Sunday, June 12, 2016

My book The Dirty Little Dog  is now published and available. It received an excellent review in the Sydney Morning Herald/Age Spectrum section and has sold well in the bookshops where it is stocked. Unfortunately a small press like Fat Frog Books lacks the resources to distribute across the country and is reliant on bookshops taking the initiative to stock the title. Very few seem willing to step outside the mainstream and offer the book to their customers. This is quite disappointing to me as a writer, but I'm thrilled we have managed to reprint given the small number of places where the book is available.
The Bookshop, Darlinghurst and Hares and Hyenas in Melbourne have been great supporters of the book and they have the print edition available for sale both in the shop and online. The ebook is available here.

Friday, October 2, 2015

Book Council of Australia

Will the Book Council of Australia achieve anything for Australian authors? Regrettably, it is unlikely that authors will benefit. Authors seem to be ignored or completely misunderstood, not only by the Book Council in its proposed form but by cultural funding agencies such as the Australia Council.
So-called major performing arts bodies like the Sydney Theatre Company and Opera Australia with their lavish mostly foreign productions (the STC occasionally puts on a translation or original piece by its now former director Andrew Upton, but it is the performances of his wife in American plays that are the company's forte) continue to gulp down most of the Council's funding. Yet despite this so few people want to see sopranos warble Wagner or Strauss, those fine Australian composers (!), that Opera Australia is reduced to using the millions -- millions! -- it receives from the Australia Council to subsidise performances of musical theatre. By such famous Australian writers as Lerner & Loewe, no less! What admirable use of the money Australian taxpayers believe is assigned to foster Australian culture! I could have danced all night -- and still had time for more!
The advice the government has taken on board with regard to the formation of the Book Council is seriously flawed and whoever provided it should be sent to a gulag. How absurd that the Australian Writers Guild, a  fine organisation representing dramatists and screenwriters but with no connection to book publishing in Australia, should be invited to be a member when writers centres, professional organisations such as the Australasian Association of Writing Programs, or more specific representatives such as Romance Writers of Australia and the Society of Book Illustrators and Writers are completely ignored.
The advice the government has received is one-eyed, sef-serving and undoubtedly fuelled by publishers. Authors are a token presence. It is even more absurd that the government has acted on the advice without querying it. This demonstrates the government's total lack of understanding of the Australian publishing industry. Given that a new Minister, Senator Mitch Fifield, now has responsibility, perhaps, perhaps there is now an opportunity for this seriously flawed advice to be overturned. Let us hope that this might be so.
Let us also not forget that authors are at the beginning of the creation chain -- and there lies the problem. The profit in writing does not reside with authors; publishers have their self-interested thumb and forefinger tightly holding, nay, grabbing, the cash. Government being government, and in Australia with both major parties subscribing to a 'free' market economy and the right for greed to overwhelm public interest, publishers represent themselves as the top dogs, which they are in author–publisher relations. They are the bullies who dictate terms and screw authors.
It is time for government to step in and protect authors, small businesspeople at the mercy of massive international publishing conglomerates. Contracts must be made to be fair. Reprographic and digital rights must be made inalienable to the author. Other measures must be put in place to protect the poor authors who are being bullied into submission.
Publishers still make BIG profits -- authors' incomes are dropping even further. These small changes should be what the Book Council is there to implement.
But I won't be buying a lottery ticket on it. I hear my publisher bashing on my door with a cricket bat.

Saturday, November 23, 2013

How to tell your father to drop dead -- reviews



How to tell your father to drop dead has been reviewed by Kerryn Goldsworthy in the Sydney Morning Herald (28 September 2013) and in the Melbourne Community Voice (20 November 2013, p. 22). Kerryn was kind enough to say that stories such as "On Rosa Luxemburgstrasse in a Vietnamese cafe" explore "the place where personal history and world history connect" and try "to negotiate some sort of personal truce or peace between the past and the present". The reviewer in Melbourne Community Voice gave the book four stars and says that I "write with a stark detachment to fill each phrase with meaning, as in the autobiographically styled 'Tusk' -- or move you to tears as in the collection's central story, 'Winter afternoon'."
The book is now available at more locations. Hares & Hyenas stock it in Melbourne, Books@Stones in Brisbane have it, and it is also available through the University Co-op Bookshop.

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

1960 Gay Pulp Fiction

I have a chapter in the forthcoming book edited by Wayne Drewey Gunn and Jaime Harker, published by University of Massacusetts Press.

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Gay Liberation

My work "Gay Liberation" is available on the Polari Journal online website. It tells of my engagement with this movement in the early 1970s.

Luke Davies' four plots for magnets

I reviewed Luke Davies four plots for magnets in Cordite Poetry Review. Read the review.