Each year, seventeen per cent of the Department of Foreign Affairs’ cultural budget is spent to boost Australian literature in non-English speaking countries. From the government’s point of view, it is not a program for the promotion of literature but for the promotion of attitudes, not a stratagem for expanding our book-market but an appeal for respect from the intellectual elites in certain places.

Here lie some of the contradictions. The Department of Foreign Affairs is not looking for any immediate pay-off from these ventures. More English departments incorporating Australian novels into their syllabuses, more translations, and more space in the cultural marketplace – these are all to the good, but they are not Foreign Affairs’ first priorities. Its first priority is to prove that, culturally, we are not uncouth colonials and not brassy nouveaux riches, and so the authors selected generally fit the image of an urbane, mature Australia – Thomas Shapcott, A.D. Hope, David Malouf, Les Murray, Frank Moorhouse, David Williamson, Rosemary Dobson, Rodney Hall. The Literature Board admits that it is not a case of giving every writer a go – and, in fact, a writer who has filled the diplomatic function gracefully once is more likely to be asked to do so again.

The matter of a writer’s suitability is left to the Literature Board, but Ric Throssell, Assistant Secretary of the Cultural Affairs Board within the Department of Foreign Affairs, says that he can imagine querying a Board nominee if he thought the writer was a bad choice. Once the writer has been accepted at the Departmental level and by the diplomatic base abroad, the writer receives air fares and expenses – usually a modest $100 per day regardless of whether he is impecunious, is supported by a Literature Board grant, or is drawing an academic salary. The Department of Foreign Affairs feels that the high quality of performance that is required, especially in Europe, would be inconsistent with paying writers any less. When the Literature Board pays a portion of the writer’s expenses, its contribution goes through the Foreign Affairs coffers, so that all payments to writers are made through the diplomatic posts in the host countries.

The Literature Board feels that not enough money is coming into its hands for overseas promotion. The slice of the Literature Board budget going to initiatives abroad is $50,000 this year, one-thirtieth of the Board’s allowance, and that small sum also has to offset the costs of foreign writers’ visits to Australia, to subsidise the translations of Australian books, and so on. To meet even those existing commitments the Literature Board should have spent three times its $50,000 this year. For example, seminars in Australian literature at foreign universities have sprung up in the past five or six years, but in the past twelve to eighteen months academic interest has accelerated unexpectedly quickly.

The Literature Board would obviously like the Department of Foreign Affairs to support more overseas promotion, but the hitch, as I’ve said, is the fact that Foreign Affairs regards its literature program as serving ends other than the writers’. Although the money from the two sources feeds into one stream, and although the writers who have accepted these trips usually see no conflict between their diplomatic role and their self-promoting role, the discrepancy between the objectives of the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Literature Board is notable. How this is resolved in each visit depends largely upon the kind of engagement and who proposed it, rather than upon the origin of the funds.

(1) There are, most importantly, exchanges between countries with which we have cultural agreements. These are governed by political rather than literary considerations. For instance, every few years three Australian writers visit Russia and three Russian writers come here. A similar reciprocal arrangement with India sent Frank Moorhouse and Barbara Jefferis there in October. In all there are fourteen countries with whom Australia has cultural pacts – the most recent was signed with Greece in November. There are, however, only three places where Australia has cultural attachés – Jakarta, Tokyo, and Peking – and without a cultural attaché the on-the-spot administration of the visits is sometimes very loose. Obviously, it is easier for diplomatic staff in an overseas post to put on a party for a ballet troupe than it is to work up the necessary background in a writer’s books and make the apposite introductions to other writers and intellectuals.

(2) There are also requests for writers to visit foreign universities, coming through channels independent of our diplomatic bases. These are often filled by writers and academics who are in the neighbourhood of the host country on study leave or personal trips or other business. Rosemary Wighton has criticised the haphazard selection of participants that results from these manoeuvres to save money. Very fairly, she has pointed out that using the writers and academics whom we ‘have on hand’ creates a strange picture for a European audience of the figures in contemporary Australian literature. It is the cheapest way of presenting a face of Australian writing, but it does very little for, and may even work against, the kind of cultural image that Foreign Affairs wants.

(3) A number of Literature Board writing grants have been given to expatriates like Peter Porter and Desmond O’Grady, and the Board calls upon these writers when seminars are held. In addition, writers can apply for travelling expenses under the Board’s ‘special grants’ scheme. Authors like David Rowbotham and Ivan Southall have had such awards. While overseas in connection with their own work, they have assisted the Board’s promotional program as well.

(4) Then, too, there are the visits that are entirely paid for by the host country, although the Literature Board and Foreign Affairs may advise the country and co-operate in non-financial ways. South Korea is most hospitable: John Blight, Vivian Smith, A.D. Hope, Bob Brissenden, and many others have been its guests. In this case, the reason is that although the invitations are extended through the Korean government’s cultural organ, the initiatives lie with Professor Chung-Chong Wha of Korea University who, while a student in Australia writing his thesis on D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo, developed a great affection for the Australian literary scene.

As a rule there are also specific personal relationships behind invitations extended to Australian writers to visit the United States. Foreign Affairs’ policy is that normal commercial channels should take care of our cultural diplomacy in other English-speaking countries – so none of its money goes to the Unites States, for example. This puts a burden upon writers and Literature Board members as individuals to create conduits for invitations and return invitations. The Board’s writer-in-residency scheme, which has brought Mark Strand, Philip Levine, Galway Kinnell, and Louis Simpson from the United States and Jon Silkin, Alan Seymour, and John Arden from England, goes some way towards compensating for Foreign Affairs’ lack of concern in this area.

When an invitation is from a university, at the instigation, say, of Anna Rutherford at the University of Aarhus, or Bernard Hickey at the University of Venice, or Peter Quartermaine at the University of Exeter (to name the three most important sources of such invitations), a conflict can arise between the principled assessing of Australian literature purely as literature and using our literature chauvinistically, to celebrate the country itself. There is, in other words, a muddling of artistic reality and ordinary reality – maybe this is due to the fact that the seminars are funded by source which believe such a muddling is in the country’s interests.

David Malouf was criticised for having tried to speak sensibly about this muddling when he was a guest at Lugarno earlier this year. Malouf asked the Swiss students to approach Australian poetry not for what it might tell them about Australia but for what it might reveal to them of themselves. This is hard for some cultural bureaucrats to accept. Anything that isn’t positively promoting Australia appears, in those overseas contexts, to be covertly criticising it.

Australian writers who participate in European seminars and speaking tours should be reminded that they are dealing with countries who regard themselves as cultural exporters. Importing Australian culture as a ‘greenhide and stringybark’ curiosity, as David Malouf says, is acceptable to some Europeans, given their cultural ‘superiority’, but it is not wise for us to create such a diplomatic disadvantage. Culture is big business in the modern world and

Australia, culturally, is a corner shop. The mistake we are likely to make is to overextend ourselves by sending writers overseas who will not earn the respect that the Foreign Affairs money could buy. We cannot have it all ways. With enormous difficulty we could grapple for a foothold in the international cultural marketplace; somewhat more easily, we could establish the credibility of Australia’s literary talent, as the Literature Board is trying to do; and much easier still, we can promote a vague Australian humanism and a feeling of goodwill by sending sympathetic writers on speaking tours, which is the objective of Foreign Affairs. But this third objective is, to some extent, at odds with the other two.