Paving Paradise

In late 2021, as he moved into assisted care, the Australian writer Frank Moorhouse donated his decades-long collection of anthologies of Australian writing to Western Sydney University’s Writing and Society Research Centre. He died not long after in June 2022. The Frank Moorhouse Reading Room was established as a tribute to his lifelong advocacy on behalf of Australian writers and writing: his work towards fair pay and copyright ownership for all Australian writers, and his commitment to diverse voices, progressive thinking, and social justice. In this essay stream, we invite writers to help us unpack this singular archive, spotlighting the intergenerational concerns and affiliations through which Australian literature is constantly being shaped and reshaped.

Frank Moorhouse died in mid-2022, but it took me a while to realise I missed him. Most of the celebrations of his life and work came from people who knew him and/or loved his League of Nations trilogy or his discontinuous narratives from the 1970s. I never met him; I’m not one of the many female fans of his best-known character, Edith Campbell Berry; and although we were both part of the 1970s sexual liberation movement, we were fighting on very different fronts. While Frank was discussing sex and censorship in Balmain pubs, I was joining the annual Adelaide women’s pub crawl, where a bunch of feminists refused to be confined to the Ladies’ Lounge and invaded the men-only front bars.

In theory I could see that when the bell tolled for Frank Moorhouse, it tolled for me, but in practice I spent more time thinking about the death of another Sydney writer, Gabrielle Carey, with whom I had a network of connections. My first novel was compared, inaccurately but flatteringly, to Puberty Blues; I read Gabrielle’s 1992 memoir In My Father’s House several times, because her father, like mine, was an Australian academic who died by suicide; and we finally met while she was working on her 2018 bibliomemoir Falling Out of Love with Ivan Southall, because I’d written about Southall as well. (I still love him.) When I opened the Sydney Morning Herald on 5 May 2023 and discovered that Gabrielle had died suddenly, it shook me in a way that Frank’s death hadn’t.

Gabrielle’s last published article includes a reference to her ‘perilous financial state’ and her death prompted a public discussion about the feasibility of earning a living as a writer, summarised in the final line of Caroline Overington’s obituary, ‘But being so committed to excellence, in Australian letters? It just does not pay.’ Despite all the concern and indignation, however, there wasn’t even a token acknowledgement that other writers were still facing the same problems, let alone any attempts to find solutions. At that moment, I found myself remembering Frank and wondering what goals and strategies he would’ve suggested.

For those who only knew him as a novelist, Frank Moorhouse might seem to be an unlikely consultant on industry issues, but I’d spent more time reading his articles for The Australian Author than his fiction. Not long after I became a full-time freelance writer in 1980, an older writer explained to me that despite its name, the Australian Society of Authors was actually our union. From then on, the articles in its journal The Australian Author shaped my identity as a writer. Among the regular contributors, Frank was the one who appealed to me most, because he talked about economics and vocation to the same extent and in the same kind of language.

Like Frank, I had a quasi-mystical belief that I was somehow destined to be a writer and that, in his words, ‘it is healthy for the culture to have a band of writers who are not attached to institutions, who are independent of the control of the state’. We both tried to keep our sense of vocation from becoming fanatical. I’d started to notice that a lot of people didn’t have my kind of access to the writing world when I was invited to my first interstate writers’ festival and discovered that a friend would be talking about illiteracy at a conference down the road. Later, in his final essay, Frank would ask, ‘if the rules I have followed all my life have led to me seeing a psychiatrist, were they the right rules?’ But underneath our layers of agnosticism, we were still, to some extent, the kids who sent their first manuscripts to a publisher in their teens and never really recalibrated their ambitions. (Both our manuscripts were rejected with, in Frank’s words, ‘an encouraging note’.)

Over time Frank Moorhouse became part of a disparate group of novelists whose writing about writing influenced the way I see the writing life, even though I don’t like their novels. I routinely reread George Orwell’s Collected Essays and Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader, and I’ve gone on carrying Martin Amis’s The War on Cliché and Stephen King’s On Writing from one house to the next, in case I want to read them again. But when I decided it was time to reread Frank’s writing about writing, I had to start by tracking it down.  

As a novelist and short story writer, Frank believed that ‘The serious writer of fiction does not use his or her work as a vehicle for personal, political or moral opinions’ – but that rule didn’t apply to his essays and articles, in which he enjoyed sharing his opinions. Without much effort, I found twenty-odd pieces that he had written for The Australian Author, The Griffith Review, Meanjin and Text on subjects as diverse as ASIO, Henry Lawson’s effeminacy, and ‘The Word Processor and the Shift in Visual Design of the Short Story’ – and if I’d been looking for satirical social commentary, I could’ve gone on to read The Inspector-General of Misconception, where Frank opines about politics, the larrikin spirit, and the correct way to eat an oyster. 

