I’d been trapped at home for three days by a combination of rain, a sick boyfriend and my own inherent laziness. So perhaps that’s why, as our car motored along the Western Highway from Melbourne to Clunes, I started singing. “We’re going to Booktown!” “All aboard the Booktown Express!” “You can always go - to Booktown”.

I wasn’t the only one to jump out the car with alacrity and gulp the crisp autumnal air of Clunes, a small town near Ballarat surrounded by low, golden hills. The residents of Clunes came up with the idea of Booktown last year as a way of combating the dip in the town’s fortunes following the drift of industry, business and residents to the city. This year it was a two day event with music, author talks, sausage sizzles and over fifty second-hand book dealers set up in various historic locations across the town. The atmosphere was great, the locals were really friendly, and I loved wandering around the glamorous gold-era buildings.

The books themselves were a bit underwhelming: at least a quarter of those fifty stalls were military history, and the rest seemed divided between needlecraft manuals, local memoirs and Bryce Courtenay. These books weren’t even kitsch enough to be cool - except for one I found on the history of beer can collecting. I still managed to accumulate an even dozen of books, mostly from $2 bins: Joyce Carol Oates, Elizabeth Jolley, Shirley Hazzard, a first edition George Johnston (yes - still $2),and some other stuff I’ve forgotten already. I’m not sure I even intend to read some of these. But it was such fun! I’m going to Booktown again next year - perhaps on Saturday morning instead of Sunday afternoon, but still singing all the way.

Yesterday, I felt like Wil E. Coyote after he’s been thumped by a giant hammer. That little flattened concertina shape was Ms TN, just back from the 2020 Summit. On Friday afternoon, I registered as an official 2020 Summiteer, put on the blue-ribboned lanyard of the Creative Australia stream (for “best in show”, as poet Peter Goldsworthy remarked), and entered a surreal parallel universe.

It was a world of corridors and party rooms and the Lego gigantism of Parliament House. It was instant media feedback via huge screens in the Great Hall, in which events I had witnessed live that morning were rendered in the afternoon as image and symbol, already swollen into myth. It was a thousand conversations. It was an exhilarating, bruisingly exhausting experience, and I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.

The 2020 Summit was at once exciting, frustrating and disappointing. It was, above all, a startling expression of collective goodwill, a fascinating and – for all its faults – inspiring experiment in open government. The weekend ran the whole gamut, from the genuinely moving opening event to the bizarre disconnection of Sky Channel vox pop interviews which seemed to have nothing to do with anything under discussion.

I spent most of the weekend on a steep learning curve, attempting to understand some new and strange vocabularies. The first was the language of “facilitation”. This process, run by volunteers from private corporations, involves industrial quantities of butcher paper, textas and white boards, and is supposedly designed to permit the rapid transmission and synthesis of ideas.

The second was the language of politics, the massaging of message into digestible chunks. Or, as many Creative Australia delegates complained on Sunday after they heard the presentation of the interim 2020 report, into pap. Nobody felt that what was presented on Sunday was a fair representation of what had emerged from our collective labour. (A rather less hurriedly put together report has since emerged).

There were 102 Creative Australia delegates (or Creatives, as we were inevitably tagged). The mix was diverse and by no means predictable. It included, as has been dutifully noted by the press, a fair proportion of glamour, and this rather obscured the collective intellectual weight, which included economists, commentators, producers, curators of museums and galleries, broadcasters, artists, bureaucrats and philantropists.

This weight was evident in the discussions that ensued, and equally in Cate Blanchett’s accomplished handling of proceedings. Her co-chairs were media academic Julianne Schultz and Arts Minister Peter Garrett. They, and the increasingly grey-faced facilitator Andy Schollum, always faced a difficult task: it was, as Blanchett remarked, a question of “herding cats”.

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Guest post by TimT, cross-posted at his blog Will Type For Food.

Strange day at work today. First, the spell check decided to throw a fit at the anagram ‘FaHCIA‘, and I have no idea why. It kept on throwing up suggestions like ‘Fuchsia’ or ‘Facial’. Then it tried to change ‘Aboriginal activist Murrando Yanner’ into ‘Aboriginal activist Murrando Yawner.’

