And so, publishers are like invisible ink. While editors work closely, often hand in hand, line by line, with authors, the publisher’s mark is also on the book. The shape of the company’s list, the look of the book, the marketing presentation, the costing and retail price of the book are decided on by the publisher.

These may seem external to the text, mere presentation, but I’d like to show how a publisher imagines the book for a public still in the future, and how this imagining may be based on some long-standing passion for an author’s work. This passion can create the coincidence of books and cultural change since the publisher is a sounding board, collector and collator of invisible material. The writer provides the artistry, the publisher frames it.

To draw authors to their list at least half of the publisher’s commitment has to be towards the future writing, and this requires awareness of the gaps in the public gallery and of the changing allegiances caused by inevitable shifts in corporate structures.

In this essay I hope to show how a publisher finally has to be part of each element of the book trade: part publicist, part marketer, part bookseller, part editor, part host and part confrere in the transfiguration of ideas into manuscripts into books.

Here is the history behind twenty imagined but not imaginary works.

D.H. Lawrence – 1967

I was fourteen years old and living in Wollongong. Old enough to read D.H. Lawrence. This master of the English language had actually written in a holiday house ten kilometres north at Thirroul. Why couldn’t we study Kangaroo? Why couldn’t we see the house? Why couldn’t we do all that even if officially we had to read Sons and Lovers?

Our school wasn’t into excursions. Our teachers weren’t interested in Literary Sites. And so, I used crawl to the cliff-face front lawn of Wyewurk, to look out to sea, and to read Kangaroo in situ.

My keenness to do something about Wyewurk provided me with my first excursion into journalism, with an article (unpaid) on Lawrence at Wyewurk for the local paper. That was 1970. Two years later I applied, unsuccessfully, for an NSW Government grant to write a book on D. H. Lawrence in Australia.

Nothing happened with DHL for many years, and I was very careless of him, his house and his books, until I heard that Wyewurk had changed hands in 1985. As Publishing Coordinator for the Australian Bicentennial Authority (ABA) I wrote off a pleading letter to the Wollongong Council, which got me nowhere fast. Enlisting the help (even financial) of other government bodies got nowhere faster, as Wollongong Council was determined to remain a Steel Town, removing anything of cultural value from its mental map.

Lobbying with the Save Wyewurk Committee in 1988 determined a new line of attack. Fight a local battle with books! As I had moved to Collins Australia as Associate Publisher, commissioning was possible. A local historian, Joseph Davis, was contracted to do D. H. Lawrence at Thirroul, edited by another local, Jean Bedford. Raymond Southall, a noted palaeographer, edited and introduced a corrected edition of Kangaroo, utilising the hundreds of changes Lawrence had made for the American edition – changes that had never been available in the U.K. or the Commonwealth (including Wollongong).

Reviews happened. Local community support for Wyewurk as a Literary Site was confirmed. Kangaroo moves into our Imprint Classics in 1992, seventy years after Lawrence’s arrival. Too late for me, but not for those kids now at school.

Charmian Clift – 1968

Charmian Clift used to write regular essays for the Sydney Morning Herald and Pol in the late 1960s. I used to read them. I knew that she had been a student at my high school, suggesting that there was life beyond Wollongong, that this life involved travel overseas, relationships full of sound and fury, that people made their living out of writing. Such were the dreams of a fifteen-year-old who was regularly rejected by most literary magazines in Australia. When Clift arrived at our school assembly hall she had a voice like a Siren and still looked beautiful from where I sat in Row 58.

In 1975 I met her son, Martin Johnston and his partner, Nadia Wheatley. Even then, people were talking about Martin writing a biography of his father, George Johnston, and Nadia doing one on Clift. Ten years later I wrote an article for The Sydney Morning Herald on the Clift and Johnston partnership, as it is told in George Johnston’s Clean Straw for Nothing, which was then a film project for Pat Lovell. Something certainly should be done about them, we all thought.

When I went to work at Collins Australia in 1988, this something was made easier, since My Brother Jack and Clift’s Mermaid Singing and Peel Me a Lotus were already in Imprint. We contracted for Images in Aspic, published Clean Straw for Nothing and, with Nadia’s help, moved High Valley, A Walk to Paradise Gardens and Honour’s Mimic into the list. After the merger with Angus & Robertson (who originated publication of the couple in 1948 with High Valley), we could at last do the obvious – commission Nadia to introduce and edit all of Clift’s essays into two volumes: Trouble in Lotus Land (1990) and Being Alone with Oneself (1991). Nadia’s biography of Clift is on the way.

