Formal daytime sessions were lively and varied, the papers ranging from the very general to the extremely specific and not, as they say, wholly uncontroversial. But perhaps the real business of the conference was done in the program’s gaps. For ASAL includes among its members not only teachers and scholars of Australian literature from all over the country and from overseas, but also a high proportion of non-academic literary people – writers, editors, publishers, and media people – and plans, agreements, contacts, and friendships were made by various combinations throughout the week. Any student of literary production in Australia could do much worse by way of research than hang around with a tape recorder at a few ASAL coffee breaks or after-dinner bar sessions.

It’s this mixture of roles and interests which has, perhaps more than anything else, given the ASAL conferences their special character: they are always dynamic and productive; they are gatherings at which things literary are learned, planned, and made.

But there seems to be the odd sign of unease, an occasional lapse in communication between these different groups of people, and unless I am mistaken the chief source of this unease is their various attitudes to the increasingly sophisticated and specialised vocabulary of literary-critical discourse. Or, as Louis Nowra was heard to put it during the week, ‘I don’t write texts, I write books’.

Now I can just see the knee-jerk response (impatience, dismissal) on the faces of some of my academic colleagues to a comment like that. But there is, damn it, no earthly reason why a writer should speak the language of a profession (s)he does not practise. The language has evolved as a way of talking about what the writers produce, after all, and yet there exists among a few literary academics a lurking, rarely-articulated belief that writers are an ignorant, scurvy lot if they don’t know what J. Hillis Miller or Gayatri Spivak said last week. It’s a bit like blaming a cat for not being a dog.

On the other hand, though, writers who are bored, irritated, alienated, or even threatened by the specialised vocabulary of literary criticism at its most esoteric are also missing the point. Perhaps this area of tension is best illustrated by a vignette from a recent reading by Fleur Adcock, who at question time was faced with a question by a student who seemed, like a boa constrictor, to have swallowed post-structuralism whole without chewing it, who clearly believed that there was no other legitimate way to talk about writing, and the gist of whose question was ‘Do you know all about post-structuralism and if not, why not?’ Adcock’s dismissive response was ‘I don’t bother about all that stuff.’ The student was predictably thunderstruck, and no further conversation was possible.

The point is that writers do have an intellectual, or perhaps a cultural, responsibility to ‘bother about all that stuff’ at least to the extent of keeping an open mind about it and listening when people are talking about it. A ‘serious’ writer who isn’t even awake to the contemporary nature of literary discourse – in any age – is likely to become a cultural anachronism fairly quickly.

If Australian literary people from both camps can maintain an acceptable level of mutual tolerance and open-mindedness on this front, one of the best things about ASAL conferences will be preserved, but if they can’t, it might well be lost. In the meantime, however, other ASAL traditions flourished this year. The Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal was won by Thea Astley, who, like Patrick White and a very few other people, has remained a major figure in Australian literature over three decades; more frivolously but no less gloriously, the Frank Moorhouse Perpetual Trophy for Ballroom Dancing was finally won after years of plotting by Helen Thomson and Bruce Healey, who started favourites at 7:4. For information on next year’s conference, see the call for papers in this issue.

The prestigious Children’s Book Award (UK) for 1985 has been won by an Australian book. The award – ‘one of the three most significant UK awards given to children’s literature’ – is presented by the Federation of Children’s Book Groups, and hundreds of children from all over Great Britain take part in the judging. The 1985 award was won by writer Amanda Graham and illustrator Donna Gynell for Arthur (Era Publications, Adelaide), the story of a pet-shop dog and his ‘attempts to disguise himself as the sort of creature a customer might choose’ (see picture of Arthur practising to be a fish by attempting to master underwater breathing with his head in a goldfish bowl, paws desperately clutching the rim and back legs propped on a precarious pile of books and cushions). Sounds like real life to me. No wonder the kids liked it.

Carmel Bird made a compelling entrance at a recent Melbourne reading. She came in carrying one of those big plastic milk crates, containing, among other things, a supply of what I can only describe as bagless sample-bags for the promotion of her latest book, Cherry Ripe. Included: one fetchingly designed red leaflet and order form; another kind of order form, with impressive excerpts from favourable reviews printed on the other side; an object resembling an American Express Gold Card (and excluding considerable semiotic force in consequence) which actually turned out to be a sort of business card for the book; and one of those baby Cherry Ripes you get in Super Economy Family Size Jumbo TV Snak Pak cellophane bags in the supermarket. These four items, neatly clipped together with a staple, were handed round at the reading to anyone who wanted them.

Now I’d been meaning to go out and buy Cherry Ripe for ages, but I hadn’t got round to it yet. I now feel compelled to get round to it immediately. It’s possible that the effect of this charming piece of promotion was heightened by hearing Carmel read a story called ‘The Woodpecker Toy Fact’, the title story of a forthcoming collection and one of the funniest and most interesting pieces of writing I’ve heard for a good long time. If Cherry Ripe was written by the woman who wrote ‘The Woodpecker Toy Fact’, then Cherry Ripe is a book I want to read.

Quite apart from its effectiveness in selling books, I think this kind of high-profile-keeping by writers – doing readings, coming to conferences, talking on radio and television, frankly acknowledging one’s financial connection with one’s own books and helping them on in the world a little – is a Good Thing . I am not suggesting for a moment that shy writers (if such creatures really exist) are obliged to go out and crucify themselves on public platforms. And personal publicity can have its own weird and subtle pitfalls, as Gina Mercer pointed out in her article on Helen Garner in the June ABR. But it’s still nice to be reminded that the literary world has a mobile, breathing, social life apart from the silent exchanges of paper for paper across the counters of bookshops. And the success of the Harold Park readings in Sydney, the Friendly Street readings in Adelaide, the Universal Theatre readings in Melbourne, and doubtless many others, says a lot about how much people like to see and hear and meet the writers whose books they buy and read and like, the writers whom they keep in socks and Vegemite, in love and money.