Browsing through this archive, I was braced for the kind of disappointment that often comes with a return to the past, but what I found was even more remarkable than I had remembered. Among the pieces I retrieved were four articles in which Frank summed up the state of Australian writing across four decades: ‘The Politics of Writing’ (1981); ‘Drowning, not Waving’ (2001); ‘On being a Writer in Australia’ (2007); and ‘Is Writing a Way of Life?’ (2017). Although he skipped the 1990s, Frank basically offered some kind of commentary on every decade of my working life. As I read through those articles again in chronological order, I felt as if I was taking a trip in a time machine.

The 1980s were a relatively good time for Australian writers. The neoliberal project of deregulation and asset-stripping had already begun, but there were still some assets left to strip, so corporations were throwing money around like wolves on Wall Street: on one memorable occasion, I was paid twice for the same job. In this context, the optimism of the 1970s still had a fair bit of traction, and Frank’s 1981 article ‘The Politics of Writing’ presents the writing life as a collective enterprise. It’s the record of a talk he gave to writers all round Australia, whose input he credits, and it culminates in

Frank starts with the announcement that, working together, all these writers have brought about a ‘revolutionary change’ in their economic relationship to their society – the change being, he says, deadpan, ‘in the way we are paid’. Writers need this revolutionary change, he explains, because ‘Many consumers now feel that they have a social right to freely use, that is, copy and reproduce, anything they need from media.’ Since the royalty system has been undermined by the belief that the printed word is common property, the Australian Society of Authors has been fighting for writers’ compensation, in the form of the Public Lending Right scheme and the Copyright Agency. (Frank had already volunteered to be the plaintiff in a copyright test case against the University of New South Wales in 1974.)

He goes on to outline some other schemes for bolstering writers’ incomes which never took off – for instance, ‘a demographic loading on royalties paid for books which are specifically for Australian use’. Then he explains the reasoning behind all these schemes, saying with optimistic certainty, ‘Any model we might have of the independent writer must include economic invulnerability’ (my italics) and ‘I think we all share the belief that a civilised country should be able to support full-time writers’. While I was startled to see him using ‘a civilised country’ as a benchmark, I was equally startled by the thought of a country supporting full-time writers: they both feel like ideas whose time has passed.

There’s no public record of Frank’s take on being an Australian writer in the nineties, the decade in which he launched his research-heavy League of Nations trilogy. When I try to fill the gap, I realise I see the 1990s as a holding pattern. Publishers were more cautious than they’d been during the financial bonanza of the 1980s, but their basic approach seemed much the same. Writers were fine-tuning and extending their copyright claims and worrying about the effect of ebooks and megastores like Borders, but, as far as I know, nobody predicted the seismic disruptions to the publishing industry that were about to take place.

Frank returned to his role as commentator in 2001, his article, ‘Drowning, not Waving’, following the same basic trajectory as his first report – that is, he outlines a central problem, considers some solutions, and thinks about writing as a vocation. But this time, twenty years later, he spends most of the article defining the problems, and the solutions he offers are just his own speculations, not the established policies of the Australian Society of Authors. The sense of collectivity is disappearing; from the title of the article onwards, it’s clear that Frank’s optimism is ebbing as well.

The problem that he and the ASA were dealing with in the 1980s was an industrial one, requiring changes to the way writers were paid for their work. At the turn of the century, the main problem Frank identifies is a problem of supply and demand. By this time, a lot more novels are being published. In 1969 thirteen novels were submitted for the Miles Franklin Award; in 2001 there are fifty-four entries, even though each publisher is now limited to three submissions. As Frank says, this may be good news for readers but ‘for the writer – more means less’. His guess is that publishers are bringing out more novels as a way of hedging their bets, creating ‘a literary log jam’ in which reviewers, literary editors and bookshops don’t have enough space for all the novels that are coming out.

The increase in the number of books goes along with an increase in the number of writers, who keep emerging annually from creative writing courses in universities and writers’ centres. Frank worries that writing courses could become ‘dream factories, offering false promise of careers as writers’. He wonders whether these courses could limit entry, the way medical schools do, or be as rigorous as drama schools, but his suggestions are closer to vague hopes than concrete proposals. There’s more self-doubt here. In his first article, he summed up the case for full-time writers in a couple of confident sentences; now he says hesitantly, ‘I believe – romantically, perhaps – that we need to keep serious book writing as a vocation’ and spends the next page backing up his claim.

