I’ve heard it said that cinema is literature’s ‘Other’, but this just confuses print and visual media. In fact, literature mostly adores the cinema, which is usually faithful to it anyway – cinema’s ‘Other’, incidentally, is television. No, the number one public enemy of literature is popular fiction, upon which literature bestows as much disdain as it can muster.

Everything literature says it is, popular fiction is made to become its negative opposite. Literature is creative; popular fiction is about production, like industry. Literature is inspirational; popular fiction is sheer hard labour. Literature has genius; it will grudgingly concede that popular fiction, at best, is ingenious. Literature has ‘style’; popular fiction is functional. Literature is meandering, defiant and complex like ‘life’; popular fiction obediently follows a few simple ‘formulas’. On the other hand, literature is ‘understated’ and evocative, while popular fiction is excessive, exaggerated.

Let me list a few more points of contrast. For example: literature – even when its authors are published by Random House or HarperCollins or any other huge conglomerate – maintains a rhetorical distance from the world of commerce and the commodity form, while popular fiction sits happily right in the middle of the marketplace. Literature is written to be read carefully, even studied; but popular fiction is to be consumed, ‘processed’. Literature is serious, contemplative, unique, ‘universal’; but popular fiction is entertaining, distracted and distracting, conventional, disposable.

When literature is organised into a canon to be taught and transmitted by the old (like me) to the young (like my students), it is hardly surprising, then, to find that popular fiction is the first thing to go. We can see this especially right here, in the way ‘Australian Literature’ – my focus is on prose fiction – is constituted at universities around the country. A quick look through the various handbooks confirms the feeling that only a chosen few are given shelter beneath this particular umbrella. Conservatives out there will be pleased to know (but who can ever please them?) that undergraduate Aust. Lit subjects around the country continue to teach Henry Handel Richardson, Christina Stead, and Patrick White: our ‘great’ literary authors have certainly not been forgotten.

The racial aspects of Australian life are represented almost solely through the epic social realism of Prichard and Xavier Herbert. And ‘Australian Literature’ in its contemporary form is represented mainly through the work of four novelists – David Malouf, Peter Carey, Helen Garner, and Elizabeth Jolley – although there’s also some interest in the ‘dilettante’ Robert Dessaix and Drusilla Modjeska. Aboriginal fiction – which has in fact been increasingly attracted to popular genres – is still a token inclusion on Aust. Lit syllabi.

Amongst all the mass and diversity of Australian prose fiction – and we ought to remember just how immense that output is and has been – this is about all that makes it into ‘Aust. Lit’ canon.

Of course, the ‘Australian-ness’ of these novelists is obviously one thing that holds them together. For me, at least, it’s disappointing to see no contemporary Aust. Lit subjects teaching, say, Frank Moorhouse’s bouncy, belated Jamesian novel Grand Days, which takes its naïve-but-sexy Australian heroine to a ‘decadent’ Europe. As for Thomas Keneally, nothing of his gets taught after The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith – after which he becomes both too popular and too global (the two things often go together), or at least, too ‘Euro-western’. The requirement that Australian Literature set itself in Australia persists, even when it becomes a source of embarrassment – a predicament the Miles Franklin Prize judges, as we know, are condemned to live out every year.

In recent years, of course, the ‘Australian’ aspect of ‘Aust. Lit’ has been considerably loosened up. Most Aust. Lit subjects which continue to chart the rise of ‘literary nationalism’ at least do so critically these days. They know that a local setting both can both define the field and severely limit its range of possibilities. But there is still no attempt even to begin to broaden Aust. Lit’s geographical range. Critics and teachers have spent too long trying to identify what is ‘distinctive’ about Australian literature to let it all go; even now, it remains (like our Prime Minister) far too close to the heady stereotypes of the 1950s for comfort.

Most notably, Aust. Lit as it continues to be taught neither engages with nor identifies wider regional or global influences and trajectories. It almost never goes off-shore. I have not seen a single subject in the handbooks which situates Australian literature in the context of the Asian-Pacific rim, for example. And as for the ‘global Australian’, such a creature, in literary studies, has barely begun to exist.

Those who do teach Aust. Lit are by no means insensitive to these matters. They’ve also become aware of how the field has excluded other disciplines, especially cultural studies: recent articles in Southerly and Australian Literary Studies have, at least, tried to work these exclusions through. I fondly remember those ASAL (The Association for the Study of Australian Literature) conferences of a decade or more ago that saw frowning faces in the audience when speakers moved too promiscuously across ‘culture’ –as if Aust. Lit was required (in Kaz Cooke’s words) to ‘keep itself nice’.

