Cirrus@Austlit

'As Australia has been Britain's largest export market since 1889, it is not surprising that the local book market was dominated and defended by London publishers throughout most of the twentieth century. John McLaren has argued that 'no part of the society maintained the imperial pattern more consistently than the publishers and booksellers who exploited an Australian market held captive by its distance from the owners of capital'.' (Introduction 7)

'I started working for Angus & Robertson in my university days, around 1927. At that time they were booksellers, publishers and printers, but I worked part-time in the bookselling side. After I took my degree I became full-time, working for some years in various departments of the bookshop at 89 Castlereagh Street. I also worked at Halstead Press, the company's printing arm, where I learned typesetting on a linotype machine. Later on in the 1930s I joined the publishing side.' (Introduction, 10)

'The first battle for Angus & Robertson began quietly late 1959 and raged throughout 1960. A&R was then the most powerful force in Australian book-selling and publishing. Its nearest rival, Cheshire, produced only twenty new titles a year. Other smaller publishers included Ure Smith, Melbourne University Press, Georgian House and Oxford University Press, while Jacaranda in Brisbane and Rigby in Adelaide concentrated on educational publishing.' (Introduction 19)

Andrew Fabinyi (1908-78) came to Australia from Hungary in 1939 as a refugee from Nazism. He had worked for a bookseller in Budapest, and first found employment in Melbourne with Frank Cheshire, owner and head of the FW Cheshire bookshop in Little Collins Street. After war service in the Australian army, where he became responsible for the Australian Army Education Service libraries, he returned to FW Cheshire, where he developed both the bookselling and the publishing activities of the business. When the separate company FW Cheshire Publishing Pty Ltd was established, he became general manager. (Introduction 19)

'The publishing history of They're a Weird Mob and the manner in which this book and its fictional Italian narrator Nino Culotta shaped the life and career of John O'Grady (1907-81) are among the more extraordinary stories in the history of the book in Australia. Nino Culotta and They're a Weird Mob bear comparison with Steele Rudd and On Our Selection. Both comedies were unashamedly pitched at a local, popular market and both drew on vernacular language, Remarkable bestsellers, these books enjoyed an afterlife that extended way beyond their initial impact, in their print, radio, theatre and cinematic offspring. Both bound their authors to a series of returns to the original scene of their success.' (Introduction 24)

' In 1960 the membership of the Australian Book Publishers Association (ABPA) was made up of thirty- seven publishing firms. Australia's population was then ten and a half million English-speaking people, and most of their books came from Britain and to a lesser extent the United States. Only twenty-five of the AB- PA's member firms actually published any books in Australia, and only nine could be said to have had a national profile. Of those, three were chiefly education- al publishers and two were academic presses, leaving just four - Angus & Robertson, FW Cheshire, Ure Smith and Horwitz - primarily interested in books for the general public. Compared with the others, Angus & Robertson and Horwitz were giants among pygmies, particularly since they both had substantial educational lists as well, Angus & Robertson under its own imprint and Horwitz under the Owen Martin imprint.' (Introduction 31)

'Brian Clouston was born in 1925 in Brisbane and educated at The Southport School before joining the RAAF where he trained as a pilot. After the war he completed a commerce degree at the University of Queensland and began work at McLeod's Bookshop which had been established by his great-uncle, Alexander McLeod, and which his late father had owned. He saw the possibility of expanding the business by publishing locally written books for Queensland secondary schools to compete with the mainly British imports then widely in use.' (Introduction 34)

'Nationalism was at the heart of Lloyd O'Neil's publishing, and he was a leading figure in the development of Australian publishing in the 1960s and 1970s. Born on 17 July 1928 in Melbourne, O'Neil was the son of a talented musician mother and a left-wing, former wool-classer father. When he was sixteen the family moved to Sydney and Lloyd began as a junior in Angus & Robertson's famous Castlereagh Street bookshop. He spent six years there, and had become a buyer and head of the art books department before 'going bush' in 1952 to travel round Australia as a casual labourer. On his return he became a country representative for the British publisher Cassell, spending ten months on the road in each of the next three years.' (Introduction 38)

'Rigby legend has it that in 1853 William Charles Rigby, the nineteen -year -old assistant to a London bookseller, joined his father-in-law in buying a small ship to sail to the Australian goldfields. They reached Melbourne safely but the story doesn't say what hap- pened to Rigby's family or how he managed to open an Adelaide bookshop in 1859. But for fifty years he was a successful retailer of books for all ages, schoolbooks, toys and games, stationery, British magazines and occasional books published under his own imprint, such as the first history of South Australia.' (Introduction 41)

'Sun Books was founded in 1965 by Brian Stonier, Geoffrey Dutton and Max Harris as an independent paperback publishing company. The three men had been responsible for the establishment of the Aus- tralian publishing arm of Penguin Books in 1961, but left to form their own company after conflict with London over the Australian list. Capital of £12 000 for the new venture was provided equally by Stonier and Dutton, and Stonier obtained a bank overdraft of £10 000. Harris's role was that of literary editor and adviser. He and Dutton, both Adelaide -based, had worked closely together on Australian Letters (1958-67) and Australian Book Review which they co-founded in 1962.' (Introduction 43-44)

'In the 1930s (Sir) Frank Packer and E.G. Theodore had launched the Australian Women's Weekly and the Sunday Telegraph and revived Sydney's moribund Daily Telegraph. Their company, Consolidated Press Ltd, moved into book publishing almost by default, serialising titles and offering encyclopaedias and books about health, cooking and animals at discounted rates to subscribers. A book publishing department was established, which in 1944 secured separate offices under the management of Dr E. Harden.' (Introduction 47)

'The mass-market publisher Horwitz started in 1920, but it underwent significant changes in its scope and product in the 1950s. In 1956 Stanley Howitz took over the publishing operations, and the company remained a family concern into the twenty-first century.' (Introduction 50)

'If the 1960s was the infancy of modern Australian publishing, then the 1970s was surely its adolescence — a time of life that is characterised by rapid growth, increased maturity and an urge for independence, together with experimentation, recklessness, high ideals and overactive hormones. The Australian publishing industry had all of the the above and more.' (Introduction 53)

'By the time I became involved with Angus & Robertson, in mid -1972, The famous Old Firm was more of a beached whale. Still recognisable as a former leviathan, it was in fact close to death.' (Introduction 57)

Currency Press one of the oldest surviving independent Australian publishers, is a unique institution: a publishing house that subsists principally on the work of Australia's playwrights, performers and composers in a market almost entirely local. That the company exists at all is a tribute to Australian nationalism. That it is almost alone in surviving even thirty years is evidence of the obstacles that beset the industry and the stubbornness required to overcome them. Currency's survival can be put down to three things: good timing, finding a niche, and building a team that believes in cultural worth.' (Introduction 66-67)

'The protests against the Vietnam War were reaching their peak in 1970, a turbulent year for Australian universities. Students were finding a new, more creative voice which was not always well received in the hitherto sleepy groves of academe. The University of Queensland had, perhaps, awakened a bit sooner than most with the appointment of a relatively young and dynamic vice-chancellor, Zelman Cowan, and it had the added zest of confronting a deeply conservative state government committed to censorship and the elimination of dissent.' (Introduction 73)