Norman Lindsay – 1969

I first met Norman Lindsay through Hedley Jeffries, the group buyer for the Angus & Robertson Bookshop, then in Castlereagh Street, Sydney. I was sixteen and Hedley was kind enough to take me into the back room where Norman, ancient and wispy, proceeded to ask me about My Life with Art. Some Life! Some Art? I had the feeling then that bookshops were the centre of the universe, vortexes within which swirled artists, writers and ideas, constantly accessible. Hedley could not have better reinforced this notion.

I knew that Norman had met Annie Besant on her visit here in 1922, probably through his doctor, Francis Crossle (who eloped to Australia with the girlfriend of fellow theosophist W.B. Yeats). Crossle was a medic at Thirroul. Besant had sailed here from Ceylon with D. H. Lawrence. Was that how he got to Thirroul? With Crossle’s address?

By the time I knew how to phrase these questions Norman had been dead for fifteen years.

During the 1970s, I was trained as a bookseller, and I learnt about the depth of the Lindsay backlist. After the merger with A&R I was astonished to find that, of this backlist, only one Lindsay title was still in print – The Magic Pudding. Some of the others are now coming back; Age of Consent and A Curate in Bohemia both appeared this year.

Barry Humphries – 1971

I saw him in A Load of Olde Stuffe in Sydney. Astounded at seeing writing performed. Overjoyed at finding a contemporary comedy that fitted my own reading of C. J. Dennis, Henry Lawson and Lennie Lower. Delighted that he signed a programme for me (‘Go on, go and ask him, I dare you ...’) which I gallantly, stupidly, gave to my girlfriend. (Please give it back; keep the stereo.)

Seven years later I met him at Currency Press, where I was an associate editor working on the playscripts of The Club and Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. He was elegant, crisp, wide-ranging with his conversation, generous with his interest. He was professional. At that time he was talking up a book of his monologues with Currency’s publisher, the theatre critic Katharine Brisbane.

By 1979 I was broke and back managing a bookshop, which nevertheless proved to be the ideal place for keeping in contact with authors and publishers. We launched Barry’s A Nice Night’s Entertainment for Currency Press at the Co-op’s Bay Street bookshop in 1981 ... but the years were passing.

March 1990

I had been talking up the possibility of a Cyril Pearl Reader with Paddy Pearl, when a problem arose. Who should introduce such a bizarre slab of Victoriana? ‘Why, Barry, of course!’, said Paddy. ‘He and Cyril Pearl were great chums. Lived their books. Ring Barry.’

Dazed by the thought and keen to act on the possibility, I decided to try Nicholas Pounder’s Bookshop in King’s Cross, where I knew Barry often purchased rare editions. Nicholas is a fount of such information, and he did indeed have the number, but he knew that Barry Humphries was to leave Australia the very next day. The opportunity receded (like invisible ink). But Nicholas, with just the merest of arched brows, leant across the counter to proffer a fax number.

I sat down and wrote off a plea, completely unrehearsed, and, as a post-script, I asked him if he might consider a book of selected poems. Something out of the ordinary for A&R’s list!

I got a call next day from Mascot airport. Delighted to do it for Cyril. Should be called The Cultured Pearl. The Japanese version could be The Mikimoto Pearl. And the French version ... And not only was he enticed by the Pearl but by the Poetry as well. Neglected Poems, poetic pearls from the pen of Humphries, McKenzie, Les Patterson and Edna Everage, appears in November.

Patrick White – 1972

I was eighteen when I first left home to live in Paddington. I knew Patrick White lived around the corner and would often spot him loitering with intent near a fruit and vegetable shop. My grandmother had bought every book by White (and D. H. Lawrence) as soon as they had been published and had told me all about them. We had animated discussions about his books, his fruit, and his vegetables. She had decided however that he was a misogynist, and this was starting to interfere with her reading pleasure.

I joined the Save the Parks Campaign with just about everybody else in Paddington. Wearing my 1972 political clobber (a ten-foot-long red scarf and Spanish riding boots), I cheered at public meetings, wrote letters and jeered the government. One day, I found myself sitting beside Patrick White, the grand campaigner, on a double-decker bus from Centennial Park to Sydney Town Hall. I told him about my grandmother.