And, indeed, Aust. Lit itself has been asked to ‘diversify’ – to incorporate ethnic and diasporic fiction, Aboriginal fiction, gay and lesbian fiction, etc., into its otherwise limited field of vision. It’s been nice to see a few undergraduate subjects in the handbooks (e.g. Adelaide University) trying to recognise and transmit what Paul Salzman and I once called ‘the new diversity’ of post-1970s Aust. Lit – and what Bruce Bennett more recently calls the ‘new dynamic’.

Yet this will-to-be-inclusive only works on the ‘Australian’ bit of Aust. Lit. The ‘Literature’ part remains pretty much intact. One could argue, in fact, that the diversification of what counts as Australian has kept this part more intact (more ‘nice’) than ever before. For all its inclusiveness, nothing is ever said about the fact that Aust.Lit has systematically refused to let Australian popular fiction enter its hallowed domain.

The literary histories, to be fair, do complicate this picture just a little. The Penguin New Literary History of Australia (1988) turned away from Leonie Kramer et al.’s earlier, narrow view of Aust. Lit. (still very much in place around the country!), to recover popular genres like melodrama (Elizabeth Webby) and romance (Fiona Giles) – excavating the nineteenth century under a much more pluralist and curious sense of what might count as Australian prose fiction. Webby spoke of the ‘melodramatic imagination’, and tried to make it more central to a nation that both produced it and then, typically, held it in disrepute. In the more recent Oxford Literary History of Australia, Rob Dixon has written a much larger chapter on Australian melodrama, continuing to defend the term – a ‘dirty word’ – from its literary detractors (although he ends, interestingly enough, by consigning modern forms of melodrama to the television). Elsewhere, Dixon has also looked at the colonial adventure novel.

The newer Oxford history does try at times to incorporate popular fiction into its historical genealogies, although you can almost register the pain this causes some of its contributors. And it also provokes a now familiar self-conscious take on local canon formations over the years as a sometimes ruthless means of (in Pat Buckridge’s words) ‘clearing a space’. But the essays on contemporary Aust. Lit. tellingly let the side down: the chapter on contemporary Australian fiction (Susan Lever) mentions only a few popular novelists in passing (to be contrasted, in terms of global sales, to ‘serious fiction’ which only sells locally), and clears its own space by affirming the conventional, traditional literary canon of White, Stead, and, somewhat idiosyncratically, David Foster.

What is interesting about all this is that – as you move closer to the present in this and other local literary histories – Australian popular fiction finds itself treated with increasing amounts of contempt. Bryce Courtney and Colleen McCullough are not valued in the Oxford book even as global phenomena, whereas those chapters which do look at melodrama spend much time analysing the ‘Australian–ness’ of their nineteenth century equivalents. David Malouf, showing some interest in colonial romance, recently lamented the fact that many of Rosa Praed’s novels were long out of print. I agree: the only novels that have been available from this writer are, unsurprisingly, a couple of ‘Australian’ ones. But we won’t find Malouf – or anyone else in the literary field, for that matter – singing the praises of (for example) Di Morrissey, one of Australia’s contemporary romance novelists. Romance and melodrama are recovered only as historical literary forms; it is as if, for Australian literary critics, they are not allowed to be modern.

It can indeed seem as if the academic wing of Aust. Lit been more tolerant of popular genres from the past than it is of popular fiction in the present – as if the field, far from opening up to include ‘everyone’, is in fact closing itself down. And this, to me, is a shame. It means that students get an absolutely artificial, reified and narrow view of the prose fiction produced in their country: Jolley, Garner, Carey, Malouf.

I have nothing against these novelists, but their ascendancy into the canon has meant that entire areas of literary production – fantasy, science fiction, horror, crime fiction of all kinds, adventure thrillers, eco-romances, and so on – are written off the agenda. There are students, now, for whom ‘Aust.Lit’ simply means Malouf et al; authors-you-read-only­because-they-are-set-on-your-syllabus. It certainly does not mean, for example, Greg Egan or Matthew Reilly or Damien Broderick or Sean Williams or J.R. Carroll or Isabel Carmody or Sara Douglass. (I’ve only seen one Aust.Lit. course, at La Trobe University, that includes a work of fantasy – by Lucy Sussex.) And what this also tells us is that – out of the two terms that make up ‘Aust.Lit’ – the ‘literary’ is by far the stronger and (unlike its partner) has, indeed, increased its coherence rather than lost it.

