2015, Fisher, Jeremy

The Australian writer Gerald Marcus Glaskin was quite a handsome fellow, though his naval record - complexion sallow, hair black, eyes brown; height five feet ten inches; scar on his forehead - suggests otherwise. His good looks were combined with a sharp mind and a quick wit, overall a combination that served him well for much of his life. While Glaskin's reputation as a writer has faded, his legacy should not be forgotten. His writing was powerful and found an appreciative audience in the 1950s and 1960s. One book in particular deserves revisiting and it holds an iconic place in Australia literature. No End to the Way, published by Barrie & Rockliff of London in 1965 under the pseudonym Neville Jackson, is the first overtly gay Australian novel (Hurley 190). The book had a powerful impact on a generation of young Australian men coming to terms with their homosexuality, as demonstrated by the audience responses to a version of this paper delivered to the Australian Homosexual Histories conference at the University of Melbourne in November 2013.

2012, Fisher, Jeremy

Recently, I was perturbed to hear that a former Chair of the ASA, Anita Heiss, along with a number of other Indigenous Australians, had had her ethnicity questioned by the journalist Andrew Bolt. Anyone who knows Anita is well aware that she is a proud Wiradjuri woman. Bolt's accusations offended her and, along with others he had also offended (the majority of whom were not writers), she took action against him in court under the Racial Discrimination Act. In September 2011, Anita and her co-defendants were vindicated when Bolt was found guilty of racial discrimination. This was a significant victory for Anita and the other co-defendants. Anita felt that the ASA should recognise the matter as a victory for authors. While many members of the ASA will feel sympathy for Anita's victory, as I do, ASA management (the Board and Executive Director) were not of the view that this was a victory for authors. Why?

2014, Fisher, Jeremy

For much of the 20th century, homosexuality was illegal in Australia. The country was also subject to draconian censorship; overt homosexual works were banned. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, social change was afoot and publications of the homosexual rights and gay liberation movements began to appear, soon joined by more commercial publications aligned to an increasingly overt gay sub-culture. These publications prospered over the next three decades. Their focus ranged from earnest proselytising to post-modern pornography. Most maintained strong links to their readerships, even though many of them were distributed free of charge and relied on advertising to survive. This paper chronicles the range of these publications and examines how they helped develop and foster a gay, lesbian or queer readership (and hence outside the mainstream); explores how and why the printed forms of these publications gradually merged within the mainstream as same-sex relationships lost their deviance; and notes that these publications have largely been replaced by digital alternatives in the 21st century.

2010, Fisher, Jeremy

I think I'm meant to respond to a lot of what Peter has said with regard to parallel importation. Let me start by pointing out the areas where I would agree with Peter. I do think that there are large sectors of the current publishing and bookselling industries in Australia which need to have a look at their practices, particularly with regard to booksellers. Booksellers at the moment are complaining about the lack of an open market, but in fact, in the main (and there are some very good booksellers out there - I'm talking about a general sort of thing) I think they're actually very poor at building up sales of different books. They're guided very strongly by what publishers put to them as their best list. This may well be something which ought to be followed through, as what we tend to get in bookstores is very much a reflection of overseas lists. If you want to get a good vampire novel, can I recommend 'The Opposite of Life', which is a book set in Melbourne, written by a young Melbourne author and published by a very small press called Pulp Fiction Press, which is actually based in a bookshop in Brisbane. Due to the very small ability of this press to be able to even get any traction in this sort of area, sales of this book have been mediocre and it's hardly recognised at all. A good bookseller can get behind a book like this, actually start promoting it, and get readers reading it, even just by mentioning it, as I'm doing now, and saying that this book is a damn good book; read it. Surely that's a job that booksellers should be doing. By and large, I think many of them are actually not doing that and they're relying too much upon what the marketing departments of publishing houses are putting forward to them. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. The publishers, of course, have a lot of investment in the books they're putting forward, but they have the largest investment, of course, in their top-selling titles. Those authors who are down the bottom end of the scale - the new and emerging authors, the authors who are writing for small presses and so on - have a much harder time, and they're the sorts of authors that in Australia are particularly important.

2011, Fisher, Jeremy

Educational publishing underpinned the Australian publishing industry's profitability and development throughout the twentieth century. While largely invisible to the general trade market, educational publishing comprised up to a third of the $2 billion Australian publishing market. Investment in educational publishing late in the 19th and early in the 20th century and again in the 1950s and 1960s led to increased general publishing by local and international publishers. For instance, Angus & Robertson achieved its pre-eminent position in Australian publishing in the middle of the 20th century supported by the profits of its strong school and university textbook lists and the famous editor Beatrice Davis was initially lured to the firm to work on textbooks before she established herself as a major gatekeeper for the publication of Australian literature. In the latter half of the 20th century, many publishers underwrote their trade publishing with profits from educational lists, which included major reading programs from Pearson, Mimosa, Macmillan and other publishers (a significant number of which were exported to other markets) and complex projects in subject areas such as mathematics and science. Globally, however, publishing companies were expanding in size, yet consolidating their output. As of 2011, four publishers - Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Cengage, and Wiley - dominated English language (and Australian) educational publishing. Only one, Pearson, continues to publish in the trade market. As well, the first decade of the 21st century saw many curriculum areas being serviced with digital materials with the educational publishing sector struggling to maintain its traditional role as supplier of educational materials. Trade publishers are now totally reliant on their own products, with no underwriting of risk from educational products. What impact these developments will have on Australian publishing as it confronts the digital challenge has yet to be determined.