Cirrus@Austlit

'This episode features a live event recording taken of a conversation between Alexis Wright and Ivor Indyk, to celebrate the publication of Wright’s new novel, Praiseworthy.

'Alexis Wright is a remarkable writer, originally hailing from the from the Waanyi nation in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Her novel Carpentaria won the 2007 Miles Franklin award, and Wright was awarded the 2018 Stella Prize for her biography of “Tracker" Tilmouth. Praiseworthy is Wright’s fourth novel.' (Introduction)

'Award-winning poet PiO chats with Giramondo publisher Ivor Indyk about poetry, on and off the page. This is a live recording of an online event hosted via Zoom during the Covid-19 crisis.'  (Production summary)

'This is one of those occasions where I feel I am wearing too many hats, and I am not sure what to do with the excess ones. This is because I am speaking of Gerald Murnane in a number of different roles – as a friend, a critic, a publisher, an editor – though I should admit that Murnane doesn’t need much editing, at least in my experience, since what I suggest as an editor tends to get rejected anyway. As he busies himself behind the bar in the room here as I talk now, I cannot be sure whether he’s listening , or whether, like the narrator at the beginning of Border Districts, he has resolved to guard his eyes, so as to be more alert to what might appear at the edges of his attention.1 But perhaps the greater discomfort for me, is to talk as both a publisher and as a critic. As a publisher there’s a sense of excitement when you’re producing a book, a kind of intimacy in the production of it, which as a critic you’re not meant to feel; you keep the book at a distance, the better to form a judgement of it. Nevertheless, when I’m preparing a book for publication I do read it critically and develop ideas about it that I think are significant, and should be conveyed to readers, particularly those who have not read Murnane before. I’m only allowed a little over one hundred words, in the blurb on the back cover, to address the reader directly, and there is not a lot one can say there, though there is a lot one wants to say. I have found, especially being here today, that much of what I wanted to say has now already been said, or is being said, as the critical discourse catches up with Murnane’s works of fiction, and his idiosyncracies as an author. And though this makes me feel proud as a publisher it makes feel humble as a critic, because it’s other people making the points that I would have liked to make, and they are making them more thoroughly than I could have done.' (Introduction(

'Les Murray is the contemporary Australian poet one most associates with the celebration of a particular place, but with the publication of the monumental Fitzroy: The Biography, that mantle must surely pass to π.O. Murray’s 40 acres at Bunyah on the north coast of NSW is one-sixth the size of the inner city Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy, though considerably larger, and much more sparsely populated, if you take into account the memory of the larger family territory commemorated in poems like ‘Their Cities, Their Universities’, and ‘Aspects of Language and War on the Gloucester Road’. At little more than 240 acres, π.O.’s Fitzroy is the smallest suburb in Australia, and the most densely populated.' (Introduction)

'The Australia Council’s six-year funding program, on which the Sydney Review of Books and other literary journals had been depending, has been suspended. If there is no corresponding program forthcoming from the Ministry for the Arts, our existence will be threatened. The cancellation of the June round of funding will have an immediate effect on the publishers of Australian literary titles, requiring the cancellation or postponement of some of those titles. Senator Brandis claims that the transferral of funds to the Ministry for the Arts means only a 12–13% reduction in the budget of the Australia Council. When the government-directed programs, which are quarantined from cuts, are taken out of the equation, the reduction is more like 27%. Literature has always been the poor relation to the other arts when it comes to funding – if, in addition, you take out the $6 million transferred from the Australia Council budget for the new Book Council of Australia, the situation for us looks pretty grim.' (Publication abstract)

'This is the record of a conversation between David Malouf, Ivor Indyk and audience members at the 31 May 2013 David Malouf Symposium, held at the North Sydney campus of Australian Catholic University. The speakers reflect upon the papers delivered at the Symposium.' (Publication abstract)

Ivor Indyk points to the shortcomings of recent criticism of Kefala's Sydney Journals and concludes: 'The consolation one offers oneself, when confronted with the patronising criticism of Kefala and, more frequently in the recent past, the outright exclusion of her writing, is to hope that time will bring the recognition she deserves.' (232)

'This chapter focuses on the period from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, a watershed period in Australia-US literary relations, which saw the publication in the US of Australian novelists Peter Carey, David Malouf, Jessica Anderson, Thea Astley, Elizabeth Jolley, Helen Garner, Tim Winton and Beverley Farmer among others, but which was also crossed by tensions and contradictions which led to confusion, disappointment, lost opportunities, and sometimes the outright rejection of important Australian authors and their books. Among these tensions, we look at three in particular: the promising but limited role played by the multinational publisher (in this case Penguin Books) offering Australian titles through its US affiliate (Viking Penguin); the intervention by literary agents in Australia - US literary publishing relations; and the difference in values between the two cultures, which served to hinder the appreciation of important works of Australian writing.' (p. 309)