I often note, in passing (since to make the point in earnest rubs too many literary critics up the wrong way), that popular fiction is much harder to teach than literature. Literary studies relies on a whole network of apparatuses available to students, which give them templates with which to process the works their teachers have already sanctioned. A university library subscribes only to those journals which take literature seriously. Students read them and learn from them: this is how you read: this is how you do it.

Their teachers (themselves underpinned by funding bodies who only support the study of ‘serious literature’) confirm those knowledges and send them off into the world. Go into the Australian literary journals and see what I mean – with their appreciative critical articles on Malouf and Garner (yet again), as well as minor examples from the literary field like Farmer or, tiresomely, Gerald Murnane. A recent issue of Australian Literary Studies ran an interview with Gabrielle Lord: a rare exception to the rule, especially here, in a journal which prides itself on its excavation of minor literary figures. Students of literature who publish in this and similar venues reproduce all the parameters of their teachers pretty much wholesale: even inclusiveness (getting those minor figures ‘recognised’ in the present day), as I say, only works within the already sanctioned category of the literary.

Very few university libraries subscribe to popular fiction prozines (‘professional fanzines’) or fanzines. It would be pointless to ask them to do so – they will say that these publications are supported quite well enough by the marketplace. This means that bibliographies of popular fiction are difficult to do: popular novelists, in this country especially, are so much harder to recover than even the most minor of literary novelists, scattered across a myriad of journals, newspapers and magazines, and almost always long out of print. The fanzines will do this kind of work, of course, lovingly rounding up a host of writers that the literary world has long forgotten. But the fanzines themselves –never collected in any official capacity are destined to go the same way, the preserve only of collectors and enthusiasts in the popular fields.

This means that the few book-length bibliographies of Australian popular novelists that exist are indeed prized commodities – labours of love and rich with information. One of the best and most neglected has been John Loder’s Australian Crime Fiction: A Bibliography 1857–1993 (D.W. Thorpe, 1994). This book accounts for almost 3,000 Australian crime novels. You won’t find many of its often prolific writers in the otherwise comprehensive Oxford Companion to Australian Literature: the whole point of Loder’s work is to flesh out an iceberg that is barely tipped by the latter’s three editors.

Those popular novelists who do make it into the Companion can also be fleshed out in Loder’s book. The marvellous Guy Boothby, for instance, a turn-of-the-century Adelaide born bestseller (mentioned only in passing in the newer literary histories under their far-too-broad heading of melodrama) is given almost seven pages. Loder reproduces six letters from Boothby to his typist, confirming both the industriousness and the transnational reach of the popular novelist: ‘I shall be sending you the last chapter of A Bid for Fortune [his first ‘Doctor Nikola’ story] this week. Will you kindly make two copies of it & let me have it as quickly as you possibly can as it is wanted in America’.

Loder notes that Boothby was a pioneer in dictating his novels into a wax cylinder phonograph ‘and employing two secretaries to transcribe them using an early model Fox type­writer’. It’s worth remembering that Boothby was a contemporary of Henry Lawson: the Oxford Companion’s praise for Lawson’s ‘deceptively lucid, understated prose style’ gives us the familiar literature-is-restrained/ popular-fiction-is-excessive contrast already noted above when compared to the Times’ obituary for Boothby – for which, Loder tells us, Boothby’s novels were ‘frank sensationalism carried to its furthest limits’.

The Times’ comment also tells us why some of the most interesting genres of popular fiction in Australia – science fiction and fantasy, in particular – remain on the outer fringes of Aust.Lit Peter Nicholls calls Australian SF ‘a secret aura of Australia’s literary history’, busy and productive and locally ignored. Greg Egan or Damian Broderick or Sara Douglass won’t be taught at the universities; and yet these writers circulate globally, win international awards, and sell well (in some cases, very well). Look at Greg Egan’s wonderful website: this is where the aesthetic of contemporary Australian SF unfolds itself, crisp and beautiful, pushing the nation itself out to its ‘furthest limits’, literally moving (as characters do in his novels) all over the place.

