Cultural cringe is creeping back
What kind of country can’t bear to teach its own literature? Australia, apparently.
The University of Melbourne says its bachelor of arts is “the most popular degree in Victoria’’, a boast based on 2017 admissions figures. With more than 40 majors to choose from, students starting a BA amid Melbourne’s grand heritage buildings and sandstone columns are certainly spoilt for choice — unless, that is, they want to specialise in Australian literature.
READ MORE: Publisher lashes uni’s ‘shocking betrayal’
Melbourne undergraduates can choose from majors including French studies, German studies, Islamic, Italian, Jewish or Japanese studies but, according to the university’s website, the only major focused on this country is Australian indigenous studies, which the site describes as “a value-driven program’’.
There is no specific major for students who want to study Australian literature; nor is there a first-year subject dedicated to the nation’s novels, plays and poetry.
An equally prestigious sandstone institution, the University of Sydney, boasts that it “has one of the largest English departments in Australia’’, with more than 30 full-time academic staff. Traditionally, Sydney was the nation’s only campus where undergraduates could major in Australian literature. However, this major was axed last year. This means there is now no local university where undergraduates can take Australian literature as their main area of study.
Tertiary institutions’ chronic neglect of homegrown writers and writing has come under fresh scrutiny following Sydney University’s highly contentious decision to withdraw funding for its professorship of Australian literature, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious Ozlit chair. The university says it will need to secure external funds if the chair — founded in 1962 after a public campaign by luminaries including novelist Miles Franklin — is to continue.
Elizabeth Webby, who filled the role from 1990 to 2007, describes the defunding of the symbolically significant chair as “very disappointing’’. She points out that if external funding isn’t found, this will leave the University of Western Australia’s professorship as the nation’s only government-funded chair of Australian literature that is open to academics.
The UWA chair was established after a 2006 investigation by The Australian revealed there was only one dedicated professorship in Australian literature — the Sydney position that is now in limbo.
The UWA chair has been vacant for months following the resignation of its inaugural professor, Philip Mead. The university has told Inquirer it will appoint a new professor early next year. Says a spokesman: “UWA is committed to the study of Australian literature and we hope to have a new incumbent in place for the first quarter of 2020.’’
This year the University of Queensland terminated its only professorship of Australian literature and cultural history, following the retirement last year of David Carter.
In a scathing attack, leading publisher Michael Heyward condemned Sydney’s withdrawal of internal university funds for its Ozlit chair as “a shocking betrayal of readers and writers’’ that “reveals a contempt for books themselves’’.
Heyward, managing director of Melbourne’s multi-award-winning Text Publishing, which publishes new and classic Australian works and international titles, says: “In the sorry history of the teaching of Australian literature in our universities, Sydney has been the outlier since 1962 when its chair was founded by public subscription. Now it, too, has joined the philistine ranks of its fellow institutions.’’
Certainly, our universities’ indifference to and even disdain for Australian literature has been notorious at times. In 1940, JIM Stewart, a professor of English at the University of Adelaide, reportedly declared that because there was no Australian literature, he would give his paid Commonwealth Literary Fund lecture on Englishman DH Lawrence’s Kangaroo.
Heyward says, today, “not even the Australian National University has a chair in Australian literature. What kind of country can’t bear to teach its own literature?’’ (In 2010 ANU announced a new chair in Australian literature but the role was downgraded to a lectureship before it could be filled.)
As she collected her $80,000 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for fiction this week, novelist Gail Jones described the Sydney decision as “deplorable”. She said: “Our own literary culture seems to be valued more abroad, and I’m often in the embarrassing position of trying to explain the diminishing status of Australian studies and chairs in Australian literature.’’
The peak academic body for English literature departments, Australian Universities Heads of English, also has expressed its “strong opposition’’ to Sydney’s defunding of the chair and says it will “have grave consequences for the vitality of Australian literature as a subject nationally … and internationally’’.
Fiona Morrison, president of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, agrees Sydney’s move is causing “great concern’’ and questions whether “there is an imperialist problem, where we are reverting back to Europe and North America where quality is decided’’. Morrison says the Sydney professorship has had an “extraordinary history’’. Among its four incumbents was Dame Leonie Kramer, who went on to become the first chairwoman of the ABC and first female chancellor of Sydney University.
The chorus of criticism over Sydney’s move reflects anxieties over broader job cuts in the Ozlit field, coupled with claims that academics who specialise in Australian literature and publish their research in local journals risk harming their careers.
This is because international publications boost universities’ citations and research rankings more than local journals do.
Susan Lever, who edits the Cambria Press Australian Literature series, says: “Your reputation is based on your international publications and no Australian literary journal counts at all.’’ She adds: “Ten years ago you couldn’t have believed that this would have happened (defunding the Sydney chair).”
