This year the National Library announced that it would be a major sponsor of one of Australia’s leading literary magazines. Aviva Tuffield outlines some facets of the partnership One of the most exciting developments for Australian Book Review this year has been the announcement, in May, that the National Library of Australia was to become the magazine’s national sponsor. ABR is one of Australia’s leading literary magazines of review and comment, with a focus on reviewing new publications by Australian writers and publishing pertinent essays. Established in 1961 by Max Harris, ABR had a brief hiatus in the early 1970s but was revived in 1978 under the auspices of the National Book Council, with John McLaren as editor. Based in Melbourne, ABR is now an independent magazine that is widely distributed both nationally and internationally. Its past editors have included such committed advocates for Australian literature as Louise Adler, Kerryn Goldsworthy and Helen Daniel. ABR’s past and present contributors include some of Australia’s best-known writers and commentators. Peter Rose, the current editor, is a former publisher at Oxford University Press, a poet and the author of a family memoir, Rose Boys. He has been active in Australian literary life for many years serving both as a judge for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and as a board member of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival.
The Library’s welcome sponsorship recognises ABR’s importance to Australian literature and publishing. At the time of the sponsorship’s announcement, Jan Fullerton, Director -General of the National Library, expressed her delight that the Library was supporting ‘the activities of a magazine that has contributed, over many years, to Australia’s cultural life, and that has promoted an awareness of our documentary heritage through reviews, essays and the discussion of ideas’. The new partnership celebrates the commitment of both the Library and ABR to national literary life and Jan Fullerton pointed to the overlapping interests of the two organizations: the Library’s Manuscripts Collection contains ‘a great many personal papers of writers who have appeared in ABR. We hold manuscripts of many of the books reviewed in its pages. And our general collection is, in part, a history of Australian publishing.’ Such links continue to be reinforced: for example, August’s ABR contains an essay by Professor Margaret Harris on the love letters between Christina Stead and her lifelong partner, William Blake, all of which are held in the National Library. Editor Peter Rose commented with pleasure on the opportunities that the sponsorship presents to ABR. ‘The new partnership caps a period of real change and growth at ABR. The benefits are myriad. ABR is now linked intimately, in a most creative way, with one of Australia’s great cultural institutions. It helps us to circumvent the misleading but perhaps inevitable perception that any literary magazine based in Melbourne must be slightly Melbourne-centric. ABR is very conscious of its national readership and obligations—now we have the perfect opportunity to consolidate our influence in the national capital and northern states. Best of all, the partnership will enable ABR to apprise our readers of the richness of Australia’s written, aural and pictorial heritage—not just this season’s major releases.’
For ABR, the benefits of the Library’s national sponsorship are manifold. The Library’s financial support enables ABR to continue flourishing and providing its readers (whether they be subscribers or those who access the magazine through the numerous libraries that take it) with lengthy reviews of new Australian publications in many fields: fiction, politics, history, philosophy, gender studies, literary criticism, to name just a few. This is vital at a time when many of the major newspapers are shrinking their book reviews, often to little more than 500 words, and frequently devote greater coverage to overseas publications. ABR is committed to reviewing important literary works by Australian authors, especially scholarly books that often go under the broadsheets’ radar. Furthermore, ABR publishes at least one major essay each issue—and often a second, shorter one, too (the National Library kept the ball rolling by sponsoring the ABR’s essay series in the 1990s). These essays always stimulate debate and capture the public imagination, sometimes being reprinted in other media and becoming the focus of national discussion. One essay last year, by Peter Porter, on his memories of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (ABR, August 2001) was much reproduced and earned praise in the Times Literary Supplement. More recently, Kerryn Goldsworthy’s June/July 2002 essay, a combined eulogy to her academic life in Melbourne and her new freelance existence back home in Adelaide, was abridged in the Age. The public hunger for essays is much in evidence in this age of soundbite journalism, and ABR, as a 64-page, monthly magazine, is well positioned to meet this need.
