarts to make himself a softer piece of rough trade. But five years later he was getting older and had to do a lot more to earn a dollar than when he was fresh in the city. Which was why, that Sunday, he was at Newtown Police Station with its usual 24-hour-a-day bedlam.

White light. Death is nothing but white light. Like the late Kerry Packer, I remain convinced that I have been to the other side and there is nothing fucking there. The experience ended any lingering faith I might have had in God or an afterlife. It was also the end of any further thoughts of suicide - because that was how I had ended up in such a state.