I didn’t see Patrick White again until 1977, when I was working on his play Big Toys for Currency Press. Conversations were like lines from his plays.

Then, in 1981, when I was managing a Co-op bookshop in Pitt Street, Sydney, he turned up one day, out of nowhere, and asked me for a copy of Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights. I refused payment, which I knew he must have hated. Somehow, asking him for money for a book seemed wrong.

By 1983 I was working for the National Times doing a weekly book column and the odd review. By this time, I had been outside of publishing for so long that the idea of appearing in print weekly seemed considerable – nay magical. I had known David Marr for a few years, also Peter Corris and Jean Bedford, but many new faces became part of everyday life at the National Times, notably cartoonists Cook, Fitzjames and Coopes, as well as Gabrielle Lord and David Dale.

Marr was clearly our best biographer, and very game. His background in law gave him an amazing capacity to say the unsayable and get away with it, and to make ideas accessible to the general public. His interest in White was known, and in 1985 it was obvious he needed to leave journalism to absorb himself in writing the biography. At the Bicentennial Authority we offered him $25,000 as part of the National Literary Commissions. A few days after this offer was made, David called me with the bad news. Patrick White felt the Bicentennial was a concept about as vile as the Olympics Complex at Centennial Park. I could only agree that it was not the right note on which to start a major work on his life. And so, David declined our offer, and we wrote to the Literature Board asking them to consider the biography in their next round of fellowships.

A few years later I was looking through the White file in the Herald library and wrote off to Patrick to see if Collins might just publish his collected statements and articles. I made a terrible mistake, sending the letter directly to him at Centennial Park, instead of through his agent. Patrick was ill in hospital, and my letter sat with many others unopened for weeks. It must have been a lonely time for that letter ... regretting its inability to speak. During that time, Primavera Press wrote directly to his agent over a similar project and, rightly so, Patrick went with the first presentation. I tried to co-publish with Primavera (Patrick White Speaks, 1989) but to no avail.

It was the photographer William Yang who first alerted me to a book of tributes that was being compiled for Patrick White. In 1990 Clayton Joyce, a Telecom worker and avid reader, had quietly been putting together a selection of tributes. When White died, the project looked as though it might be shelved, but in January of this year I met with Clayton and moved the manuscript into a book.

For me Patrick White: A tribute is important. White was the first major novelist I ever met, and the book holds within it that sensation of a half hour ride on a double-decker bus which ground to a joyous halt at Sydney Town Hall.

Frank Moorhouse – 1972

Tabloid Story was the most dangerous and mind-expanding drug I found that year. It contained the new fiction by Moorhouse, Peter Carey, Michael Wilding and Vicki Viidikas, and it was everywhere. In newspapers, free, and doubled up in University magazines. The audience for this kind of writing was dramatically broadened. With that and Nation Review, I was a happy man.

After reading The Americans, Baby I decided to write overtly autobiographical stories. These were regularly rejected by Nation Review between 1972 and 1974, but in the nicest possible way. Most often my piece was just not fast enough to get to their desk (Bob Ellis tended to work in the same areas of trashy pop culture) but I enjoyed most of all the letters from the publisher, Richard Walsh. He made it possible for an unpublished fop like me to have a dialogue about my favourite pastime – writing. And Richard often pointed (as indeed I did!) to the strengths of the New Journalism as displayed by writers such as Ellis and Frank M.

1974 Tabloid Story (where Moorhouse and Wilding were editors) not only took my first story but paid me before publication; professionalism took on new economic meaning. And so, in 1975 I started a little literary magazine called Dodo (designed to become extinct after eight issues), paid $7 a page out of my wages and wrote off to all the writers I admired. Wilding and Viidikas said yes. Moorhouse was more circumspect but promised something. Carey was writing a novel ...

In 1978 I convinced Frank to join the Poets Union. I reviewed his Days of Wine and Rage. We met at parties, bookshops, but I didn’t get that story he promised until 1984, when I could pay $200 for it, and it was to be delivered personally by him to the assembled masses at Sydney Writers Week. Sydney Town Hall. Hundreds of people laughed in all the right places. William Yang took the photographs. Frank’s essay turned up in The View from Tinsel Town (Penguin, 1985) and he got paid three times for the same thing.

