'This chapter sets the scene of the book by looking at an angry fax by Peter Carey to Robert McCrum, Faber, and Faber’s editor, about a speech that Carey had given to booksellers and publishers “at a literary dinner” in Sydney in 1988. The image of Australian readers consuming books at a literary dinner becomes Carey’s grudging metaphor for Australia’s consumption of books published by British firms. The literary dinner brings together the agents involved in a set of relations which centres around the identity of the Australian author with all its accompanying baggage, against the demands of a literary marketplace that thrived increasingly on authors as commodified literary celebrities in the 1980s.' (Publication abstract)