Contributors & Columnists
Among some of The Spectator Australia's regular columnists you'll recognise some of the most gifted and celebrated journalists of today. Rod Liddle, Tom Switzer, Peter Coleman, Fraser Nelson, Matthew Parris, Jeremy Clarke, Taki, Toby Young, Mary Killen and Joan Collins all contribute regularly.
An extraordinary range of people share their thoughts in The Spectator Australia – the above is just a brief sample of recent guests you might have read in our pages.
Ever controversial and highly entertaining, our writers delight readers in the elegant manner they expect. It is this unique quality that makes The Spectator Australia stand apart from the rest.
Australian Notes
PETER COLEMAN
3 December 2011
Far be it for me to leap to the defence of Julia Gillard. She has a huge staff and a regiment of journalists to do that. But what a foolish speech Julian Assange made when (in accepting the Walkley Award for Excellence in Journalism) he attacked the Prime Minister as ‘cowardly’ — unlike Australian journalists, who exhibit ‘courage, loyalty, compassion and strength’. You may find all sorts of flaws in Julia Gillard’s character: disloyalty, deviousness, opportunism, lack of principle. Take your pick. But not cowardice. You have to make allowances for Assange’s current plight. He may soon be deported to Sweden to face sex charges. But whatever criticism the Gillard government deserves, it has not been servile to President Obama in the Wikileaks case. It rejected calls to withdraw Assange’s passport. It offered him consular assistance. But it sticks by its sensible view that in publishing stolen diplomatic cables, he broke the law, undermined diplomacy, and imperilled lives (including those of Australians) in Afghanistan. The Walkley Foundation brushes aside all that boring stuff. Perhaps they accept the idea that journalism depends on leaks. But are there no limits? Perhaps they are firing a warning shot at the ill-omened Finkelstein Inquiry into the media ? Whatever the reason for honouring Assange, it would help if the Walkley judges explained the difference between leaks and phone hacking.
In his new autobiography Fierce Focus, the brilliant if controversial cricketer Greg Chappell states his big theme in the book’s Prologue. This tells of a conversation he had with Sir Donald Bradman when the two bumped into each other in the car park of Adelaide Oval in 1999. They had been bitter foes in the 1970s when Chappell threw in his lot with Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket while Bradman was a key member of the Australian Cricket Board and opposed them. Why did you, Chappell asked? Sir Donald replied: ‘I believe that cricket is not meant to be a profession. It’s meant to be a pastime. Sport loses something when it becomes a business.’ Reflecting on the dreadful things that have happened in recent decades, Chappell concludes: ‘My biggest fear for Australian cricket is that Sir Donald was right.’
Why has it been such a bad year for the book trade? Publishers report a 20 per cent decline in sales, and bookshops have been closing down at such a rate that one Minister of the Crown predicts their extinction. Booksellers blame the growth of online sales, the success of e-books, the GST, and the protection still given to publishers against cheaper imports. The poet and critic Jamie Grant has a more radical explanation. Too many recent books, he says, are not good enough, or not up the standards of past years. Grant was delivering his tenth annual, magisterial Judges’ Report on the CAL -Waverley Library Literary Award for excellence in research combined with literary merit. He announced the Prize ($20,000) in the Bondi Pavilion on Bondi Beach — this year a wet, windy and romantic setting. Grant reported that the judges did not include any novels in the year’s shortlist of six. They also excluded several war books which, although well-written, only added details to familiar stories. They had reservations too about some popular biographies. They could not shortlist Blanche d’Alpuget’s biography of her husband R.J.L.(Bob) Hawke because it is, in effect, a reprint. Nor could they include John Howard’s Lazarus Rising. It is, Grant said, too ‘plodding’ and lacking in literary merit. (This does not seem to have troubled readers. A bestseller, it even outsold The Costello Memoirs written by Peter Costello and me! No one said we were plodders, although the always fastidious and judicious John Hewson may have had a go.) But two splendid biographies made the shortlist: Eileen Channon’s Book Life: The life and times of David Scott Mitchell of Mitchell Library fame, and Mark McKenna’s An Eye for Eternity about Manning Clark (and his longsuffering wife, Dymphna). The other four in the shortlist were: Alan Frost’s The First Fleet: The Real Story, documenting the detail and humanity that went into planning the First Fleet, thereby exposing the myths of anti-British demagogues Manning Clark, Robert Hughes and their school; Penny Russell’s Savage or Civilised? Manners in Colonial Australia (with lively anecdotes about the ill-bred Prime Minister of NSW Henry Parkes or the ordeal of Lady Jane Franklin in the social minefield of genteel Van Diemen’s Land); Anna Krien’s Into the Woods, a compelling memoir of the battles over Tasmania’s forests; and the winner, Delia Falconer’s Sydney, which combined detailed research, eloquent prose and sensitive autobiography. The Copyright Agency Limited again donated the $20,000 prize, although after four years it is pulling out and a new sponsor must be found. (An earlier sponsor was Frank Lowy.) After such a successful ten years, let us hope the annual award will keep going.
In chairing the presentation of the Waverley awards, Richard Glover of the ABC listed a number of categories the austere judges of literary prizes sometimes overlook. These include not only chick lit (which sustains the publishing industry) but sick lit (about ghastly murders), flick lit (with lots of pictures and few words), tick lit (which confirms all your prejudices), kick lit (sport, where a desperate ghostwriter spends weeks recording a footballer’s conversation in the hope of chancing on one coherent sentence) and thick lit (fantasies of 600 pages with pompous titles like The Agamemnon Chronicles.) But above all there is Fitz lit — all those books by Peter FitzSimons which sell so well that they condemn mere prize-winners to a lifetime of resentment.