I reviewed his Room Service (Viking) for the National Times and we’d imagine a time when Performing Stories would become an art form in itself. Sometimes I’d see him dancing on tables to the Delltones at Kinselas. Frank never fell off.

At the ABA it seemed appropriate that Frank’s long-term involvement with The Story should be acknowledged, so an anthology of winning stories edited by him was created as the State of the Art Award (ABC Books, 1988). This was my last year as coordinator of Sydney Writers Week and Frank began a series of stories in defence of his position as Chairperson at the Festival, which were addressed to me. He must have really wanted that job.

At Collins I tried to commission three books from Frank, two of which had come directly out of the Festival experience. One would comprise the Festival stories, another a larger reworking of his memoir on working with Makavajev and the third, a book on the 1980s, similar to Days of Wine and Rage.

We lost this bid to Picador, who duly published Lateshows in 1990. Frank did introduce for us Paul Wenz’s Diary of a New Chum to honour the work of his translator and publisher in France, Jean-Paul Delamotte, who so keened for Wenz’s rediscovery. And this year saw A&R, his originating publisher, publish two of his books into Imprint, as well as creating a twentieth anniversary edition of The Americans, Baby. Twenty years after I first read Frank.

David Malouf – 1976

I met David Malouf through working on the production of New Poetry. I admired his poetry, and I also admired his decision to leave the Academy to go and live in Italy in order to try to write a poetic novel. A few years later, when I came to review An Imaginary Life, it was obvious that his gambit had succeeded magnificently.

He was always a friend of the theatre, but the most memorable occasions for me were meeting him at Kinselas Nightclub (where Frank Moorhouse was not falling off tables to the music of the Delltones). David was never afraid to share his joy. Nor afraid to go against the grain – but always in the most diplomatic and simply glorious ways. In Milan, for example, he took part in a panel on Patrick White, where he graciously refuted an Italian critic’s response to White in such a way as to have the same critic nodding his head in agreement by his side.

At A&R I wrote to him about a new Selected Poems, which would touch on his work over the last ten years. It appears this October, released on the same day as the new opera for which he has written the libretto to the score by Richard Meale. Perhaps one day there will be a libretto for the music of the Dellies?

Robert Adamson – 1973

That year, I lived in Annandale above Carl Harrison Ford and Cassandra Pybus, and from my balcony heard the nightly rumblings of change as Robert Adamson, Michael Wilding and Carl pitched New Poetry even further away from the Poetry Society of Australia.

My poetry was regularly rejected by New Poetry in 1975 but when I did get to meet Bob I enjoyed the stoush, his frenetic energy for poetry and his ability to draw on everything at hand. Raid the pantry. I worked on the production of a number of New Poetry issues, edited an issue of Leatherjacket with his then wife, Cheryl, and only bailed out in disbelief at the Romance is Taking Over issue in 1977.

In 1978 I found myself being more aggressive in areas that interested me – Dorothy Hewett’s absurd defamation case, non-payment of royalties by little publishers and non-payment of poets ... in New Poetry. Gawd, I’d struck a minefield of angry, demented poets and publishers, all determined to maintain the status quo. Because I was challenging that, I was instantaneously exiled from the Kingdom of Poesy. Probably a good thing, too.

After a few knives in the door (better than in the head) I left the brawl to my betters and quietly watched from the sidelines. New Poetry died. Bob went back to the Hawkesbury. He wrote a book called Where I Come From which seemed to me to be a movement back to a narrative line, a prose.

In the bookshops I watched the trickle of poetry sales, the lack of marketing nous of the big publishers as well as the small publishers’ commitment (limited by their print runs) to activate sales of poetry dubbed difficult or unsaleable. When will things change?

Last September I saw Bob in Melbourne and told him how good I thought The Clean Dark was. After thirteen years of barely speaking, it was time. About six months later I bumped into Bob and his wife Juno Gemes (again at Pounders Bookshop, where accidents will happen) and asked him how his new book was looking. He showed me a section. It was as good as anything he’d written. So, what about we do The Clean Dark in paperback, and publish his new Wards of the State next March. He said he’d think about it.

A few days later I wrote and asked him to introduce Christopher Brennan’s Selected Poems, since he’s a latter-day Symbolist himself. Letters followed, letters that rather begged him to consider his prose, to consider this book within the whole range of his talents. Contracts were exchanged, and Wards of the State will appear in the Imprint Lives series, designated as Autobiography/Poetry, which is a real attempt to broaden the poet’s audience.

