I don’t know why some people seem to think voting is a great imposition. I love lining up and watching the person behind the table pick up the ruler and find my name. There’s a little warm glow of being one tiny thread in the great muddled ball of string that is the democratic process. Always, in the queue there’s a particular feeling: pleased, proud, everyone hugging to ourselves the little secret of how we’re going to vote. When my kids were at primary school, I loved helping to person the stall churning out the Democracy Sausages.

If you don’t count the doling-out of snags – sauce or mustard? – I’ve never been involved. But this time is different. A few weeks ago I sent an email to six writer friends, to see if they’d be interested in joining a group I hastily named Writers for Climate Action. Five of the six said yes straight away. The sixth said she thought it was a good idea but that it would be preaching to the converted, so she wouldn’t, but good luck.

Writers for Climate Action now has an impressive list of members, including Di Morrissey, Helen Garner, John Coetzee, and Mem Fox. There are about seventy writers on the list, and every day more writers ask to join us.

This time is different because we’re running out of time. The last two years of unprecedented fires and floods are the first flicker of our future. Looking back, those floods and fires will seem like just the gentlest hints of what was to come.

Standing in that little cardboard booth with the little pencil in our hands, we’ve got a lot of urgent issues swirling in our minds.  The cost of living, employment, refugees, taxes, corruption, defence, Indigenous justice ... They’re all important and they’ll all shape our future. But the writers who have come together believe that one issue underlies all the others: the need for a reliable climate. Without that, all those other issues – no matter how important they are – are only going to get much worse.

Writers for Climate Change isn’t pushing any particular candidate or party. We’re just hoping that people will do a bit of googling about the candidates in their area to find out which is the most likely to be part of real action on climate change. Most of them can see there are votes in climate action and are talking the talk. Let’s hope enough of them are prepared to walk the walk as we head into the next last-chance few years.

For more information, visit: https://www.writersforclimateaction.com/

Newcastle Writers Festival was the first Australian literary festival to cancel due to Covid on March 13, 2020, and the first to transition to an online program three weeks later. It was thus strangely fitting that I appeared at the launch of the festival’s 2022 program via Zoom for the first time. As a household contact – one of the kids contracted Covid – I couldn’t be at Newcastle City Hall in person to speak about the line-up of 110 writers appearing in our first in-person program since 2019. Three years without a festival. It still shocks me.

While the program doesn’t have an overarching theme, I wanted the opening and closing night events to capture the tone. The opening night gala is titled What the World Needs Now and centres on love in all its forms. Six writers, including Trent Dalton, Hannah Kent, and Nardi Simpson, will speak about love’s transformative impact. On the final evening, Sarah Wilson will discuss her most recent book, This One Wild and Precious Life: A hopeful path forward in a fractured world, with Beejay Silcox.

Kerry O'Brien, Trent Dalton, Chloe Hooper, and Rosemarie Milsom at the Newcastle Writers Festival 2019

This year’s program also includes journalists Van Badham, Justine Cullen, Kate McClymont, and Amy Remeikis, Aboriginal writers and activists  Chelsea Watego and Thomas Mayor, academic and former Griffith Review editor Julianne Schultz, Clementine Ford, Anne Summers and Wendy McCarthy, as well as Vanessa Berry, Kelli Hutchins, Michael Robotham, Mehreen Faruqi, Jane Caro, Tom Keneally, Amani Haydar, Brendan Cowell, Jessie Stephens, Jen Webb, Laura Elizabeth Woollett, and international guest Simon Winchester, who will be appearing live from the US via video link. There is a strong contingent of Hunter region writers, including Lee Christine, Keri Glastonbury, Jean Kent, and Wendy James.

I realise there is a lot to despair about: the ongoing impact of the pandemic, record-breaking floods, and the war in Ukraine. It is overwhelming. I didn’t want to sugar-coat the hardship or avoid tough conversations with the program, though I also wanted to celebrate the comfort provided by books and powerful writing during the tumultuous past couple of years.

Richard Flanagan said it best during a recent event at Adelaide Writers Week, ‘I feel there is a mood for change in the country that I haven’t seen for a very long time. And I find that hopeful.’

Australia’s first and largest open-access press, ANU Press, has hit the massive milestone of publishing one thousand titles. Reaching this benchmark in just under twenty years is a big goal for such a small press.

The original Australian National University Press was founded in the 1960s, with a traditional publishing model focused on book sales. It published important academic research for more than three decades before it was wound up in the early 1990s.

The new, progressive model of open-access publishing, focusing mainly on free ebook distribution with print-on-demand sales as a sideline, kicked off as an experiment in 2003 – and the Press has since gone from strength to strength. ANU Press now achieves more than five million downloads of its books annually worldwide and publishes more than fifty titles each year.

