Week in Review

As the first issue of the Sydney Review of Books for 2015 has been taking shape, we have been contemplating the coming year in publishing. Given the recent speculation about titles and leaders at the national level we think it’s only fitting that we begin the year by nominating our ‘captain’s picks’ for 2015 — a list that reads like a roll call of contemporary literature’s knights and dames.

The announcement last week of the inauguration of a ‘new but rather hazily defined’ Book Council did not include the information that it will be funded by a cut to the Australia Council of $2 million per year for three years. This is about half of the Council’s traditional literature budget – a massive hit. The Australia Council was informed of this just a few hours before the budget announcements on Monday, and is still working through what it will mean, in a practical sense, for the funding of literature.

The ceremony for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, which were announced in Melbourne on Monday evening, outdid itself in its awkwardness. I wasn’t there (though I did have my spies in the audience), but thanks to the decision to broadcast ‘highlights’ on SBS, I was able to soak up some of the unusually excruciating atmosphere. The Prime Minister seemed to radiate discomfort.

Tonight marks the end of state-based television current affairs on the ABC, with all eight Friday night 7.30 programs preparing to air their final episodes. The state editions, which for more than two decades have covered local politics, arts, sport and cultural issues that would otherwise miss out on coverage beyond the local papers, have been axed as part of the much-discussed (and criticised) federal government cuts to the ABC.

It is something of an understatement to say that Serial has become a cultural phenomenon. The statistics are widely quoted – each episode averages 1.5 million listeners. It is both the number one and the fastest downloaded podcast in the history of iTunes. The show has inspired countless opinion pieces, interviews, analyses, memes, google hangouts with program ‘characters’, and even a parody. There are dedicated discussion outlets. Slate has its own weekly Serial forum, podcast and aggregated feature story site, for example; while Reddit, in typical fashion, has taken its obsession to another level, with its devoted citizen-sleuth pages.

Margaret Atwood, on a world tour to promote her new collection of fantastical stories, Stone Mattress: Nine Tales, when asked if she wrote climate fiction, responded thus: ‘I don’t even call it climate change, I call it “the everything change”. It’s a change of everything.’ Atwood was recently announced as the first contributor to Scottish artist Katie Paterson’s 100 year artwork, Future Library — Framtidsbiblioteket in Norwegian — for the city of Oslo. A thousand trees have been planted in a forest just outside the city, and they will supply paper for a special anthology of books to be printed in 100 years time.

Perhaps the most significant news of the week for the book industry is that the dispute between online retailer Amazon and publisher Hachette has apparently been resolved, though the precise terms of the agreement have not been made public. At issue was the right to set prices for e-book sales. Hachette was unhappy at Amazon’s attempt to use its clout in the marketplace to dictate terms and drive down the cost of e-books in a way that Hachette regarded as detrimental to the interests of publishers and authors alike.

There was a moment during the speech Cate Blanchett delivered at Gough Whitlam’s memorial service on Wednesday when the headlines got up and wrote themselves. It took 51 seconds and began with the following eight words: ‘I am the beneficiary of free, tertiary education.’ While the majority of the crowd showed their support for the actor’s agenda with a thunderous seventeen-second round of applause, a small coterie of others set their faces to a stony neutrality.

In his excellent book The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Higher Education, UK scholar Andrew McGettigan gives one of the best analyses of market-driven approaches to university reform that I have seen. McGettigan shows how education has moved from being a public good to an ‘individual financial investment’, one that – in the end – will not only be detrimental to economic interests but also to students, society and democracy at large.

Cultural diplomacy in a different form may have resolved one aspect of the Shiva issue, so called, which appears to have queered Radford’s chances of staying on in a job he had held for more than a decade. The work in question, an eleventh century Chola bronze statue of a dancing Shiva valued at $5.1 million, was among 21 items the NGA purchased from disgraced New York art dealer Subhash Kapoor, whom Interpol has called ‘the world’s biggest commodity smuggler’.