Arguments with authors are finally only useful to their place in time.

Christina Stead – 1977

I met Christina Stead at Newcastle University, and later in Annandale at some quietish, bookish occasions. It wasn’t until 1984, after her death, that I sighted a special issue of Southerly which held 120-odd pages of stories collected by her literary executor, Ron Geering. I rang Brian Johns to tell him this should be a Penguin book.

‘But it’s only 120 pages!’

‘But I bet there’s more!’

‘But it’s already published!’

‘But you can sell it back to the Brits!!’

I think this must have done it, and they duly received an offer sight-unseen from Penguin. There was four hundred pages more, and Ocean of Story (Viking, 1985) was originated, and almost won the Victorian Premier’s Award. (The author, being dead, was considered not in due need of financial assistance.)

Once with A&R, it was possible to see the Stead backlist, revive it into Imprint Classics and commission Ron Geering to get Stead’s Selected Letters into print. What a resource! Two volumes will appear in 1992 – a life in letters.

Patrick Cook – 1977

Working at Currency Press my job was to put together Patrick’s first book, Coming Soon. Really, I just had to shape the book page by page (an eel could have done it). Privately I had collected all his cartoons from the Nation Review and other newspapers throughout the 1970s, so maybe I was just destined for this cut and paste job.

At the Co-op we launched Patrick’s Fraser Country (Fontana, 1980) and two years later at the National Times I could see Patrick at the daily grind. Not that it ever looked hard. Patrick’s line was effortless, but he was often in the trenches over the worst excesses of Australian politicians. This was his zeal and his strength. When Bob Hawke was elected as leader in February 1983, we were both at the Times. I and my partner, Elizabeth Butel, were packaging books for Penguin at the time, and the stupidest idea came to me that day. What about a quickie on Hawkespeak, using the fabulous and ever-ready flare of Cook to decorate and focus the ‘text’? Brian Johns took the idea and ran with it, and seven days later The World According to Hawke was finished. From idea to publication took twenty-eight days. That it sold 15,000 copies made the effort more appetising.

Lennie Lower was another subject of mutual adoration and Patrick decorated Here’s Lower (Hale, 1983) for me, and a later selection, The Legends of Lennie Lower (Collins, 1988). His response to Lennie brought out, in my opinion, Patrick’s finest individual work, with somehow a softer line.

Patrick was writing for Max Gillies at the time, and helped me with a production of Balmain Boys Don’t Cry at Kinselas Theatre in 1983. Balmain Boys, in a concerted effort to touch on issues of defamation that hamstrung the print media, misrepresented the views of a group of wisely disgruntled journalists and wits who braved this theatre. Graeme Blundell, Barry Oakley, David Dale, Alex Buzo and later Barry Dickins, all helped develop three shows of fun, games and occasional writs.

But after five books with Patrick and bits and pieces, how will we ever get him to write the great comic novel that looms large? An illustrated Here’s Luck? The Complete Adventures of Biggles? I don’t know. Maybe I’m not old enough yet.

Robyn Davidson – 1978

I first met Robyn Davidson thanks to William Yang, who had photographed her after her trek into the desert. Camels were nowhere to be seen. When Tracks (Cape, 1980) came out, at the bookshop I sold one hundred and fifty copies in two weeks. I didn’t really talk with her properly until 1985, when she was here with Doris Lessing. ‘What about the novel we talked about five years ago?’ ‘It’s on the back-burner.’ ‘Along with everything else ...’ Five months later the ABA commissioned Ancestors (Cape, 1989) from a synopsis, and in 1986 I enjoyed haggling for a contract.

In 1988 I had met her in Glebe where she had given me the manuscript to read, to prove she had done it. It was in a cardboard box and I found myself quizzing her on all her abandoned work for the press, the whereabouts of travel articles lost in the ether. In January 1989 I flew to Alice Springs and contracted with her for Travelling Light as well as an essay, Alice Springs (both Collins, 1989). The essay was finished on April 1 and was available as free sampler on May 1, as a drawcard for both Ancestors and Travelling Light. It is a dazzling essay, exhibiting all her skills.