She also claims that permanent Ozlit lecturing jobs have become so scarce, she and her colleagues feel guilty about encouraging postgraduate students into the field. “We wonder, will they ever get a job?”
Julieanne Lamond, a lecturer at ANU’s college of arts and social sciences, says she has heard of “quite a lot” of “anecdotal cases” of other universities discouraging academics “from doing research in Australian literature because those (local) journals are not highly ranked and the research funding doesn’t follow”.
The editor of the Australian Literary Studies journal, who completed her undergraduate degree and PhD at Sydney, Lamond shares Lever’s concern about the dearth of permanent lectureships for younger Ozlit scholars; some researchers, she says, are effectively working for free. She says that “overall” she is worried about the survival of Australian literary studies in the tertiary sector, despite the “incredible” research being done.
She maintains, however, that ANU, which doesn’t have any chairs in its English department, is committed to Ozlit, with three stand-alone Australian literature courses and a fourth course in local cinema. Last semester, her Australian literature course for second and third-year students had the second highest enrolment of any English course offered by the university. She says creative writing subjects are growing in popularity and should not be seen as being “in competition” with Ozlit courses, as “they feed into one another”.
Paul Giles, Challis professor of English at Sydney University, agrees the Sydney chair is symbolically significant, as it is the country’s first permanent professorship dedicated to Australian literature. “Certainly I and colleagues in the English department (at Sydney) have been making that case that we want to see the chair replaced,” he says. (The incumbent, Robert Dixon, retired this year.)
Despite the outcry, he says: “I can’t see the University of Sydney changing its mind on this issue anytime soon.”
He reveals that in its search for external funding — which it hasn’t started yet — the university has its eye on a Melbourne precedent: in 2015, the University of Melbourne scored a $5m donation from merchant banker John Wylie and his wife, Myriam Boisbouvier-Wylie, to set up a chair in Australian literature. Aimed at writers rather than academics, this rotating position is managed jointly with the State Library of Victoria and has been filled by Man Booker prize-winning novelist Richard Flanagan and Miles Franklin winner Alexis Wright.
The withdrawal of university funding for the Sydney role, he says, was caused, in part, by a “murky’’ financial history, in which the public donations that initially funded the chair weren’t “ring-fenced’’ from internal faculty funds.
Other factors included a dearth of resources within the university’s English department and fewer research grants being allocated to the humanities.
He also says students today are more interested in studying communications and media than literature courses.
Webby agrees enrolments in Australian literature subjects at Sydney have dropped as “students are more focused on something that is going to get them a job’’. She says “there are probably more people studying Australian literature in China than in Australia’’ — a startling claim also made by Giles.
But Morrison says 2018 data shows “Australian literary courses are about the fourth most popular course in higher education … There is no special pleading to that; it is a metric.”
Webby and other Ozlit academics stress the situation is not entirely bleak. Some universities, they point out, employ professors who specialise in Australian literature alongside other literary subjects without holding dedicated chairs. The prestigious, externally funded Kidman chair at Adelaide University rotates between different Australian specialties, and has just been filled by Ozlit specialist Anne Pender.
Even so, historically, Australian universities’ commitment to the nation’s literature has been patchy, at best.
Peter Pierce, James Cook University’s first full-time professor of Australian literature, was also its last. In 2006, in what Pierce characterised as “a scandal’’ and a return of the cultural cringe, the position — the nation’s second dedicated Ozlit chair — ceased to exist because of a departmental restructure.
That chair has since evolved into the externally funded Roderick chair of English — albeit now occupied by Ozlit specialist Michael Ackland. (Interestingly, publisher and academic Colin Roderick, who endowed this chair, also helped establish the Sydney chair.)
Richard Nile, JCU’s head of humanities and creative arts, says Australian literature is “pretty healthy’’ at the university, where it is a “foundation subject’’ for bachelor of arts students.
He says Sydney’s defunding of its chair is “very disappointing’’, and argues that “there is no reason why Australian literature couldn’t be broadened to include communications and creative writing. That combination has worked well for 20 years. It’s a real growth area.” He is optimistic about Ozlit’s future, pointing to an imminent generational renewal of academic ranks as 30-somethings replace retiring baby boomers.
For others, however, the undermining of the Sydney chair highlights a disconnect between universities’ coolness towards our own literature and the public’s enthusiasm for it. In 2017, according to sales tracker Nielsen BookScan, five of the top 10 bestselling books were local titles. In the theatre, Australian plays frequently outsell imported dramas, while the Sydney Writers Festival is one of the world’s biggest literary events.
Says Heyward: “Our universities are increasingly cut off from Australia’s dynamic literary life … We are a country of extraordinary writers and voracious readers — but don’t look for evidence of this exciting cultural life inside our universities.”