IP eNews 48

I read with concern recently the news that Melbourne bookstore Collected Works may be forced to close its doors due to changes in the lease agreement for its store space on Swanston Street. For years, CW has been a literary icon in Melbourne, stocking the titles that the more mainstream bookshops won't, providing space for launches especially of new poetry titles and a sanctuary for lovers of literature to come to browse the latest releases.

A talented poet himself, Kris Hemensley, owner of CW, has always gone out of his way to support the national as well as the Melbourne writing community. I can recall at least one occasion when Kris opened the shop just for an IP launch on a Sunday. We were immensely grateful for that, and we hope that the literary community will repay Kris' selfless dedication by supporting CW in its hour of need. We need to keep CW open!

There's been much debate about the future of physical bookshops as more and more titles become available online and eBooks take a larger share of the publishing market. Is this further evidence that the physical bookshop is an endangered species? Perhaps. A lot depends on the marketplace itself and whether loyalty to physical bookshops means anything in the face of online availability and discounting.

If anything will save independent bookshops like CW, it will be people expressing their desire to preserve them by the most obvious way – doing business there on a regular basis, and encouraging others to do the same. Yes, you may save a few bucks by ordering that book online, but have you factored in the invisible costs of subjecting valuable enterprises like CW to a process of slow starvation? Think again!

As Director of an independent publishing house, I can certainly understand CW's plight. Many people pay lip service to the need to support our local authors and publishing industry – and then they go out and buy "best sellers" published by international companies from chain stores offering discounts. Perhaps they think our local industry will survive on dedication and the wish to preserving our cultural identity. They won't – not indefinitely.

We depend on independents like Collected Works to preserve a diversity of choice and to stock low volume work like poetry that the chain stores won't even consider. Just today, when I was visiting Kris at the store, a woman came up to the counter with a hefty hard back book that she'd found on the stacks. It didn't have a price on it, and it turned out it had been on the shelf for some years (compare that to the average shelf life of a book in the chain stores). Remarkably, the customer, recently from Ireland, was the grand niece of the author and was amazed that she'd found the book so far from home. Would that have happened in Borders?

Should we do something decisive to help Collected Works? Of course. IP is determined to do its part – with your help. From now until Christmas, we'll donate 20% of the GST-exclusive proceeds of all sales ordered by email to sales@ipoz.biz with Collected Works Appeal as your subject (see Your Deal for ordering details).

Consider ordering several books and using some as gifts over the holiday season. Don't wait until Christmas, though. Put your order in now so that Collected Works can have a happy holiday, too!

[Melbourne author Olwyn Conrau's memoir of the rougher side of life in the Big Smoke won the IP Picks 2010 Best Creative Non-FIction Award..]

OC: It was crucial to tell the story as honestly as possible from Oli's perspective. I didn't really think about it too much but followed my instinct mainly because it's hard to remember names from so long ago. I actually met up with someone from that era and I mentioned an incident which was used in the book, but we both remembered a different person being involved. So on that level, truth is subjective anyway.

OlwynC I did draw the line at inventing events for dramatic purposes. A good writer can make the most boring aspect sound interesting. So the events in the book did happen.

DO: For a memoir, the book is written much more in the mode of a novel. Do you prefer this to the more traditional, more confessional one of modern memoir?

OC: I guess it's more of an autobiographical novel and yes, I do prefer it. When I first started writing the book my main task was to get the voice right. I felt that being, at the time, close to middle-aged and writing from that perspective would turn it into something lame - someone looking back on a period in their life but without that raw energy of youth. I find many memoirs that are written in that confessional mode tend to be preachy. I just wanted to tell a story the way I felt it was back then and for younger readers to relate to that voice.

DO: As the story sits knee-deep in youth drug and partying culture of Melbourne, do you think people from elsewhere will still be able to identify with it?

OC: Absolutely. I'd say anyone, anywhere will relate to the story. It's a universal story and one that will never go away and probably never be resolved.

And there's this bizarre collective thought that it is only a certain type who get involved in this culture. But that just isn't the case.

DO: At the beginning of the book, Oli pities those young people who lead less dangerous and fun lives than her own. Do you still feel that all people should have a phase of going wild?