After two years of talking up her next book on India, we’ve lost the bid on it at A&R, but I still look forward to reading where these years and her wanderings have led her writing.

Peter Corris – 1980

Peter Corris and his partner Jean Bedford would often call at my bookshop in Bay Street. Authors made bookselling a pleasure for me. I launched Peter’s The Dying Trade and The Marvellous Boy (Pan, 1981) at the Co-op Bookshop in Pitt Street, and occasionally dropped in to see them at Coledale, just south of Sydney. We’d talk detective fiction and he’d beat me at ping-pong. It was that sort of relationship.

We corresponded a bit while they were both in America and I remember Peter’s delight that Allen & Unwin were so positive about The Empty Beach. ‘A good move for me I think ... tough and helpful advice which I’ve responded to with a lot of rewriting. Best of the Hardys, I reckon ... working on Cliff Hardy and the Maltese Falcon!’ He felt things were turning at last.

I followed Jean at the National Times doing Bookwatch, and put them both on the first Sydney Writers Festival programme in January 1984, commissioning him to do a piece on Cliff Hardy’s town, which he called Detective City. This was published in the National Times and in The View from Tinsel Town.

The ABA commissioned Jean Bedford to write Lease of Summer (Penguin, 1990) in 1985. I didn’t see Peter much until 1989, when I seriously tried to draw him over to Collins new crime Blacklist. Well, you can’t have everything, and we didn’t get it. After the merger of Collins with A&R, Jean was working for us as an editor, and was commissioned to write a series of three crime novels, the second of which (To Make a Killing) has arrived on my desk in manuscript even as I write this page. Cheap coincidences do not only happen in crime novels.

Last year Peter and Jean dropped into my house on the south coast, to play ping pong. Peter broke my photograph of Lennie Lower with a forehand smash. We talked about Pokerface (Penguin, 1985) which I had reviewed in the National Times, and discussed my belief that poor old Ray Crawley wasn’t really seen as a serial character in the same way Cliff Hardy was. And mare’s the pity ...

Jean’s Worse than Death was launched in February this year at the same time that A&R took on The Azanian Action (Crawley’s fifth, out this month). I was pleased Crawley had a new home. I was elated when we received the fifth Browning book, Browning PI, from Peter’s agent, Rose Creswell. I read it twice, over two nights, and made an offer. Here Browning meets Raymond Chandler in LA and solves a case of Maltese proportions! A few weeks later the sixth Crawley escapade arrived, The Japanese Job, which we promptly contracted.

Cradling my broken photograph, I practise another forehand smash, in preparation for the Rematch.

Olga Masters – 1983

Having read The Home Girls (UQP), I decide to go and meet the author, as this is the best book of short stories I’d read since Carey’s Fat Man in History. Olga was a humble soul, very reluctant to take any honour for her work. While I was at the National Times I asked her to send me some of her new stories to the paper, but when she did, they were promptly rejected by the National Times. Acting as her agent, I sent seven chapters from what became A Long Time Dying (UQP, 1985) to Collins, who promptly rejected it (possibly put off by her title, which was then A Very Dull Place!).

Luckily, UQP contracted Olga and gave her support when she needed it most. I cajoled her to speak publicly about her new book at Sydney Writers Week and bustled about the Herald (as did Thomas Keneally) to have them give her a column for a series of essays on domestic life.

In 1985, the ABA commissioned Olga’s Harvest (which became The Rose Fancier, UQP, 1985) on a synopsis. Olga died in 1986, just before the publication of Amy’s Children, which I launched at Manly Town Hall. It was a sad time. In only a few years Olga had achieved so much and was so determined.

When I came to Collins in 1988, I wrote to Olga’s husband, Charles, about a book of her journalism. I called it Domestic Dispatches: ‘it is a world of cups without handles, of husbands, wives and housework, of the loneliness of long-distance motherhood’. While I worked up the essays, prior to contracting, Charles died. UQP published Reporting Home in 1990. While I missed publishing her books, Domestic Dispatches (just the cover of the planned book) always gives me the rush of excitement I first felt on reading Olga’s stories. Delicate and intense.

C.J. Koch – 1984

My partner, Elizabeth Butel, wrote a history of Kings Cross (Atrand, 1984). I found all the weird pictures and wrote the easy sections (on sex, life and crime).

