Writing Australia, Creative Australia’s new literature body, launches today, bringing the history of Australian cultural policy full circle: writers were the first artists in Australia to receive government support and Writing Australia represents a renewed focus on the sector after an extended period of neglect.
It’s got a big job ahead of it. Over the last decade, federal funding for literature has dropped roughly 43% in real terms, even as writers’ incomes have stagnated below the poverty line and threats to their livelihoods have proliferated.
So government investment in the sector is critical – not least because supporting writers is nation-building work. We rely on Australian writers to inform and inspire us, tell our stories to the rest of the world, and help us tuck our children in each night with bedtime reading. Australia’s writers are indispensable to our day-to-day lives as imaginative beings and engaged citizens. Quite simply, we can’t live without them.
Inaugurated within the government’s2023 cultural policy, Revive, Writing Australia has a budget allocation of $26m over three years and a mandate to support writers to create new works, invest in key organisations within the literary sector, and develop national initiatives that benefit authors and audiences. Its agenda will be determined by a board of industry representatives and specialists appointed by the minister for the arts – and that work can’t start soon enough.
Thecollapse of traditional publishing models, theincreasing costs for independent publishers,AI’s unregulated encroachment into the publishing sphere, big tech’sindustrial-scale infringement of Australian authors’copyright, and the sharp increase inpoliticised attacks on writersall tell a bleak story.
In the face of these challenges, Australian writers earnan average of just $18,200 per year. That doesn’t even come halfway towards approachingthe poverty line. Securing the conditions where writers can survive, let alone thrive, is Writing Australia’s first challenge.
Christos Tsiolkas, Helen Garner, Richard Flanagan, Kate Grenville, Charlotte Wood and many other prominent Australian writershave been outspokenon the urgent need for reform and increased investment. They’ve spoken passionately about the life-changing impact of grants they’ve received on their work.
Both theAustralian Society of Authorsand theAustralian Writers Guildare calling for fair payment for writers, as well as strengthening copyright protections and introducing meaningful AI regulation. And the Australian Publishers Association’sBooks Create Australiacampaign is calling for investment in the entire literary ecosystem that supports Australia’s writers, including libraries, agents, writers’ centres, festivals and literary journals.
Expectations are high for what Writing Australia needs to achieve – even ifthe director position has only just been advertised this week. Well-funded fellowships that afford writers the time to write, industry development initiatives that strengthen the entire ecosystem, and secure multi-year funding for the literary journals that provide the majority of each year’s publication opportunities are a must.
Back in 1818, the fledgling colony’s first-ever arts grant came in the form of cows: one per year for two years for our inaugural poet laureate. In 1908, the young federation established the Commonwealth Literary Fund as its first-ever arts program, supporting writers in need of financial aid.
It wasn’t until 1939 that the CLF’s remit expanded to include stipends for writers and subsidies for publications such as literary journals, becoming the first proper federal arts funding body. During the second world war the Menzies government briefly made substantial increases to the CLF’s budget, but these were not sustained through the following decades.
Then in 1975, under the new Whitlam government, the CLF was folded into the new Australia Council, becoming its first Literature Board. This was the beginning of an ambitious era for literature investment, with a program that included career development initiatives for emerging writers, dedicated funding for literary journals, and audience and market development initiatives such as writers’ festivals. Whitlam tripled the overall arts budget and also introduced a new income source for writers: the Public Lending Right scheme, which compensates authors for lost sales when their books are borrowed from libraries. In 2023, the Albanese government expanded the scheme to include ebooks and audio books.
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The Literature Board survived a range of restructures over the following decades, until 2013, when all artform boards were replaced with advisory groups and peer assessment panels.
In 2010, a short-lived attempt to bring together the state-based writers’ centres into a national body (coincidentally also named Writing Australia) failed. In 2015, an attempt to unite industry organisations into aBook Council of Australiaalso failed. Arts minister George Brandis had taken $6m from the funding pool to create the Book Council, butpointedly failed to return the fundswhen the body didn’t eventuate.
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These thwarted developments compounded the chronically disproportionate funding of literature, which sankto a low of just 2.4% of total Australia Council allocations in 2021, or $4.7m. By contrast, the major performing arts organisations received $120m.
Writing Australia’s budget of $26m over three years (or an average of $8.6m per year) sounds good by comparison, though it still represents a decline from a decade ago: in 2013-2014, $9m in grants were distributed to literature projects (the equivalent of $11.7m today). Since that time, need has only grown.
In another full-circle moment, Writing Australia will also re-inaugurate a poet laureate for Australia: a writer, mentor and advocate to focus the public conversation and help guide valuable policy development. This is a funded rolededicated to promoting poetry and mentoring up-and-coming poets; Writing Australia’s board is charged with determining the process for appointing the role, then making the selection.
“A national poet laureate will help ensure people can develop a love of poetry in school that they can carry throughout their whole life,” the arts minister, Tony Burke, told Guardian Australia.
Internationally renowned Australian poet Sarah Holland-Batt sees the laureate as an unequivocal “force of good” that will face many challenges – not least of all being the scrutiny of fellow poets – in a cultural landscape that has become increasinglyhostile to poetry. Academic Peter Kirkpatrick is more cautious,asking: “How would a poet laureate ‘speak’ to the spoken word, slam or hip-hop communities, or to bush poets, or to songwriters?” Academic Valentina Gosetti, looking at the impact of poet laureates across history, asks with hope: “Will Australia make a brave choice?”
These are urgent questions – because the long-term politicisation of cultural policy consigns writers to precarity and diminishes us all. No Australian arts policy has ever survived a change in government.Reviveis Australia’sfirst-ever such policy to survive into a second term.Given Labor’s thumping majority, and the lengths to which Burke has gone to legislate its key components, it will probably be some years before it might earn the distinction of being Australia’s first cultural policy to survive a change in government as well.
Among all the industry and technological changes facing writers, and with fewer and fewer publication opportunities for poets in particular, strong public voices will be vital. Given the intense scrutiny Creative Australia is facing right now, will Writing Australia be the strong advocate Australia’s writers need? With arts policy and writers’ opportunities having become so fraught, this is a time when we need to see writers well supported to create their finest work; Writing Australia’s arrival is critical.
Now the policy and funding spotlight is finally back on literature, Writing Australia and our national poet laureate must not just speak for our writers – they must roar.