Advances

Advances from the ABR December 2022 issue.

The Mildura Writers’ Festival is always one of the most congenial and stimulating events on our literary calendar. Clive James, our lead reviewer this month, has just agreed to attend this year’s festival and to deliver the 2003 La Trobe University/ABR Annual Lecture. The lecture will take place at 8 p.m. on Friday, 25 July, and the festival will follow that weekend (July 26–27). Clive James (pictured below) will also deliver the lecture in Melbourne soon after the Mildura Writers’ Festival. Full details of both events will follow in the June/July issue. ABR subscribers will be entitled to attend this major lecture gratis.

Australia has produced (or welcomed) some fine publishers, but none was more influential on the world stage than Carmen Callil, who has died in London at the age of eighty-four.

Welcome to the 250th issue of ABR – or, rather, to the 250th issue of the magazine in its present guise. Some readers may be unfamiliar with the first series, which appeared between 1961 and 1973. It came out of Adelaide under the editorship of Max Harris, Rosemary Wighton and, for a time, Geoffrey Dutton. Kerryn Goldsworthy – herself an Editor for two years in the mid-1980s – writes fascinatingly about those early ABRs in her article ‘The Oily Ratbag and the Recycled Waratah’ (page 23). Like Kerryn, we celebrate the original begetters of ABR, and everyone else who has made the magazine such a success since the present series began in 1978. Independent magazines have never been more vital than now, when a remarkable (even eerie) editorial consensus obtains in the major Australian newspapers. We look forward to bringing you more cogent, questioning writing in coming years, and we trust you enjoy the 250th issue.

The ups and downs of biography

Hazel Rowley is the 2007 Australian Book Review/La Trobe University Annual Lecturer. That title is quite a mouthful (the acronym doesn’t bear thinking about), but one that Dr Rowley will handle in her stride, as those who recall her appearances on Australian literary stages will attest.

Dr Rowley – born in England and educated in Australia – taught for many years at Deakin University before moving to the United States. In 1993 she published Christina Stead: A Biography. In her review in The Independent, Doris Lessing said, ‘Christina Stead has long needed a good biographer, and here she is.’ Miegunyah has just issued a revised edition of the biography, in time for Dr Rowley’s Annual Lecture – and her appearance at the Sydney Writers’ Festival.

Allen & Unwin tells us that David Marr and Marian Wilkinson’s much-anticipated book about the Tampa Affair has been postponed until February 2003. The title is now Dark Victory: The Military campaign to re-elect the Prime Minister.

New Partner for ABR

Let’s be candid. Producing a magazine of this kind is not easy in a country with a small population and one where the life of the mind (even if not ‘the least of possessions’, to quote Patrick White) rarely commands the attention or glamour often associated with sporting events and other fashionable distractions.

A new prize for Miles Franklin

Miles Franklin turns fifty this year. Well, 128, to be strictly biographical. Three years after the death of Miles Franklin (1879–1954), the inaugural Miles Franklin Literary Award was inaugurated. This year, the judges have rather more money to present ($42,000) than they did in 1957, when Patrick White’s Voss won the Award.

The Fortunes of HHR

Last month, in his critique of Bruce Beresford’s memoir (whose title is far too long to reproduce here), Peter Craven, in addition to expressing surprise at film producers’ unwillingness to finance Beresford’s proposed film of Henry Handel Richardson’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, deplored the fact that the great trilogy (1917–29) was out of print. Well, abracadabra! Australian Scholarly Publishing has come to the rescue with a three-volume edition of Fortunes. (Penguin informs us that it will publish a new Penguins Classics edition in 2008.)

The Australian Scholarly Publishing edition marks the culmination of Clive Probyn and Bruce Steele’s scholarly edition of the works of HHR: six novels, a novel translated from the Danish, her music and her complete correspondence. Professor Probyn, of Monash University, writes about the trilogy and the vicissitudes of HHR’s career in this month’s Profile in World Literature and Ideas (beginning on p. 30).

Scholarly editions of this kind are the rara avis of Australian literature. What this country badly needs is an equivalent of the Library of America, that redoubtable, non-profit enterprise which brings readers – in handsome, relatively inexpensive, hardback editions – novels, stories, poetry, plays, essays, journalism, historical writing, speeches and more. The Library – long dreamt of by Edmund Wilson, inspired by La Pléiade in France – was founded in 1979 and now runs to more than 150 volumes. The authors range from Edgar Allan Poe and Edith Wharton to James Baldwin and Philip Roth. The aim is a simple one: to keep classics in print in order to preserve the country’s literary heritage.

Now there is an ambitious project for a visionary Australian philanthropist or philanthropic trust.