How can Australian SF be ‘Australian’ when it shifts so indiscriminately from one place – often, one world – to another? For Nicholls in a review from ABR (February–March 2000), ‘Australian SF is not an identifiable subject in any very useful sense’. He sees it as implicitly transnational, even when it puts itself under the national umbrella .Jack Dann and Jane Webb’s massive anthology, Dreaming Down Under (Harper Collins, 1998), is full of good fiction – but Dann’s American background and the profiling of this book overseas rather than here (it was a cover story for the American SF prozine Locus, for instance) complicate its perhaps yearned – for ‘Australian’ identity. Its title, of course, turns the national itself into a global fantasy (Australian SF’s occasional fetishising of the ‘dreaming’ is another story). And as for fantasy itself in Australia: what is the literary national to make of Sara Douglass’s other worlds? How can the Aust.Lit requirement that its literature be both recognisable and unique deal productively with a genre that is both fantastic and derivative?

Paul Collins has recently edited an Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy encyclopaedia (MUP, 1999), which even, I’m pleased to say, has a little entry on me. And Russell Blackford, Van Ikin and Sean McMullen have also recently published their Strange Constellations: A History of Australian Science Fiction (Greenwood Press, 1999), the first book-length academic study of this local popular genre.

These books work like Loder’s bibliography, bringing together a mass of Australian writing hitherto ignored under the Aust.Lit rubric and treating it as an archive worthy of serious analysis. Similar work has been done in Stephen Knight’s study of Australian crime fiction, Continent of Mystery (MUP, 1997), which also draws together a myriad of obscure yet popular Australian writers.

Knight’s lament that there is still no representative anthology of the work of Mary Fortune speaks just as loudly as Malouf’s recent discovery of the publishers’ neglect of Rosa Praed.

For Knight, crime fiction – like SF and fantasy – was ignored locally precisely because it was genre fiction (and therefore never sanctioned by Australia’s literary gatekeepers), but also because so much of it was published overseas, in London especially. Their Australian reputation thus becomes just a minor aspect of their global reach. Knight’s book tries to pull these writers back into a national framework, mostly because crime fiction has a stronger sense of the local than SF and fantasy – and it certainly fits into Australian Literature’s overworked fascination with ‘landscape’. But a lot of crime fiction here depends on transnational routes (of crime, of inquiry, of migration, of money). And besides, the ‘local’ in popular fiction is almost always rendered so for a global marketplace, which is also why it so troubles the mostly inward-looking nationalism of Aust.Lit.

The studies and bibliographies by Knight, Loder, Collins, and Blackford et al that popular fiction has long and complicated histories in this country – histories that are only now beginning to be written. These histories are caught up with transnational publishing and global movements; but they also involve themselves with a whole range of processing mechanisms and cultures that students of literature barely notice. Fanzines and prozines are one example. The first Australian SF fanzine; Thrills Incorporated, lasted from 1950 to 1952, set up by the famous Stanley Horwitz’s Transport Publishing Co. (which also published a Scientific Thriller series). About a dozen SF magazines ran from the 1950s to the 1970s; with Paul Collins’ Void magazine, launched in 1975, Australian SF publishing became ‘semi-professional’.

These days, two SF journals – fully professional – dominate the field: Aurealis and Eidolon. In crime fiction, of course, Stuart Coupe’s Mean Streets is the big one: it flirts nostalgically with an older U.S. pulp aesthetic, while placing its Australian crime novels alongside crime fiction from around the world. Horror fiction here (what little there is) once had Bloodsongs to speak up for it, but this worthy fanzine has now moved offshore.

Fanzines and magazines help to turn popular fiction into a culture in which many readers can participate; so do the websites (popular fiction has much more website activity than literature), and so do the genre bookshops. In Melbourne and Sydney, Kill City is a key crime fiction genre bookshop, again flirting with lurid pulp aesthetics (there is no history of Australian pulp fiction, incidentally) and developing dense archives of crime fiction publishing both here and abroad. Slow Glass Books is Melbourne’s SF, fantasy and horror bookshop, also turning Australian SF over to a transnational SF community.

These places have their own aesthetics, their own logics, their own trajectories for dissemination and discussion. Students can learn as much about Australian writing here as they can by reading Malouf, Garner, Carey and Jolley: which of these is more ‘authentic’ to Australia is entirely open to question. I don’t want to bring literature and popular fiction together in some impossible gesture of reconciliation, because these two fields of writing will never get on with each other – nor should they. But I do want to say that Aust.Lit, as it is studied and transmitted in this country, has relied upon a severely restricted view of the literary field for too long. There are flourishing literary cultures out there that it routinely ignores and/or disparages; as a character in a famous serial killer novel once said, ‘the world is more interesting with them in it.’