Frank’s concerns about the writer’s vocation keep increasing. His third article, ‘On Being a Writer in Australia’, published six years after ‘Drowning, Not Waving’, begins by looking back at how he became a writer, gravitating towards a ‘strange, self-stimulating clan’ of writers in Balmain during the 60s and 70s who lived by ‘something which could be called The Writers’ Oath’. According to the Oath, writers who take fiction seriously will trust their readers to work things out for themselves and concentrate on listening to their inner voice and resisting external pressure from the market and the state.

Frank distances himself from his Balmain days to some extent, mocking the uniform (goatee and corduroy jacket) for young male writers, and admitting that their principled objection to moralising didn’t stop them bashing the bourgeoisie. At the same time, he spends most of the article expanding his definition of the literary author in ways that clearly still draw on The Writers’ Oath. He believes that for literary authors, as compared to journalists or academics, ‘there is a need to withdraw a considerable distance from society on a creative level’ and quotes the critic Lionel Trilling, who says that art liberates individuals from the tyranny of their culture.

The balance of Frank’s assessments is tilting, with this third report dealing almost entirely in generalisations, apart from a brief reference to the increase in book talk on blogs, in book clubs, and at writers’ festivals, though even here he doesn’t come to any conclusions. He sounds beleaguered, turning back to the past to remind himself of his reasons for becoming a writer, as if he feels his construction of the writing life is currently under threat, in a way that will become explicit in the title of his fourth and final article, ‘Is Writing a Way of Life?’

Frank’s concern was justified. In 2003 there was a sudden drop in the sales of Australian fiction, and publishers responded by cutting their fiction budgets. Cultural historian David Carter has documented the process, suggesting that, ‘What we might be seeing in those years is a period of adjustment and transition, firstly in response to the threat or promise of ebooks and online bookselling, and secondly as part of a shift in conceptions of and investments in the fiction field itself.’ US journalist Scott Timberg confirms and broadens Carter’s analysis in his book Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class, saying, ‘Book editors, journalists, video store clerks, all kinds of musicians, novelists without tenure – they’re among the many groups struggling with the dreary combination of economic slump and Internet reset’. 

The effects of the cultural shift in the 2000s were far-reaching but it mostly passed without comment. I knew it had happened, because I experienced it myself – although my last novel was one of The Age’s top three books in its category for 2007, I was never published again. But even so it took me years to accept that, while the publishing industry eventually recovered, a generation of writers had mostly been marginalised or eliminated. Scott Timberg died by suicide at the age of fifty. I backed off and immersed myself in a memoir that I’d been working on sporadically for decades. Gabrielle Carey’s next book went to a smaller publisher.

In comparison, Frank Moorhouse might have looked like a survivor. Although Random House published the third book in his League of Nations trilogy in 2011, Frank was one of the few people to talk openly about the vulnerabilities and fears of Australian writers at the start of the twenty-first century.

Frank’s first three reports were addressed to his fellow writers and published in The Australian Author, the quarterly journal of the Australian Society of Authors. But the ASA was changing. In 2013, on the fiftieth anniversary of its founding, the executive director Angelo Loukakis said:

I can’t tell whether Frank felt that the ASA’s current mission didn’t align with his commitment to literary authorship; whether he knew that The Australian Author was about to be discontinued; or whether he decided it was time to address readers and critics, as well as other writers. But one way or another, ‘Is Writing a Way of Life?’ was published in the Autumn 2017 edition of Meanjin, one of the literary magazines to which Frank’s Balmain clan had aspired. 

Having revisited his Balmain days, Frank now travels even further back in time. He opens as a fifteen-year-old attending Wollongong Tech, and over the next three pages, he tries to work out ‘how a young man from an Australian country town could identify and aspire to belong to a way of life called “literary”’. The stories he tells cover a range of approaches to the writing life – commercial, journalistic, anecdotal or research-based, and, closest to Frank’s heart, literary authorship. 

Because he is addressing a new and wider audience, Frank recycles a lot of what he has said earlier about the literary author, talking about ‘the Western literary tradition’ this time, rather than ‘civilised’ countries, and praising that tradition’s artistry, audacity, and ‘imaginative enquiry’ more overtly than ever before. He starts to think about concrete proposals again, exploring some possibilities for mid-career funding or long-term national contracts for senior authors. Then, after an extended defence of public funding for the arts, he abruptly announces that ‘The writing of this essay gradually became disturbingly existential and personal.’

From there on, the essay keeps swinging between despair and hope. To begin with, Frank quotes a Cormac McCarthy character who, as he prepares to shoot someone, asks, ‘If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use is that rule?’ Frank tells us that after fifty years of the writing life, he’s going broke again, which makes him question his commitment to The Writers’ Oath. He conscientiously lists all his successes but ends that catalogue by acknowledging that he has just been through ‘something of a breakdown’. Then he changes tack again and signs off by saying, ‘I don’t think I am looking down the barrel of a gun. Yet.’