OC: Oli felt alienated throughout school and estranged from her peers. It's probably how most people feel at that age. But she had different tastes and interests to what her peers did and wasn't interested in pursuing the same suburban dreams. So when she fell in with this cool group of people who shared similar interests, life suddenly held possibility. It seemed new and exciting. Here was a group of eccentric, indiviual young people living life on their terms. Not settling for what 'the establishment' said they should settle for. It's a pretty amazing thing to be welcomed into.

I don't know if people should have a phase of going wild but I believe, for many, it's a natural progression to rebel.

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[Barbara's well-known for her meticulous research into historical topics. Her first book with IP was The Australia-First Movement, an exposé of the Ultra Right during the Second World War. The focus of her latest book is on the Intelligence community at the same time.]

DO: When did you first gain your interest in Intelligence?

BW: I think that I have always been interested in why things happen, not just in what happens. Knowledge is power, and knowledge BarbaraP

means information. Nationally, some of this information is furnished by Intelligence services operating in secret. Every country engages in this sort of activity, if it can, and within limits it is quite legitimate. So does every successful business enterprise and in a small way every individual. When it comes to the Intelligence services of countries, it is not an exaggeration to say that it can be a matter of national survival.

DO: Is it hard to find relevant documents to your case? Since some have not been released to the public, how do you read between the lines in documentation?

BW: The availability of documents is variable. Since the catalogues of the holdings of National Archives Australia have been made available on Internet, locating scattered material has become easier, and the digitisation of documents has also been advantageous. However, research of this nature is time-consuming and expensive. At the time of going to print, I don't think that any of my requests was still outstanding.

Filling in the gaps entails having wide background knowledge, and sometimes tracking down all the carbon copies of a document to see whether several screeners have made expungements in different places. Some dossiers on the Russian fascists contained quite silly expungements of material that was readily available elsewhere. I have never broken the law, or even bent it, to obtain information, but I have pushed the boundaries to the limit, and I am not going to reveal trade secrets on how to do this.

DO: Some means that ASIO adopted of gathering information for the source cases might have been illegal, either under the standards of today or under civilian standards of the time. Was ASIO justified in using such methods, in your opinion?

BW: In the first place, this book covers mainly the period between 1920 and 1947. ASIO did not exist then; it is involved only to the extent that it has become custodian of material created by other services. These were mainly the Commonwealth Investigation Branch and the Commonwealth Security Service. Although the Special Branches of State Police and Military Intelligence also collected information, their reports are difficult to access, except when they provided copies to the CIB or CSS.

In the second place, much of the information-gathering in the files consulted for this book took place during the war, and it was covered by emergency powers. Little of it was illegal, although of course it was clandestine. There was a period covering about 12-15 years when ASIO engaged in some illegal secret activities because it was denied the authority to carry out operations considered necessary, but that has nothing to do with this book.

DO: How many dangerous men did you consider on your shortlist before coming to those that you thought were dangerous enough to feature in the book?

BW: I had envisaged a total of ten sections in the book, but in the end they more or less

selected themselves. They had to be rather mysterious, so I rejected those whose activities had been covered adequately and fairly correctly by others, and also most politicians. Some politicians were more dangerous than any of the persons in this book, but they needed a different treatment, and in my intended next book a few of them will get this.

Some people in this book were not in fact dangerous: they looked that way, but they were too stupid to be useful to an enemy. Many of those concerned were under notice not only for suspected subversion or espionage, but also for other reasons. Some were involved in criminal activities that could not be pursued in court, while a lot had a questionable family background. I wonder whether this connection was intrinsic, or coincidental, or whether in my selection I was showing an unintended bias. I am not sure.

[Cynthia's forté is romantic fiction. A grandmother who thinks life may well begin at 70, she's been a darling of the media with revealing interviews on A Current Affair and Brisbane radio station 3BC.]

CL: Yes, certainly: and it is limited only by the state of one's health, one's physical capacities, and the breadth of one's imagination. It is probably true to say that each generation, in turn, entertains many misconceptions about previous generations, particularly those which still share this earth with them. But, none of us was born old, and most older generation CynthiaL

members have lived through the same sorts of experiences that younger people are now going through. The young did not invent sex, for example, and it is not their exclusive province of enjoyment or experimentation. We've all been there, and done that, in varying degrees, at some time or other, and many members of the older generations are still doing it, in some measure, whether or not the young like to think about that.

