Archive for the 'Authors' Category

Another well known Australian has left this world; Gwen Meredith. I missed the announcement earlier in the week. I grew up listening to her world record making radio serial Blue Hills, continuing to listen to it well into adulthood.

Australian playwright and author Gwen Meredith has died at the age of 98, after creating the world’s longest-running radio serial.

She wrote radio plays, docos and serials in a 33-year relationship with the ABC, gaining prominence with The Lawsons, which ran for five years and 1,299 episodes in the 40s.

Soon after, she began writing country family saga Blue Hills, which went down in the record books for lasting 5,500 episodes and more than 27 years. Meredith wrote every episode.

While I was an avid listener, my mother was the really devoted fan. She would tune in to ABC Radio at 1pm every day, Monday to Thursday. I usually only listened to it in the school holidays but still didn’t miss much because each episode was repeated every evening. Of course we always joked that you could miss several weeks of episodes and not really miss out on anything because the plot seemed to be slow moving.

Quintessentially Australian

There is nothing like it on radio or television these days. It was the quintessential Australian country story, and it was no coincidence that it followed immediately after “The Country Hour,” a news, information, and opinion programme aimed at farmers. The story followed the lives, loves, tragedies and hardships of several rural families. I remember my father lingering just a few more minutes to listen if he was working close enough to home for lunch. If he was working further away from home and had taken his lunch, tuning in on the trunk or ute radio would have been irresistable.

Unusual Writing Method

Gwen Meredith had an unusual method of “writing” her radio scripts for Blue Hills. She would first record them on to tape. The tapes were then transcribed by ABC staff into typed scripts, ready for the cast to use in recording the programmes.

An interesting – and rather disturbing – literary hoax has come to light recently here in Australia. It involves the writing of our only Nobel Prize for Literature winner, novelist Patrick White.

There has been much talk in the blogosphere about The Weekend Australian‘s sting (or stunt, depending on your point of view), whereby the paper sent 12 publishers chapter three of Patrick White‘s Nobel prize-winning novel The Eye of the Storm, changing names, the title and giving White the pseudonym ‘Wraith Picket’.

Ten rejected the submission (some suggesting Wraith join a writers’ group or buy a how-to book!) and two didn’t bother replying.

I am not sure what to think of this stunt. At first I was amused, but on reflection I was rather incensed. It is hard enough to get published as it is without one of our major newspapers carrying out such a pointless stunt. One could come to the conclusion that today’s raft of publishers do not really recognise great writing when they read it. I’m not an expert on the writings of Patrick White so can’t comment on the acclaim accorded his work.

On a more worrying note the current debate here in Australia – and probably elsewhere too – is that publishers no longer publish works of literature for the sake of publishing great writing. Most publishers work only on the “bottom line,” that is – will it make money? Market driven publishing and great literature seem to be mutually exclusive. I guess that one cannot blame the publishers for always seeking to make a profit.

Where to for writers of literary novels in an increasingly small market like Australia? The harsh reality is that writers like White probably would not get published today. Work like his just does not sell in sufficient numbers to be economically viable.

And what about the hundreds of struggling Australian writers trying to break into the published world? It must be discouraging to think that the writing of even one of the “greats” of Australian literature was rejected out of hand by today’s publishers. In my opinion, this hoax has done nothing to develop the Australian literary scene. It has possibly sent it even closer its seemingly inevitable demise.

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I always thought that the British had no taste.

Now I have proof.

A survey of readers has voted JK Rowling the “Greatest Living British Writer”.

JK Rowling has been voted the greatest living British writer in a survey published by The Book magazine.

The Harry Potter creator, whose stories of the young wizard have sold over 300 million copies worldwide, received nearly three times as many votes as Discworld author Terry Pratchett in second place.

They have confused popular with greatness. Because something is popular doesn’t make it great, or even worthy. In a moment of weakness several years ago I actually read the first of the Harry Potter series. I shouldn’t have bothered. Oh, I suppose it is a mildly entertaining read, but great it definitely is not. It would not be listed in my best 100 books written for children.

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