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Jonathan Raban was one of my favourite writers. He died a few days ago, aged 80. He turned travel writing into a new form of art. His writing was comic, dark and incisive with prose that could leave a heart bleeding. He also wrote novels, essays and criticism. We had a love of the sea…

I’ve edit this story from Malcolm Knox in today’s SMH because he has obviously read Will Self’s essays, maybe even Neil Postman. Knox has done some homework on the vanishing Gutenberg mind. A 2022 Gallup poll found that Americans read less than at any time since the poll began in 1990. Even back in those…

It’s hard to think of UK music in the 1980s without foregrounding Terry Hall and his bands, The Specials, Fun Boy Three and The Colour Field. His songs were poetry and a knife against injustice. Terry Hall joined the first incarnation of the ska band The Specials shortly after the Coventry band formed in 1977….

This story is from the left wing Guardian and it hits the nail on the head. According to new research by Macquarie University, the Australia Council and the Copyright Agency, the average annual income from practising as an author is only $18,200. Many authors would revel in earning that much. Most pull about $4000-$5000 with every book. More…

JG Ballard was one of those increasingly rare writers who actually had a life before writing. He didn’t graduate with a MFA or MA in creative writing, fresh out of school. The MFA’s and MA’s write quite well, but they’re trading on style, not substance, because they’ve never actually done anything much beyond writing. Before…

And now for state of the nation … The Australian Robo-debt scheme pursued the poorest of the poor for welfare debt and in some cases, hounded them to death. Sounds like something Asimov or Heinlein would have written. Artificial intelligence gone mad and the middle class let it happen. Robo-debt was abandoned three years ago…

Don’t get me wrong. I love bookshops but with more than 100 books published in Australia every week, it’s hard not to get the impression that books are to be sold rather than read. The publishing industry submits literature to the same market forces and homogenising values as movies, TV, streaming platforms and video games….

The Australian media is not alone in publishing the more bonkers essays, reviews and opinions, such as Jacqueline Malley’s article today from the Sydney Morning Herald. She’s having a crack at Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. It’s the story of Figaro and his fiancée Susanna and two servants of the Count Almaviva, who live in the…

If you blinked you would have missed that one of Australia’s greatest writers passed away recently. Frank Morehouse was top of the heap in the 1970s. I thought him a better writer than that bitter old crone, Patrick White. Morehouse was eclipsed by the rise of Peter Carey, Tim Winton and what I euphemistically call…

About 1000 years ago, I was a professional and creative writing programs director at RMIT. I had around 1500 students and 50 staff. I’d inherited the job from a woman who was ‘gung ho’ over all things warm and fuzzy about creative writing but left her program, Professional Writing & Editing, $250k in the red…