Sydney Publishing

The 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birthday on 7 February set off the whole year of celebrations taking place throughout the world, including Australia. While Dickens is widely known a writer and a journalist, his role as an editor is rarely mentioned. Yet he spent close to 25 years in the editor’s chair mentoring a new generation of writers and shaping the way Australia was perceived overseas.

When I was small, I really wanted to have a dog. And not just any dog, I wanted a German shepherd. It may have had something to do with a series that was run on Polish TV every summer about four tank-men and a dog who fought together as members of the 1st Polish Army during World War Two. The film (made in 1966-70), and the book it was based on, contained elements of pro-Soviet propaganda, as was the norm at the time. But as I was a kid the political overtones went straight over my head and I only saw the wonderful friendship between the central character and his dog, Szarik.

Despite what Louise Adler says in The Australian, the future of monograph publishing in Australia is looking well and the opportunities for Australian academics to publish their research have actually been growing.

Adler is calling for the government and the university sector to support the ‘traditional livelihood’ of four university presses: Melbourne University Publishing, UNSW Press, University of Western Australia Publishing and University of Queensland Press. The management of these four presses, by and large, abandoned the ‘traditional livelihood’ of academic monograph publishing years ago in an attempt to make the presses commercially viable and save them from closures. The transition into trade publishing was a visionary thing to do and the four presses have become established cultural institutions that contribute greatly to the intellectual life of Australia. But … these contributions rarely belong to the world of scholarly publishing as defined by the requirements of HERDC (Higher Education Research Data Collection) and ERA (Excellence of Research for Australia).

There is a group men and women whose contribution to the war effort is largely forgotten: the camoufleurs who worked together to camouflage Australia during the Second World War. In a new book from Sydney University Press, Camouflage Australia: art, nature, science and war, Ann Elias tells the story of camouflage artists and explores the reasons for their invisibility in the historical record.

The ABC TV series The Slap portrays how differently people approach parenting and how dire the consequences can be when those differing approaches collide. Do parents know best? Does society have the right to intervene in the parenting process? Is it ever all right to slap your own or anyone else’s child? Or is there a better way to ensure that children grow up to be balanced and happy adults and have fulfilling lives?

Extract from Philip Muskett's preface to The Art of Living in Australia.

ALTHOUGH this work fully deals with all the many matters connected with the art of living in Australia, its principal object is the attempt to bring about some improvement in the extraordinary food-habits at present in vogue. For years past the fact that our people live in direct opposition to their semi-tropical environment has been constantly before me. As it will be found in the opening portion of the chapter on School Cookery, the consumption of butcher’s meat and of tea is enormously in excess of any common sense requirements, and is paralleled nowhere else in the world. On the other hand, there has been no real attempt to develop our deep-sea fisheries; market gardening is deplorably neglected, only a few of the more ordinary varieties being cultivated; salads, which are easily within the daily reach of every home, are conspicuous by their absence; and Australian wine, which should be the national
beverage of every-day life, is at table — almost a curiosity.

There could not have been a better person to talk about Dickens and stamps at the NSW Dickens Society’s lecture last Saturday than Susannah Fullerton. Apart from being a well-known lecturer, literary tour leader and author of Brief encounters: literary travellers in Australia 1836-1939, Susannah also collects stamps. And not just any stamps, but those depicting authors and literary characters.