Personally, to have worked with Brian has been immensely rewarding, and his encouragement and interest in myself and in others working on the magazine has been wonderful. ABR and Australian writing owes Brian Johns a great debt. See ya, Boyo!

So much for mystery guests, taking a break and giving you a break. My mystery columnist for this month reneged at the last minute – a Sydneysider steeped in the fast life and the good times; I should have known better than to trust him. He’ll probably get a disease and it’ll serve him right. So from Melbourne, Australia’s literary and cultural capital, I’m writing my reflections once again.

Actually the ideas have germinated not in Melbourne, but in Bali, Land of the Big Tits, or so screamed the T shirts on sale from the hawkers lining the tourist strip. A friend of mine who buys jewellery there told me that they get Australians to write the copy for the T-shirts. Others said F..CK OFF! and an awful lot said GEORGE NEGUS TALKS BULLSHIT! Not great examples of our literary culture, but I’m sure it wasn’t Helen Garner who was writing them.

My family and I did spend a week in Bali, to get away from it all. To stop thinking about work and writing … and big taxes and big government and about how small business persons like me were being squeezed dry by the socialists. And to stop thinking about the contradictions my mates like Joh and Andrew Hay and John Howard threw up. If they cut real wages further, if they cut government, school, and library budgets further, if they scrap the Australia Council then who is going to buy any books or publish or write them for that matter?

But Bali was wonderful, though in a week one gets hardly any conception of the society or the country, except as an exotic backdrop to one’s own myths and preconceptions. We stayed in the Bali Hyatt, a glorious hotel in thirty acres of immaculate tropical gardens, cocooned by walls and guards from the real third world outside its gates. Inside its gates there’s a small community of American, French, Italian, English, and Australian tourists ministered to by an army of charming, friendly, and attractive Balinese people. My son commented that everyone was so friendly; a few days later he passed a group of hotel workers who didn’t greet him with ‘hellos’ and broad smiles and commented that they must have been on their lunch hour.

The Bali Hyatt has an internal broadcasting system which funnels rather innocuous music into your room. On our first morning, our large family gathered in one of our adjoining rooms, tentative and excited about being so far from home, about being together, about being in this other world, but also nervous about the quiet and the heat. So we turned on the sound.

The voices emerged from the beautiful inlaid cabinet and what familiar voices they were. ‘And one of the points I’d like to underline is that Australians don’t have a sense of their cultural history. There always has been an Australian publishing scene. Sure, it has waxed and waned, but it has been there.’ ‘Australian poets do get published, and there is (and I’ll probably be shot down for this) a network that does seem to ensure that most worthwhile works do, in fact, get published.’ I’d heard those voices, I thought; I could visualise Penguin’s Brian Johns’ finger stabbing in the air, making his point, and Hilary McPhee, calm and seductive, arguing her case.

And then over the radio came another voice in short, edited bursts. ‘The problem facing Australian poetry is distribution, promotion, and the concentration of ownership.’ How predictable, I thought, but as I listened further, the ideas and opinions became increasingly familiar, and the voice … It was then that I realised that the voice was my own and that here on a Sunday morning in Bali, Brian Johns, Hilary McPhee, and myself were lecturing all those tourists on the problems of Australian poets and publishers. The program was part of a series made by ABC radio on poetry in Australia. What indeed were the Balinese, the Germans, the French, and the English making of all this?

In America, they were heralded as the greatest thing for publishing since the paperback. Audiobooks, books on cassette, were going to open up huge new markets for writers, publishers, and booksellers. In Australia the idea has scarcely clicked. High tariffs have kept out overseas tapes and a 20% sales tax on locally made tapes have discouraged local publishers.

The result has been that the range of audio books available has been strictly limited, and with few exceptions, Australian publishers have put audiotapes in the too hard basket. The ABC markets a wide range of tapes in many areas, but these are predominantly recordings of material that was originally made for broadcast.

Next month Melbourne publishers McPhee Gribble will launch four tapes in their Writers Read series. Produced by Patty Brown, the tapes feature four different McPhee Gribble writers reading from their works. The first four writers are Barry Dickins, Helen Garner, Beverley Farmer, and Morris Lurie and the tapes are great. Not only are they great entertainment, but for any readers remotely interested in these writers they’ll be an invaluable complement to their works.

McPhee Gribble, being wimps and cringers, have only produced a small quantity of these tapes. Do yourself a favour, now that you’ve got this exclusive advance information, and go and place an order at your local bookshop for a set of these unique cultural artefacts. At $16.95 for over an hour of each writer they are a steal!

The problem of distribution for small Australian publishers has been a critical one. In part this has been solved by the existence of small distribution companies around Australia who have been prepared to take on the products of independent Australian publishers.

Victoria’s Kingfisher Books has played a leading role in this process since its creation almost ten years ago. Most of Australia’s independent publishers have been distributed at one time or another by Kingfisher books and their service has been critical in the survival.

It came as a shock, therefore, when Kingfisher’s owner Ernie Williams announced last month that Kingfisher was in trouble and that the company was in receivership. The book trade has been very quiet this year, which exacerbated a perennial problem facing Kingfisher. Their sales in the first six months of a year, the quiet time in bookselling, were never profitable and they relied on strong Christmas sales to subsidise the quiet periods.

Ernie Williams is hopeful that Kingfisher can survive, but it will require some radical restructuring to get costs down. If Kingfisher does not survive it will leave a critical gap in the distribution and promotion of Australian writing.