A D Hope, Patrick White, Judith Wright, and … Les Murray, and … Peter Carey, and …, well give or take a couple of more names and that’s Australian literature for most of us. But how about this: "Nearly 7000 people are employed (in Australia) as authors", and if you thought that they are all there for the love of it, think again because "Literature occupations received higher median incomes than average". These are some of the interesting factoids cited by Christine Gillespie, a visiting Australian writer, during a talk organized by IACLALS on 25 Sep 2000 at IACIS (Indo-American Center for International Studies, formerly ASRC), Hyderabad. Gillespie, whose poetry and short fiction is also published in Indian literary magazines, was in India to research on a novel set in South/India, before taking up her assignment as ‘Asialink Literature Resident’ in Malaysia.

Speaking on "The Writing World in Australia: a Small Pond?", Gillespie described the various facets of the Australian writing scene—writers, readers, publishers, critics, patrons—with the help of the findings of the "Australia Council/Saatchi and Saatchi (2000)" study on "Australians and the Arts". Like all ‘empirical’ studies this one too had some amusing statistics. For instance, if you thought that the most creative thing that the Australians do is to play cricket (or hunt crocodiles, depending on your myth source), it comes as a surprise that nearly 27% of the respondents engaged in creative writing either for personal enjoyment (18%), or for the enjoyment of others (9%)—compared to 3-4% who drew, painted, played music or made crafts. What is even more unbelievable is that creative writing emerges as a more popular way of participating in arts than attending a movie theatre (16%). Given this high incidence of creative writing, there are as many writers in Australia as there are readers, if not more: for the nearly 7000 employed as authors, there are only 4000–5000 readers for a first-time literary novel, and 5000–12000 for a prize-winning one. And yet Australians spend a lot, no not on beer alone, but on books: the household expenditure on books is an impressive $ 1.13 billion.

But the focus of Gillespie’s talk was not on these facts but on fiction, particularly by those not-yet-canonical writers whose work should be better known in India. Roberta Sykes, the black Australian writer whose three-part autobiography Snake Cradle (1997-) created literary waves; Kim Scott, the Aboriginal writer whose first novel Benang: From the Heart won the Miles Franklin Award 2000; Dorothy Porter, the author of a novel in verse The Monkey’s Mask (1995); and the second generation Holocaust survivor, Lily Brett were among the writers discussed by Gillespie.

This informative talk—organized at short notice but surprisingly well-attended—was coordinated by Bala Kothandaraman, and among those present were Iaclals members Amritjit Singh, Meenakshi Mukherjee, C Vijayasree, and T Vijay Kumar.