This morning I've gone down a bit of a rabbit hole and arrived at a surprising subject
It started when I read Austin Kleon's newsletter and saw a discussion of copyright, which took me to a comment about Australia's publishing industry:
This is all sadly true. I'm currently writing a biography of an Australian author and have done similar research into publishing history in Australia in 19th and 20th centuries, and the same situation was at play. Local authors were passed over for imported (usually pirated) copies of British and European (in translation) books. Unlike United States, however, Australia had a very strict censorship regime, with customs seizing and destroying any imported books they thought obscene (this included destroying a shipment of Zola novels). In the U.S. scene, it may be worthwhile looking into Edgar Allan Poe, who argued against the "publishing" situation and lack of copyright. His Dupin series of detective stories, for example, had a French protagonist, in order to persuade American readers that it was imported and so worth reading...
When the Berne Convention on Copyright came in and some copyright protections were in place, things got better for American authors (into 20th century), somewhat. But not so Australia, in which "colonial editions" continued to be published until 1972! Australian authors for the main had to be published by a British publisher, and have their books imported into Australia. The distance meant they lost control over editing/proofreading of their ms before publication, and they had a lower royalty rate. Until 1950s it was a fixed 5% (when British authors had 15%), and until 1972 it was only raised to 10% - but throughout, there was no rising scale of royalty if a certain number of copies were sold.
Until 1968 when Australia (finally) updated its copyright laws (and international treaties), Australia had no copyright protections in United States: that meant that U.S. publishers (technically) could have done to Australian books what they did to British books in 19th century, and pirate them (but they didn't); but worse, without Australian copyright being recognized in American, they couldn't sell their books to an American publisher. They had to go through a British publisher, and have them negotiate with American publishers...
Censorship continued until 1972, with books banned here long after they had been unbanned or available in other countries. James Baldwin's novels, for example, were banned in Australia when they first came out in the 1960s.
Australian publishing hasn't really survived these initial set-backs. The industry and the literary culture is moribund.
This prompted me to consider the current discussion of Australian copyright and whether foreign-owned (so-called) AI (really, large language models) should have unfettered access to our country's cultural works for free.
While I am generally of the opinion that copyright is an antiquated model, it is the one that provides remuneration to a (small) group of creatives (but mostly the corporations that take ownership of works) and (in theory) incentivises the creation of new cultural material and other intellectual property.
Given the author of the comment quoted above wrote their reflection in 2022, I began wondering what they'd make of the contemporary debate about copyright.
However, I was reluctant to create a LinkedIn account and found that Lamb's Substack requires a paid subscription for me to ask, so I started looking for interviews with the author and soon found myself interested in the book he's been promoting -- a biography of Frank Moorhouse.
It looks like a good book and I'm really curious about the subject's experience of living in Wagga, where he worked on The Daily Advertiser newspaper.
That journal is usually referred to as The Agoniser by people I know, and it's become renowned as the place where sometime Nationals leader Michael McCormack wrote a homophobic editorial (that he's since distanced).
So, before long, I've found myself interested in learning more about Moorhouse from digging into interviews with Lamb.
