It is always tempting when looking at the bulk of material which comes to the ABR or to the National Book Council to make judgments about where our writing is heading. There does seem to be increasing interest in local and institutional history, although this may be an indication of improvements in quality rather than quantity. I understand that there has been a great increase in the amount of interest given to family histories, although so far not many have achieved general publication. The history of the Chirnsides, Wool Past the Winning Post, by Heather B. Ronald (Land vale Enterprises), is an example of the value of such histories to our understanding of ourselves. Yet the danger of exploring our past is that it will become just a romantic escape from the present. The idealisation of the pioneers and their families is a natural reaction from the complexities of the present to a time when there appeared to be opportunity for the individual to shape his own fate. This idealisation can obscure the exploitation of land and people which lay behind the establishment of our society, and can be used to justify the extension of that exploitation into the present. In this respect, as in others, the histories of Manning Clark offer a salutary corrective. That is no doubt why he arouses such ire.

The other element in contemporary Australian publishing is the multiplication of solid academic works which subject the details of our social reality to rigorous inspection. These works in turn give rise to a lively industry of satire in the columns of reviewers and commentators, and all too often the derision is merited. The energy of academic ants gathering dusty grains of knowledge along the frontiers of knowledge does not necessarily add to our wisdom, and when the results of their labors are described in esoteric jargon their effectiveness is doubtful. We know too that many of these tomes are published only to earn their authors promotion or to save those responsible for teaching from the necessity of thought. Yet when these blemishes have been noted the achievement of Australian academics, in both quantity and quality, is impressive. We do know more about our antecedents, our population patterns, our voting habits, our prejudices and preferences, and our economic possibilities than ever before. This knowledge is to a great extent the by-product of the educational expansion of the past decades, which has multiplied not only the numbers of teachers but also of students and thus of potential readers. The biggest problem we have to face with the end of this expansion is that there will no longer be places for the brightest and the best of the young, let alone those who would like to contribute the value of their experience elsewhere to the world of academe. The other problem is that the academics who have benefited from the spread of education are talking to each other rather than to the community they have educated. Like bureaucrats and politicians, they prefer to assert rather than demonstrate their value to the community.

The consequence of these trends is a lopsided intellectual growth. We have been prepared to spend money on educating people to play a part in the life of the community, but we are not prepared to spend the money needed to promote that life. Most of the people who write our books do so either for a pittance or in their spare time. We allow our schools and universities and colleges to be run by clerks, and when the result is not all that we had hoped we cut their funds and tighten the controls, so reducing still further the amount of teaching or learning that may go on in them. We force people like A. D. Hope or Manning Clark to retire before they can devote their whole time to what they like best and to what is most valuable for the rest of us. We force our young poets to stand in dole queues or to tramp the streets for jobs that don’t exist rather than giving thein the opportunity to give their work to the public. We spend less each year on the Literature Board than on a College of Advanced Education, and then we criticise the way it uses its funds. The cost of this is that we have to accept half-formulated ideas and the untested statements of the experts as truth because we neither give people the chance to think through to their conclusions nor encourage wide debate on what they do say. Our potential remains the property of the second-rate.

Our use in ABR of illustrations from some of the books we review is only made possible through the generosity of booksellers who lend us copies of the books so that we can make reproductions of the illustrations. The bookshops who help us in this way are the Hill of Content (Collins), Webbers, and Angus and Robertson’s Prahran and City shop. I am sure our readers will join us in thanking them.

John McLaren