It’s a moving admission, all the more effective because it comes out of the blue. Throughout all his regular reports on the state of the art, Frank has maintained an unwavering belief in writing as a way of life. He accepts that some writers don’t want to write full-time, but it remains his ideal. In the 1970s and 1980s, he worked with other writers to bring about changes in the economics of writing that would turn this ideal into a real possibility, but Frank in 2017 comes across as an isolated figure, whose financial situation is causing him to doubt his ideals so deeply that he can no longer rouse himself enough to denounce the culture or the market or the state.

By now I can see why, several years after Frank’s death, I was still subconsciously waiting for his report on the 2020s. Instead, I can only sit with the reverberations of his last word ‘Yet’ and ask myself what he might have said about the choices Australian writers are facing at present if he had gone on to explore the implications of his own despair. 

In a neoliberal world ruled by the market, it’s not surprising that in their final essays Frank Moorhouse and Gabrielle Carey both talk about being literally unrewarded. Frank says he’s going broke again; Gabrielle asks, ‘Why had I spent my life being a writer, thereby deliberately leaving myself in this perilous financial state?’ The economic vulnerability of older writers is, of course, an important issue – for all writers, not just those who are currently old – but I can’t help thinking that the sense of loss experienced by Frank and Gabrielle also has a metaphorical dimension.

During the forty years in which he made his four reports, Frank watched his construction of the literary life fall apart. By 2019, Gabrielle was recording her ‘growing sense of the writing vocation as useless and unproductive in comparison to nursing or even landscape gardening’. Like most writers who started out in the 1970s – when writers, publishers and government departments were working together to develop a new kind of Australian writing – both of them initially believed that the literary author was, in Frank’s words, ‘an important participant in the public discourse’. But by the 2010s, social media had changed the arena for public discourse and derailed the twentieth-century model of a writing life.

At the point where Frank was editing his school magazine or joining the Balmain clan, writing was still a geeky occupation and, as the American critic Mark McGurl observes, ‘the understanding had always been that readers would be relatively many and writers relatively few’. These days everyone’s a writer, either because they’ve been accredited by a writing course of some kind or, more simply, because they’re part of the solid majority of Australians who post regularly on social media, putting their experiences into words.

At the same time no one can realistically aim to be a writer in Frank’s ideal terms – that is, full-time for a lifetime. The current template for the writing life is to be either a trained professional, training more professionals, or a gig economy worker whose writing occupies one section of a multitasking pie chart. Frank saw literary authors as detached from society – outside, looking in – but these days writers are expected to build a brand and write big books that attract big audiences, which represents a fundamental (although mostly unspoken) shift in the writer’s relationship to society. 

As I reread the last paragraphs of Frank’s last essay, I noticed that the way in which he was brought down by his own sense of vocation matches Aristotle’s classic arc of tragedy, where a morally complex protagonist is destroyed by a tragic flaw. I found myself responding with the requisite pity and fear – and anger as well, because the move from collective action to individual isolation is also a classic neoliberal trajectory, which has harmed or obliterated many of the concepts, practices, and people I’ve valued over the years.

Frank’s advocacy on behalf of writers in general shaped the way I see the writing life. As a writer he was dedicated to a purist’s idea of the literary, but as an activist he was instinctively inclusive. Twenty years later he was still sad that Colleen McCullough refused to shake his hand at a literary lunch in the 1980s, because she’d heard that the Balmain clan despised her novels, and his articles reference a wide range of writers: new and established, literary authors and the writers of cookbooks or gardening books, writers who teach full-time and writers who never get published.

This belief in writers making common cause didn’t die with Frank. In her 2023 article ‘The artist as essential worker’, Jennifer Mills argues against the current construction of artists as entrepreneurs and looks at national policies that could protect or extend artists’ rights at work. Frank’s first article described photocopying and lending rights as a revolutionary change, and Australian writers could definitely use another round of revolutionary change at present, when, as Mills says, ‘the notion of the artist as worker is at something of an historical ebb’.

Reading through Frank’s history of the last forty years, I realised I’d gone on thinking about him because I want him to come back and tell me what to do next. But it would be unfair to turn Frank Moorhouse into an oracle. In fact, the ideas he was voicing had been developed and debated by a community of Australian writers, who collectively came up with a new definition of their rights, campaigned for it, and won it for future generations.

That happened once, so it can happen again. But although the activism of Frank’s writing community remains a long-term inspiration, in the short term his despair is even more compelling, showing us, like a canary in a mine, which areas of the writing life are becoming toxic and where we need to make revolutionary changes.

Ave atque vale, Frank.