Helen Garner: the writer’s life probably looks like ‘bludging’

Authors Helen Garner, Charlotte Wood and Christos Tsiolkas lay bare the realities of writing.

Author Charlotte Wood at her home in Marrickville. Picture: John Fotiadis

Literary authors suffer chronic pain from poor work environments, fret with anxiety about their economic circumstances, and earn so little from their writing that they scrape by on the breadline, author Charlotte Wood has told a federal parliamentary inquiry.

Earnings from literary work were “shockingly low”, Wood said, as writers made about $4000 on average from their creative output in 2008, and that figure had declined since.

Writers work a variety of jobs to make ends meet but casual work had dried up since the pandemic. Opportunities for book sales at writers’ festivals also have disappeared because of cancelled events.

“We work — when these jobs exist — as dishwashers in airline catering centres, behind cinema ticket counters, in supermarkets and call centres and shops and libraries, in women’s refuges, in hairdressers’ and on building sites,” Wood said. “We repair bicycles for a living, deliver for Uber eats, drive Ubers and taxis and soft-drink delivery trucks. We study. And in the hours available to us, we write.”

Wood and authors Helen Garner and Christos Tsiolkas have made submissions to the inquiry into Australia’s creative and cultural industries and institutions, which will consider the pandemic’s impact on those sectors.

They have been invited to give evidence in public hearings that are due to start online on Friday.

Garner said she was grateful for the grants she had received earlier in her career that bought her the “unencumbered time” to read widely and to observe life.

“To an outside observer, these activities probably don’t look like much,” Garner said. “In fact, although they’re a sort of labour, they probably look more like bludging. But without them, no one can write anything that’s worth reading.”

Author Helen Garner, pictured at the State Library in Melbourne.

Wood, author of recent bestseller The Weekend, said she was lucky to live with her husband in a house in inner-Sydney that had been co-purchased for them by friends.

She writes there against the background of construction noise from the WestConnex motorway, street traffic and the flight path overhead. It was a fantasy, she said, to imagine a writer “sitting at an antique desk in a beautiful room staring through gauzy curtains into a peaceful garden”.

Federal government funding for literature through the Australia Council was $5m last year, compared with $15.4m for theatre and $14m for visual arts, according to the 2019-20 annual report.

And Wood said there was “nothing for writers” in the Morrison government’s $250m rescue package for the arts.

But any cash that comes to writers is spent “directly, totally and immediately” in the local economy.

When writers receive a grant or win a prize — Wood was winner of the $50,000 Stella Prize in 2016 for The Natural Way of Things, and shared the Prime Minister’s Literary Award — they make the money “last longer than seems humanly possible”.

“They use it to buy child care for time to write,” she said. “They use it to finally get a tooth filled, to buy food or pay the rent, keeping enough aside to buy a week or a month off work to write.”

Most grant income or prizemoney, with the exception of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, is subject to income tax.

Tsiolkas, author of The Slap and more recently Damascus, urged members of the inquiry not to become “caught up in the inane simplistic dichotomies of the culture wars”.

His advocacy for the literary canon, such as novels by Patrick White, and for Indigenous authors such as Alexis Wright, could see him labelled either as “conservative” or “progressive”.

Melbourne author Christos Tsiolkas. Picture: Stuart McEvoy

“The truth is that I can be both, and that rather than offer prescriptions for what Australian storytelling should be, we need to develop the support structures and the educational commitments that make all kinds of storytelling possible,” Tsiolkas said.

The chairman of the Communications and the Arts committee, David Gillespie, said he was pleased that Garner, Wood and Tsiolkas were appearing in the committee’s first hearing.

“I look forward to hearing from these prominent Australians, and from all witnesses, about the significant contribution the arts makes to our lives, our economy and our way of coping with difficult events,” he said.