DO: Following on from the last question, is it quite an exciting life if it produces a book such as Facades? How much as been drawn from personal experiences?

CL: These are matters for me (and my husband of 50 years) to know, and for my readers to speculate about. But remember, too, what I said about imagination, in my answer to your previous question.

CL: I think, Teale, Simone's handsome, young lover – because he is young, handsome and virile. Not much conversation would be required!

DO: Which scenes are the most fun to write? D you imagine they'd also be the most fun to read?

CL: In Façades, I think I had most fun writing the 21st birthday party scene, especially Sasha's party-stopping little performance with one of her more exotic (and erotic!) gifts. That would be clos

ely followed by the lustful assignation between Lee and Nadine at The Misty Mountain Lodge. As for the reading, I cannot speak for readers, as everyone's tastes are different, but I think some might prefer one of Simone's sultry encounters with Teale,particularly the one that took place during the Braithwaites' garden party.

[Paul is a writer, author, engineer and general jack-of-all-trades living in Melbourne. Though he's been writing fiction and screenplays since the 80s, the action-packed sci-fi book Elvene is his first published novel]

DO: Sci-fi is generally seen as a genre for males, especially young ones: spanning early teens to twenty or so. Did you have this audience in mind when writing Elvene?

PM: I really didn't have any audience in mind when I wrote Elvene, except myself. This is the book that I'd like to read, and I think that's the approach one should take as a writer. I certainly didn't expect women readers to like it PaulM

as much as they do, but I think that's the result of a combination of a strong female protagonist and a naturalistic love story. Believe it or not, I never intended to write a love story, yet I think that's the book's greatest appeal, along with a driving suspenseful narrative in its second half. I expect teens would like it, especially male teens, but I would like to think that this is a sci-fi novel for people who don't normally read sci-fi, and feedback I've had to date supports that view.

DO: How much research did you have to put into the book? Which field or aspect took th emost studyng to get right?

PM: I subscribe to scientific magazines like New Scientist, Scientific American and COSMOS, and I read authors like Paul Davies, Roger Penrose and John Gribbin (all physicists). But the most difficult aspect of the story to research was not futuristic or technological at all; it was the navigation skills of the indigenous Micronesians of the Pacific region. Fortunately, I had a copy of David Turnbull's Mapping the World in the Mind: An Investigation of the Unwritten Knowledge of the Micronesian Navigators. I didn't tackle this aspect of the book for nearly a year because I knew it would be difficult to convey in a believable manner.

DO: In Elvene, the characters are split between coming from the Space Corps (a futuristic scion of our culture) and the Kiri (the tribal-living natives on the planet involved.) As neither of these groups has much to do with our modern-day society, was it difficult to write dialogue for them, considering they can't draw on the shared historic or cultural knowledge we have now?

PM: The most important aspect of dialogue is to engage the reader, so writing in an affected or pseudo-foreign 'voice' probably wouldn't work. If you look at something like Tolkein's Lord of the Rings, he created an Elven language but the dialogue is still written in a manner that sounds and feels familiar. I did the same, where I invented some words, especially for the Kiri, but still kept the dialogue 'natural' in feel. As a writer, one always writes dialogue from the point of view of the character as if you are inhabiting their mind, so you would never use a term or concept that they would be unfamiliar with. It was an interesting challenge writing Alfa's dialogue (the spaceship's computer) because I had to 'think' like him, yet it provided most of the few humorous interactions in the book.

DO: How do you find the balance between exposition and narrative when dealing with a world we're entirely unfamiliar with?

PM: The trick is to give exposition to the

characters, but in a way that doesn't read like exposition. So if you have a character, like Elvene, who is visiting a strange and unfamiliar world, we literally see it and interpret it through her eyes and senses. The mind works in an interesting way, in that we can only understand new knowledge by integrating it into existing knowledge, which is why a dictionary can only explain an unfamiliar word using words one already knows. Therefore, in sci-fi, you need to describe landscapes, objects, creatures and persons that subconsciously reference similar events and objects in our world that the reader is already familiar with. For example, I created creatures that fly in the air with tentacles hanging down like giant aerial jelly fish. The reader would axiomatically make that association even though I didn't describe them that way.