La Trobe University Press: Celebrating Five Years

Frank Bongiorno AM

Professor of History at the Australian National University and Distinguished Fellow, Whitlam Institute, Western Sydney University

La Trobe University Press landed at a time when debate about university presses and scholarly publishing were in an intense phase. Melbourne University Publishing, under Louise Adler, was pursuing one model: the publication of some traditional scholarly books, often low-key, alongside a rather more flamboyantly promoted list of popular works by journalists, politicians and others designed to garner media attention and find a market among the general reader. The aim, it was said, was to be a player in contemporary debate.

That was one intelligent answer to the question of what an academic press might do in the modern era. The University of New South Wales Press went some way along this path, too, although not quite as far as Adler when it established its NewSouth imprint. Another answer was offered by Monash, which pursued a more traditional pathway of academic publishing – leavened by some popular biographies – all under the wing of the university library. Within the library was where the revived ANU Press – initially ANU E-Press – also did its business but unlike Monash, it made open access publishing its business. Similar outfits emerged elsewhere but did not always survive. Others, such as the revived Sydney University Press, continues its work today.

That was the rather unsettled, complicated, even bewildering university publishing landscape in which La Trobe University Press took its place five years ago. One pattern, clear enough, was a convergence of what some called ‘academic’ publishing with ‘commercial’ or ‘trade’ publishing. The terms, frankly, looked increasingly redundant, the distinctions unreal. There was movement on both sides of what now seems a very ill-defined boundary – it was rather more like a borderland or contact zone.

University presses were necessarily looking for general readers, not only to make their books pay, but also because there was an intrinsic good in producing books with impact beyond ‘college walls’, as Henry Lawson disparagingly called them. Meanwhile, commercial or trade publishers were producing books that still had all of the hallmarks of what most would recognise as a scholarly work, while also seeking to avoid academic jargon, abstract theorisation and what Black Inc.’s Chris Feik – I believe he credits Donald Horne with the phrase – calls ‘throat clearing’: that is, verbiage that avoids getting down to the main event.

La Trobe University Press, then, offered a different answer from any of those I’ve already mentioned. La Trobe University, under Vice Chancellor John Dewar, partnered with Morry Schwartz and Black Inc., to create a new imprint that would rely on Black Inc.’s in-house expertise and distribution networks to produce books that combined scholarly rigour with a capacity to reach the general reader and help to provoke and influence public debate. The result is a diverse, rich list of about fifty works.

Many, but not all, of the authors are academics. There are a couple of serving politicians, Andrew Leigh and Daniel Mulino – even if both have PhDs in economics – and there are authors whose careers have taken in both academia and government: Ross Garnaut, Hugh White, Kate Auty, Rory Medcalf and the late Allan Gyngell.

There is a ‘selected writings’ series taking in authors such as Donald Horne, Judith Wright, Inga Clendinnen, Hugh Stretton and George Seddon. All were leading public intellectuals in their time. Their writings are given new life here, now accessible to new and younger audiences.

Yet there are also first-time authors in the list, such as Dominic Kelly, on Political Troglodytes and Economic Lunatics: The Hard Right in Australia and Ryan Cropp on Donald Horne: A Life in the Lucky Country. Both began their lives as PhD theses. Neither read that way in book form. There are works of biography, of history, and of international relations, studies of transformative technologies such as artificial intelligence on which Toby Walsh has written prolifically, but also books on law and economics, pianos and prostitutes, consultancies and courting.

Unsurprisingly, for a Press that is engaging with the most pressing issues of our times, there are several books that are about, or deal substantially, with China. Some have explored the oppression of First Nations people: for example, Russell Marks’s account of the most incarcerated people in the world and Kate Auty’s on the Forest River massacre in Western Australia’s Kimberley.

Among the earliest books was a history of La Trobe University itself, From the Paddock to the Agora: Fifty Years of La Trobe University. This effort kept Gerard Henderson busy for some time, via several meaty pronouncements concerning his recollection of the luncheon arrangements in the politics department at La Trobe in the 1970s. This important matter, I fear, could be revived on any Friday afternoon to come, when Gerard sends out his Media Watch Dog blog from the Sydney Institute. Perhaps this occasion tonight will give that great Prandial Scandal, as I like to call it, new life.

