Reading Australia from Distant Shores

In the Summer of 2002, I traveled to Paris in order to present a paper on Croatian-Australian poet Morgan Yasbincek and French-Canadian poet Nicole Brossard. I was then a doctoral candidate at the University of Melbourne, where I was writing on aesthetics in the contemporary Australian and Canadian text. One of my supervisors, who was originally from Perth and had published several novels with Fremantle Arts Centre Press, had given me a review copy of Yasbincek's prose novel entitled liv, also published with FACP. I was absorbed by this novel, for the sensuality of its prose, the critical astuteness of its philosophical ideas, and for the power and beauty of a narrative dealing with three generations of women, the trauma of escaping Tito's dictatorship, the dislocation of moving to a new country, and the feeling, two generations later, of being caught in-between cultures, languages, and historical epochs. Yet in Paris it seemed no one had ever heard of Morgan Yasbincek, let alone the novel liv. The other doctoral candidates I met who were working in Australian Studies were almost unanimously working on Patrick White. This was because, so they told me, it was impossible to get anything else in France. Three years later, when I was living in Paris on a research grant, I experienced the paucity of quality Australian literature for myself. Elaine Lewis had closed The Australian Bookshop on the LeftBank in the year 2000, and whilst other well-known English-language bookshops such as Shakespeare and Company, the San Francisco Bookshop, and the Abbey Bookshop were still there, the examples of Australian literature I could find were often mainstream texts from big publishers.In Paris, however, I was doing my own research and I didn't have to teach, develop course outlines, or set texts for student reading. When I moved to Berlin in 2006 to take up a post-doc in Australian Studies, the situation was quite different. Here I was confronted with the difficulty of compiling reading lists of texts by new Australian authors who I thought were engaging with language and culture in exciting, and often very experimental, ways; writers who compel us to think differently about Australia and the world. In Melbourne, as a doctoral candidate, I was heavily involved with the emerging writer's scene of young poets and novelists who would read their work at casual pub events, literary evenings and other informal gatherings. I spent some time editing the postgraduate literary journal entitled antiTHESIS and was involved in the formation of the spoken-word event series known as animal. I knew there was an exciting world of contemporary Australian writing out there and I wanted to share my passion for it with my students in Berlin. In hindsight perhaps I was a little naive to think that I could deliver what I considered to be some of the best of contemporary Australian writing to students on the other side of the world; although to be fair, one would think that this wouldn't be such a problem in a cultural capital such as Berlin-a city renowned for its vibrant experimental arts scene.The course I developed was titled Writing the Australian Imaginary. It aimed to examine different ways of imagining the Australian nation and what it meant to be Australian. I only set three titles: Kim Scott's Benang (FACP); Morgan Yasbincek's liv (FACP); and Brian Castro's Shanghai Dancing (Giramondo). From my experience with the Yasbincek title in an earlier aesthetics course, I knew the students would have difficulty finding the books. I therefore listed with the course description links to two Australian art-house bookshops, both of which offered online ordering systems, albeit somewhat user unfriendly for international customers. None of the students in this course chose to order with the Australian bookshops. Some went to Saint George's Bookshop in Prenzlauerberg (widely considered the best English-language bookshop in Berlin together with the large multi-level bookshop on Friedrichstrasse called Dussmann) but were dismayed to discover that the shop assistants had never heard of any of the authors and it would take six to eight weeks to get the title in. …

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