When news broke about the University of Sydney’s decision not to fund a replacement for the retiring chair of Australian literature, it caused outrage – and rightfully so. But this battle is about more than just this one academic position, and it seems to me as if the battle lines have been drawn in the wrong places.
The division between Australian literature “inside” and “outside” the academy – a division we’ve seen raised in recent media coverage of this issue – is a false one. It doesn’t exist.
Australian universities and those who work in them are deeply entangled with contemporary Australian literature. They house and support publishers and writers’ centres, publish and edit journals of creative writing and criticism, and run public events promoting writers and their work. Academics judge literary prizes, write book reviews and are themselves often novelists and poets.
Still, there is a battle for survival going on. Literature in our universities is indeed under threat. But it’s not – or not only – because of cultural cringe.
In the field of Australian literature, we are seeing a reduction in specialised courses, a failure to replace retiring positions and dramatic casualisation of early career research. But this is happening to literary studies and the humanities more widely across the board. It is one of the critical issues for the sustainability of the academic workforce . Young scholars who are doing some of the most important and exciting work in the field of Australian literature and in literary studies as a whole are more often working on casual contracts, with no job security, completely unmanageable workloads and less than half the pay of salaried academics.
The casualisation of the tertiary teaching workforce across the world is a much greater threat to our literary culture than cultural cringe.
This battle is not about protecting Australian literature so much as it is about protecting the humanities and literary studies in general when funding bodies use Stem disciplines as the model for how research should be performed and measured. Universities increasingly base decisions about disciplines and staffing on success in attaining government research funding. When a discipline brings in less research income – and Australian Research Council funding for literary studies is seriously on the decline – it becomes vulnerable.
Reduction in research funding has flow-on effects well beyond the walls of the academy. The effects are felt by Australian readers and writers, and our billion-dollar publishing industry.
And what, precisely, are we defending? Much of the discussion to date seems to assume a literary “tradition” that does not at all resemble what is being taught and researched in Australian literature at the moment. I am one of dozens of academics in this country who doggedly, semester after semester, show students that Australian literature is not what they thought it was – and not what some pundits want it to be.
Yes, I teach Christina Stead, Henry Lawson and Patrick White. But I also teach Antigone Kefala and Nam Le, Kim Scott, Ellen van Neerven, Tara June Winch and Melissa Lucashenko. And I know that “including” these writers is not enough. As Evelyn Araluen Corr and others have argued, we have a long way to go in thinking through how and what it really means to decolonise our syllabuses and our research. This is vital to our future, as a discipline and a culture.
Last week I held two days of essay consultations with my first-year English students, who had 10 texts to choose from for their final essay – from 19th century to contemporary works, from Britain, America and Australia. All but one of those students chose to write on a book by a young Aboriginal writer whose work speaks to their thinking about the present and future of this country and their own lives within it.
The fact that my students are able to make such a choice is in no small part due to the Sydney University chair and the advocacy of those holding the position. Our literary landscape would not be the same without them. Consider Elizabeth Webby’s championing of women writers, Indigenous writers, of poets and playwrights. She published hundreds of Australian poets and short fiction writers as editor of Southerly from 1988-1999. Consider the work of the most recent chair, Robert Dixon, in reframing how we think about Australian literature and its relationship to the world with field-defining essay collections and his editorial work with the Sydney Studies in Australian Literature series. Between them, Webby and Dixon have written 176 works of scholarly criticism and more than 100 book reviews. The contribution to our public and literary life is hugely significant.
Universities are a vital part of the ecology of Australian literature, and chair positions are very influential players. Universities – especially arts faculties – increasingly have to do more with less. And we know that regional universities and those not in the Group of Eight are particularly exposed. But the fact that the resourcing of Australian literature varies so much across the country also shows that universities have agency around what they choose to value and what benefits they choose to provide for their students and the Australian public. The University of Sydney has made its position clear.
• Julieanne Lamond is a lecturer in English at Australian National University, vice president of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature and editor of Australian Literary Studies journal