We received a letter from Chris Koch that made it all worthwhile. He was working on The Doubleman (Chatto, 1985) and the photographs of the Cross in the early 1960s had been of some help to him. We were overjoyed.

The Doubleman created some overheated exchanges in the paper, and I joined in to come to its defence. I’d always felt Koch was one of the handful of great novelists we had in Australia, and so at the ABA I tried to drag him into a Bicentennial Commissioning - but the threat of a deadline weakened his interest, and his new novel, set in Tasmania, was not to be commissioned. He did, however, plot with me the creation of a series of literary plaques for notable Australian writers. He’d noted Slessor’s house at Billyard Avenue was under threat from the developers, and so from our different vantage points we wrote to Bob Carr, then a Minister in the NSW Government. Carr dropped a heritage order on 18A Billyard Avenue, and so a little bit of history was saved – for Chris (a friend of Slessors), and me (a reader).

In 1990, we published Across the Sea Wall (dedicated to Slessor) and The Boys in the Island in Imprint. Now we have the revised version of The Doubleman in-house, to be published next February.

We will publish Slessor’s Collected Poems next year, so maybe that plaque for Slessor is getting closer, drawing us to it, like the tide.

Elizabeth Jolley – 1985

Canberra Wordfest. What a mouthful. Elizabeth Jolley was the highlight for me. I’m always impressed with the English mind and hers was a new voice in Australian literature throughout the 1980s, bringing a mordant wit and arch phrasing that was even more impressive in person. That year the ABA commissioned The Leila Family (which became The Sugar Mother) on an eight-line synopsis.

A few dinner conversations in her home in Western Australia were the greatest I have experienced. Elizabeth and Leonard Jolley brought more jokes, more jests and more edginess to the tablecloth than a gang of stand-up comics.

After seeing a short autobiographical piece published in a magazine, I wrote to her agent in October 1988 to ask if Collins could publish what I described as a book of ‘articles on Elizabeth’s life and work, as previously published and performed (which is an apt phrase I think) ... not a big book, more a primer’. We didn’t get it, but I’d still like to see it happen.

At the 1990 ASAL Conference, and I found that a book of essays on her work was being put together by Delys Bird and Brenda Walker. We co-published this with CSAL in June and tried to get a collection of her radio plays into a book, but, alas, that will be Penguin too, in 1994. But I enjoy waiting, as waiting is a curious pleasure, as is Nurse Jolley, and ever more.

Tom Cole – 1985

Received two stories on buffalo hunting in the Territory from an old-timer. Thought they were good, so I wrote back to him. Received five in reply, and commissioned Hell West and Crooked on the basis of these. I find out he’s nearly eighty, which surprises me.

Tom Cole lives at Lindfield and when he visits, I enjoy seeing him tower over the bureaucratic desks at the ABA. (He’s 6’4”. I’m 3’6” deskbound.) I promise to have a drink with him one day. The book continues and I read it in draft. It holds together, sprawling, but the author is in complete control. After he gets a small offer from a small publisher, I hawk it to Collins, where Lisa Highton takes it on. While he is desperate to have it out before 1988 something tells us all to wait. The timing is sweet, and it comes out just prior to Crocodile Dundee. The media picks him up. The book is huge, with seven impressions that year. We all drink a lot of scotch.

When I move to Collins and became his publisher things look different to him, but not to me. We publish him in Imprint, and later in hardback at A&R. By this time, I’ve worked more than a thousand hours on Coles’s two new books (The Last Paradise, Random, 1990 is the latest), drunk cases of scotch, and structurally sounded out each project until it fits. Tom Cole moves publishers at the last minute - twice. Apparently, he’s not satisfied with 70,000 paperback and 10,000 hardback sales. Some poets would be.

My life is a misery, but maybe I just have to accept that there is such a thing as a one-off.

Sally Morgan – 1985

Before the publication of My Place (FACP, 1986) Sally sent me a letter at the ABA enquiring into the possibility of getting some financial help to work on a new volume, a biography of her uncle Jack. At the Authority, Phillip Morrissey (who coordinated the Aboriginal programme) was also aware of the way that Aboriginal people were moving from a spoken to a written culture. Requesting an example of her work brought forward five chapters from her work in progress, which was My Place. The ABA commissioned Sally to write what became Wanamurraganya (FACP, 1989).