Let me say a little about my own experience of the Press. Of course, I have enjoyed reading many of the titles, occasionally writing reviews, and in a couple of cases providing endorsements – most recently for Alecia Simmonds’s fine study of breach of promise cases,
Courting: An Intimate History of Love and the Law. I am also a La Trobe author, of Dreamers and Schemers: A Political History of Australia. Chris Feik and his team again brought the same degree of intelligence, care, encouragement and professionalism to which I was already accustomed as a Black Inc. author on two occasions.

If I may be allowed a personal note, I owe Black Inc., and now La Trobe, an enormous debt. They changed me as a historian, giving me the confidence to imagine that I might write books that people would actually want to read. And they tutored me in how to do it: they did so always gently and were always respectful of what I had to bring to the table, however flawed, and however limited.

You might think that an odd claim. Surely any historian would write, or at least try to write, books that people might want to read. And you might imagine that all those years of training involved in writing a PhD, and then working in departments alongside other, more experienced historians, would foster both the aspiration and the ability. The answer to that is an ambivalent ‘maybe’, but too often it is a flat ‘no’.

So, let me disclose the Australian university system’s dirty little secret. And it is a kind of secret, in the sense that it is little talked about outside academic circles and little known beyond those ‘college walls’. The reticence is understandable because, to be honest, it’s all a bit embarrassing.

So here it is: many of the people who call the shots in Australian universities don’t really care all that much if anyone reads the books that their academics write. Some university managers, in fact, do their best to prevent academics from writing books that anyone will want to read.

You see, according to one widely held view in Australian academia, the only publishers worth approaching when you have a draft manuscript are ‘overseas’. In reality, of course, they don’t really mean ‘overseas’ in general. They mean a handful of academic presses in Britain and the United States and if they won’t have you, one of the commercial publishers whose books look like they’ve just come off the assembly line of a Soviet tractor factory during the later Brezhnev era. The book will could cost anywhere between $100 and $300, guaranteeing that almost no one without access to a university library catalogue, and therefore possibly an e-book, will read it. It is unlikely to be reviewed in any Australian newspaper or magazine and will appear in no bookshop.

In such ways, universities are among the last bastions of the cultural cringe in Australia. The upside, however, is that it might help you get a job, a promotion or a research grant. Every
cloud has a silver lining.

Now, we cannot fairly criticise academics – and especially not those early in their career – when they play this game because they really have little choice. Nor are their mentors and advisers to be blamed if they advise younger scholars to seek such an avenue for publication in the interests of building a career. But that is still the country’s loss. It is therefore heartening that many young scholars are appropriately cynical about the standards of excellence being maintained by many university gatekeepers. They are seeking out publishing opportunities that will allow them to be taken seriously in their own country as contributors to public culture. And many are looking hopefully to La Trobe University Press as among the most attractive options.

And how fitting it is that La Trobe University itself should be challenging what I have treated here as a reinvigorated cultural cringe. This is a university that has long taken seriously its role as a contributor to public culture. Most authors rather like prizes but few of us can seriously aspire to the Pulitzer that Rhys Isaac won. Many of those academics who are familiar names to us because of their role as public intellectuals – John Hirst, Inga Clendinnen, Judith Brett and Robert Manne – have been closely associated with Black Inc. and now, with La Trobe University Press. It is a tradition continued by our chair this evening, Professor Clare Wright, whose formal title says it all: ‘Professor of Public Engagement’.

The great achievement of La Trobe University Press is that it has provided an opportunity for all its authors – both the living and the dead – to be Professors of Public Engagement. So, I end by congratulating both La Trobe University and Black Inc. for their achievement over these five very challenging years for Australian publishing. In particular, congratulations to the editorial board of Robert Manne, Elizabeth Finkel, Morry Schwartz and Chris Feik; to Chris as Publishing Director, and the team that works with him; and to Morry for all he does for Australian publishing and public culture in this country.