The weather at Stradbroke wasn’t that terrific, the kids were, so the novels went too fast. Three days short of leaving there was only the pious choice.

Part of the impact was the new road through a history I thought I knew, part was the sensibility of the writing and part was probably that the Blainey was the only Australian book we had brought.

Ransacking a bookshop now I would find many Australian novels that would speak to me, but I still remember meeting The Tyranny of Distance. Yet the ‘flowering’ of Australian literature over the last twenty years seems to many to be exclusively in the garden of fiction; non-fiction is merely a thousand wild acres.

Fiction. Non-Fiction. There is something in the naming of parts. About eighty per cent of the new titles published in Australia each year are classified as not belonging to the other twenty per cent.

John Bryson, in a talk on writing Non-Fiction titled ‘Some Regard for the Truth’ has said:

Writing about facts is called Non-Fiction, so far as I can guess, for reasons largely to do with perplexity. Using the same currency, editorial commentators use Non-Labor to unite, in a word, every political party opposed to organisations of workers. Both non-terms carry similar senses of boundary, of antagonism. It is as if Non-Fiction is a coalition to keep Fiction out of office.

While agreeing with the idea of boundary and the implication that Non-Fiction throws a whole range of disparate books into uneasy coalition, I rather feel that Non-Fiction is regarded as an opposition rabble. It is Fiction that sits firmly in the government benches of literature.

The Literature Board of the Australia Council states that ‘The Board’s main priority is to promote the development of Australian writing and its recognition and appreciation in Australia and overseas,’ from which follows: ‘Since the Board’s main concern is to support the publication of novels and good imaginative writing, support for Non-Fiction is contingent on funds being available after the first priority has been considered by the Board.’

To be fair, despite the rhetoric, of the 428 titles subsidised by the Board over the last four years nearly fourteen per cent were classified as Non-Fiction. But, in the main, fiction is officially the stuff of literature.

Similarly, as Dennis Altman pointed out recently, the term ‘writer’, whether at literary festivals or just in the pub, is coincident with ‘creative writer’. Is this the literary equivalent of the craftworker or graphic designer not being accorded the respect due to the ‘fine artist’? Is it infra dig to be functional?

Yet many of the novels I would regard as ‘literature’ convey information remarkably well. Graham Swift’s Waterland or Jonathan Rabin’s To a Foreign Land tell of England; Robertson Davies fits wonderful essays on music, ectomorphs and endomorphs, gypsy folklore, book collecting, embalming, and art history into his novels. John Irving tells me more than I wish to know about the foetus. Admittedly these are only ‘we’ novels rather than ‘me’ novels!

Is Doctorow’s World’s Fair or Winton’s That Eye The Sky more appropriately literature for being a novel than Bernard Smith’s The Boy Adeodatus? John and Dorothy Colmer’s The Penguin Book of Australian Autobiography, in which I must declare an interest, takes as the stuff of autobiography memoirs of Clive James, Bert Facey, Hal Porter, and Joyce Nicholson and runs them happily together with novels by George Johnson and Kylie Tennant.

It is good writing that makes literature, not subject matter or classifications. Bruce Chatwin doesn’t seem to be standing any closer to the muse when he writes On the Black Hill rather than when he is In Patagonia. When is Eric Rolls, John Bryson, or Graham Greene ‘on’ or ‘non’?

In the introduction to Sunrise with Sea Monsters, a collection of ‘pieces’, Paul Theroux describes his output over the last twenty years as ‘writing with both hands’:

I thought: I’ll write a few more pieces and then I’ll work on my novel … It has given me, in an overlapping way, two writing lives; in one I have been writing books, a lengthening shelf of them, and in the other life I have been writing these pieces. I regard the book as an indulgence – I mean a ‘vision’ but the word sounds too pompous and spiritual. These pieces I mean to be concrete – responses to experiences, with my feet squarely on the ground; immediate and direct, written to fulfill a specific purpose, and somewhat alien to the uncertainties of the novel. They were also a breath of air.

John Bryson muses on the derivation of the word ‘pieces’ to describe that form of writing:

Perhaps this is because of the astonishing carpentry in the best of them, the refractory polish, the sense that the form and function are delighted with each other.

Much fiction is not literature and much non-fiction is not literature. But the circle which describes fiction and the circle which describes non-fiction should be accepted as overlapping, like a Venn Diagram, to include in the common area that writing which Dr Johnson defined in 1755 as literature – ‘skill in letters’.