I didn’t even want to run it past ‘Oompa-Loompa’, which is a word that R. uncovered in a transcript of hers. What word is this, she asked in the tone of someone who has somehow missed out on seeing a movie that traumatised generations of children. What does it mean? How do you even spell it?

Ever being the one to pursue tiny matters such as this with a ferocious pedanticism (the stakes are so low!), I leapt onto the computer to pursue this matter. Just how do you spell ‘Oompa-Loompa’?

Wikipedia gives ‘Oompa-Loompa’, a hyphenated word. It explains that ‘They come from Loompaland, which is a region of Loompa, a small isolated island situated in the Pacific Ocean.’ (Wikipedia sources this information, presumably, from Roald Dahl’s books Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.)

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I have been very lucky in my professional life. It is hard to describe how exciting it is to open up a cupboard and find it full of 68 years of Meanjin and to know you are responsible for the future of said cupboard. I felt I was opening a door on the history of Australian book design. Some of these covers are amazing. I plan to reprint articles from these early editions also.

I’m starting by showing you the fifites, but will blog the other decades as well.

1950

1951

1952

1953
Cover design by S. Ostoja-Kotkowski.

1954

1955

1956
Cover design by Alan McCulloch

1957

1958

1959

Cross-posted at Sophie Cunningham

I just wanted to write a short post to note the passing of The Hon. John Button. While it would be hypocritical of me to complain of the media’s (excessive?) discussion of his passionate devotion to the Cats, he should also be remembered for his services to Melbourne’s literary community. He was a fine writer and he did a lot of work as Chair of the Melbourne Writer’s Festival. He was a festival patron until his death. His death is a real loss and he will be missed.

There is something most peculiar about the whole Deaves business (that’s three separate links, though you could find a billion more I am sure). I wonder how you felt about it. I went through a range of what I couldn’t call emotions, or feelings, perhaps attitudes best sums it up. A range of attitudes that I have often seen in others and tend to think of myself as being ‘above’. One of them was ‘why couldn’t they have kept that to themselves?’ and another was along the lines of ‘I certainly wouldn’t do that sort of thing’ (not having a daughter, that’s a pretty irrelevant thought, so I’m surprised it was such an emphatic one). I also – and this is such an archaic, pathetic feeling that I am most ashamed of all of this one – wondered how people in other countries would see Australia when they heard about the Deaveses.

These were just feelings I couldn’t shake, for quite some time. It was most definitely fear of the transgressive other, but maybe more? Now I appear to have regained my equilibrium, with only faint disgust and the hope that soon I would forget them. I have no idea how much of this disgust is innate and how much is cultural – bit of both? What would other animals do? How does ant society feel about public boasts about incest?

But I do retain my irritation on Mr. Deaves’ attitude along the lines of ‘of course we knew it was illegal but so what?’ and the trumpeting that sex with his daughter was ‘the best sex I’d ever had’. This might be something to do with a general prudish wish to never hear anyone ever talk about the best sex they’d ever had whoever it is with. Though I think it might be something to do with the couple’s appearance on 60 Minutes, which I didn’t see anyway but have seen a lot about since in various permutations, with this ‘best sex I ever had… get over it’ attitude, which is doubly annoying from someone you had previously never heard of and never wanted to.

I suppose talking/writing about it in this vaguely pompous way is just another way of fuelling the overall chatter on this subject without seeming to get my hands dirty. And I should stop, delete this file and not publish it on Sarsaparilla. Good then.

The judges for the new Prime Minister’s Literary Awards for Fiction and Non-Fiction, worth $100,000 each, were announced this week. The really juicy news is that Kevin Rudd isn’t ruling out intervening in the process: according to the “rules”, the final decision on the shortlists and the winners rests with him. Some of the judges claim they didn’t know about this, although it’s been up on the web for a while, but I can still understand their shock. Having it in the rules is one thing, but the idea that he might apply independent thought is another. To appreciate the true scandal of this potentiality, imagine the Queen actually choosing the Governor General! Or the Governor General exercising his powers! The entire charade of our constitutional monarchy would be exposed and we’d have to become a republic or something.

Meanwhile, in the Republic of Literature, the issue of Rudd’s urge to join the literati barely scratches the surface of the messages these judging panels send about Australian culture. Let’s walk it through.

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