I only see Sally Morgan very rarely. While I can’t expect to publish her, she is always in mind, at the publication of any and every Aboriginal autobiography. She helped shift the position of her people. Articulate and passionate, she is just cause for celebration.

Ruby Langford – 1986

Ruby is commissioned by the ABA to write an autobiography. I meet her regularly with Phillip Morrissey, sometimes with Burnam Burnam, or Billy Marshall-Stoneking. She is a rollicking character, and well worth a bet. Penguin commission Susan Hampton to help her with this autobiography and publish Don’t Take Your Love to Town in 1988. Her career has begun.

Two years later I find myself wandering out to see Ruby at Granville to talk about her new project. It’s so big it’s distressing, but she laughs out loud and I like that. I commission an interim book, which we call Real Deadly, about contemporary Aboriginal life told in stories and poems, to be published next March. Where did we find this title? From Ruby. She kept saying it, like a refrain, assuring me that each story was ‘Real deadly ... Aboriginal lingo, like we speak. Real deadly.’ Like it is.

Mudrooroo (Colin Johnson) – 1986

The ABA commissioned Dalwarra, the Black Bittern (CSAL), 1988) as part of its West Australian State Commissionings. It was one I enjoyed contracting as I’d been a great fan of his writing for over ten years.

Browsing in the file room at A&R one day in 1989, I was amazed to realise that Mudrooroo had left the firm nearly twenty-five years before and yet he had written so much major fiction. He had sustained his reputation. We had to get him back.

We commissioned Mudrooroo with a three-book contract, the first of which appeared this year, titled Master of the Ghost Dreaming. When I see the reviews I get hot under the collar. Grrrrr. Two are by anthropologists who are determined to keep the writing inside the terms of their reading. Muddy writes language-based books, on the fringe of writing, but few are game to tread outside their normal reading space, it seems. He keeps upending my heaven, my ideas of language, space and time, just when I think I’m getting it right. And this is a good thing.

Alister Kershaw – 1989

I have argued with Nicholas Pounder about the relative value of books for thirteen years. It was during a quick dip into his shop that I spied an early issue of Angry Penguins (1943) and there I found Kershaw’s name. I’d remembered Kershaw’s voice (which, to Nick’s despair, I’d suggested sounded like something between Edith and Osbert Sitwell), but he knew Kershaw’s shoe size. Kershaw was living in Sancerre (my favourite wine!) in France and had barely been back here since 1947.

To really whet my appetite Nick gave me Alister’s address and a signed copy of The Pleasure of Their Company (UQP, 1986). I read the first chapters on the way back to the office, and once there, I wrote to him: ‘I was wondering if you might consider a sporadic memoir, in whatever form you choose, on the late 1930s and early 1940s in Melbourne. Something more conversational, I would think, than Rebels and Precursors! Something that might have letters, photographs, poetry and jokes. A Melbourne collage, perhaps?’

He replied coyly: ‘What do you mean, a book. Three lines on a postcard?’

Presented with the problem, I suggested: If you “did” Tucker, Nolan, Harris, Crozier, Reed, Robert Close, Joy Hester and a few others, it would be the substantially inaccurate portrait that any of us would love to see you write.’

We contracted in November on the strength of these winsome words, and on my holidays in May 1990 I dropped in to see him in France (a shock tactic I know the French really enjoy). And he had written five chapters! And they were great! We talked up a title, and I floundered through the impossible humour of his radio broadcasts.

Heydays was published on April Fool’s Day this year, with photographs by Albert Tucker. Thanks to Michael Ingamells, the ABC recorded Kershaw reading Heydays in Paris and it was broadcast later that month over ten episodes. The book of his broadcasts appears this month under the title A Word From Paris, and he will drag his Edwardianism back to Australia this November. It should be some party.

Alister is a marvellously new, seventy-year-old friend, whose voice was with me twenty years before our meeting. Maybe that’s what publishing’s all about, meeting friends we’ve always had, or always wanted to have.

Such as Lloyd Rees’s Peaks and Valleys, Betty Roland’s The Eye of the Beholder, Payday by Robert Wallace ... there’s a hundred great stories in a publisher’s Naked City.

And hundreds of people. There’s Richard Walsh (who taught me the value of the letter and of the word ‘no’), Brian Johns (who taught me the value of the lunch and the word ‘yes’) and Katharine Brisbane, who showed me that publishing is a passionate industry, author led.

And so, with books, to bed ...