The new relationship with the Library not only assists ABR to thrive, but also provides the magazine with access to the Library’s Pictures Collection. Each issue of ABR during the period of the sponsorship will be graced by a stunning image from the Library’s prodigious collection of more than half a million photographs. Already this year, May’s issue of ABR carried a striking historic photo of Parliament House and the West Block administration building taken by Jack Mildenhall in the 1920s, one of over 600 lantern slides in the Library’s Mildenhall Collection. For the June/July’s issue of ABR, the Library provided a rare photo of a smiling Patrick White accompanied by his scene-stealing cat, Tom Jones. And August’s cover displayed a tender image of an elderly Christina Stead pruning her camellias, at home in Australia after over 40 years overseas. Access to the Library’s Pictures Collection, in conjunction with the talents of ABR’s designer,Chong Wengho, will ensure that ABR’s covers continue to receive compliments and stand out from a crowded bookshelf. In addition to rich visual material, the Library will also supply textual content to ABR in the shape of regular columns informing readers of Library collections and activities. Jan Fullerton recognises that ABR presents ‘a way for the Library to reach people with a strong interest in the nation’s cultural well-being’. For example, in the ‘National News’ column of May’s ABR, Kathryn Favelle detailed the Library’s progress in preparing Donald Friend’s diaries (all 44 of them) for publication. Favelle engagingly revealed the conversations that arise around such projects, and the imaginary ones that develop between researchers and manuscripts. In June/July’s ABR, Graeme Powell, the Manuscript Librarian, recalled his first meeting with Christina Stead in 1975, which ultimately led to her bequeathing her papers to the Library. In August’s National News column, Mary-Louise Ayres alerted readers to the Australian Literature Gateway (AustLit, www.austlit.edu.au), a remarkable bibliographical database that indexes almost 400 000 works of Australian creative and critical writing, not just by author and title, but also through a detailed subject analysis, allowing extensive cross-referencing between works and writers. Scholars of all stripes can now quickly and easily obtain answers to literary questions that previously might have taken them years to research. These National News columns will continue to amaze and inform readers of developments at the Library throughout the sponsorship period.
These are certainly exciting times for ABR. The magazine has undergone a number of changes in recent months that the Library sponsorship endorses and enhances. Since Peter Rose assumed the editorship at the start of 2001, he has introduced a number of new features to the magazine including diaries, commentaries, travel writing, columns on writing and language, reports from literary festivals and new poetry. Highlights to date include the ‘Author! Author!’ columns by Peter Bishop (Director of Varuna, The Writers’ House), and ‘Letters’ from Australians in such far-flung locations as Manila, Iceland and Tokyo. In 2002 ABR has also introduced a series of regular events, ABR Forums, which have proved remarkably popular, frequently selling out. Held at the home of the newly-established Mietta Foundation (45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne), founded in memory of the restaurateur Mietta O’Donnell, ABR Forum goers have enjoyed an eclectic range of events including Julian Burnside QC and Robert Manne discussing the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers, Janine Burke and Brenda Niall revealing the secrets of writing artists’ biographies, and John Button conversing with Don Watson about the latter’s literary portrait of Paul Keating, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart. Peter Rose hopes to raise the national profile of ABR even further in coming months with ABR Forums in other cities and states. Discussions are underway with the National Library’s Paul Hetherington, who has been appointed to ABR’s editorial advisory board for the duration of the sponsorship, about initiating some form of joint National Library/ABR events at the Library in the near future. According to Peter Rose, this is a most auspicious time for a partnership between the Library and ABR: ‘Interest in ABR has never been greater, and the future looks bright. I can’t remember a time when there has been such a public thirst for serious ideas, debate and writing. People are looking for the kinds of essays and forums that the popular media is not always willing or equipped to provide. NLA’s sponsorship will help us to provide Australians with the kind of incisive, independent general magazine that they are looking for.’ The Library’s sponsorship not only endorses ABR’s commitment to Australian writers and publishing, but enhances its ability to truly make its mark as Australia’s leading literary magazine. Here’s to a fruitful partnership! AVIVA TUFFIELD is the Assistant Editor of the Australian Book Review |
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