‘Our readers cover the length and breadth of the world,’ deputy manager Emily Tinker said. ‘To be able to provide access to such important research for free, to people from all around the world, is a real privilege. While our books are accessed by some of the best institutions in the world, they are also read by the people the research is about – Papua New Guinea, for instance, is a significant area of research for our authors and PNG is often in our top ten countries for downloading our books.’

The wide range of disciplines published by ANU Press is also impressive, covering everything from Asia-Pacific studies, Indigenous studies, humanities and social sciences, to law and science.

The thousandth title was Professor John Braithwaite’s Macrocriminology and Freedom, an 800-page ‘magnum opus’ that ‘weaves together all the main themes of [Braithwaite’s] influential work … to produce an elegant and ambitious explanatory normative account of crime as freedom-threatening domination’.

While its core publishing program focuses on academic monographs, ANU Press also prides itself on innovative publishing, incorporating videos, voice recordings, and interactive elements into many of its works. Wiidhaa: An Introduction to Gamilaraay is one such publication, aiming to revive the Gamilaraay language through the use of sound files in the textbook. Fluid Matter(s): Flow and Transformation in the History of the Body is another: a digital humanities publication that relies on the fluidity of electronic publishing to conceptualise its content.

Other key titles published by the Press recently include History Wars by Doug Munro, an analysis of the Peter Ryan–Manning Clark controversy; Honouring a Nation by Dr Karen Fox, the first history of Australia’s honours system; and Sound Citizens by Dr Catherine Fisher, on the history of female broadcasting in Australia and its contribution to the feminist movement at large. Each of which received wide circulation and praise in Australian media, as well as impressive download results.

Through its fully open-access ethos and commitment to publishing works based solely on academic merit rather than potential sales, ANU Press continues to seek and explore new ways to communicate research, history, and stories to inform people and policy and to create a better world.

‘ANU Press proudly celebrates its contribution to increasing knowledge throughout the world with its 1000th volume,’ said University Librarian Roxanne Missingham, who is the division director of ANU Press. ‘With over 5.7 million downloads in 2021, the Press fulfils the University’s vision of communicating scholarship and fostering innovation through its open-access publishing. A recognised world-leading press, it is timely to acknowledge the importance of the transformation made through ANU Press’ leadership in new forms of publishing.’

ANU Press is holding an exhibition at The Australian National University’s Menzies Library from now through to the end of May 2022. It showcases the past, present, and future of the Press. Find out more about ANU Press or download any of their titles free on their website here: https://press.anu.edu.au/

Life Before Man (LBM), the poetry imprint of Gazebo Books, was founded by artist and publisher Phil Day in 2020. To date, seven books have been published, including works by Subhash Jaireth, Cassandra Atherton, Anthony Lawrence, Gary Catalano, and Alex Selenitsch. Forthcoming is a substantial international anthology of prose poetry, titled Alcatraz.

The books in the series strive for a recognisable, uniform look. Front and back covers feature paintings by Phil Day, and forgo the standard typographic author and title details – these appear on the spines only. Internally, an emphasis has been given to clean design and generous allocation of space, allowing the poems to breathe.

S.K. Kelen’s ‘Love’s Philosophy’ and Alex Selenitsch’s ‘Purgatorio Replaced’, both published by Life Before Man

Day has a long association with both trade publishing and handmade artist books. He originally trained under book artist Petr Herel at the Graphic Investigation Workshop, Canberra School of Art, during the 1990s, and subsequently co-founded the Finlay Press (named after letterpress printer Peter Finlay), which issued more than twenty limited edition letterpress books between 1997 and 2009. The Press later morphed into trade publisher Finlay Lloyd, co-run by Day and Julian Davies, which became known for its strikingly designed books. In 2010, Day founded Mountains Brown Press, producing more than a dozen artist books that displayed a ‘back to basics’ approach to book-making.

LBM’s most recent initiative, the Red Letter series, in part returns Day to the bespoke publishing of his Finlay Press days. The Red-Letter series consists of poetry chapbooks featuring new work by significant Australian poets. Each title, while commercially printed, has been issued in a strictly limited edition of twenty-five numbered and signed copies, featuring original woodcut wrappers printed on Japanese paper, created especially for the series by Day.

The first four titles in the series, issued in December 2021, comprise Laurie Duggan’s The Earlwood Journal (The Fire Season), Jordie Albiston’s Book: 15-Line Sonnets, Ken Bolton’s Three of Them, and Jill Jones’s My Workshop of Filthy Creation. In the pipeline are four further chapbooks featuring new work by Judith Beveridge, Anthony Lawrence, Judith Bishop, and Lindsay Tuggle.

Red Letter series published by Life Before Man (photograph courtesy of Des Cowley)

The Red Letter series takes its inspiration from European presses such as Fata Morgana, and strives to create a tactile reading experience that emphasises the poetry chapbook as a distinctive publishing form.