Tegan Bennett Daylight Thank You for the Opportunity to Comment on Our
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Tegan Bennett Daylight Thank you for the opportunity to comment on our creative and cultural institutions. This submission addresses the field of literature. I am writing simply to represent my experience, to help the committee consider life in the Australian arts, as well as the importance of literature to Australian society. I am a writer and academic; the author of three novels, a collection of short stories, several books of fiction for children and teenagers, and a recent collection of essays, The Details, published by Scribner Australia in July 2020. I began my connection to Australian literature as an unstoppable reader. Helen Garner, Ethel Turner and Tim Winton were the first Australian writers to transform – no, to form – my way of seeing our country. My parents’ shelves held books by Xavier Herbert, Patrick White, Jessica Anderson, David Malouf, Amy Witting, Norman Lindsay, Germaine Greer, Kate Grenville, Peter Carey, Miles Franklin, Tom Keneally. I read all of these authors as I was growing up. All of these writers have enabled me to have a complex and rich experience of my own country. I can’t imagine being Australian without them. I was first published by Random House in the late 1980s and have remained in print ever since. However, as is the case for most Australian writers, I am unable to support myself solely from sales of my books. Because of this I have been employed since the late 1980s in a variety of jobs. I hold several degrees: a B.A. in Arts/Communications from the University of Technology (a degree which spawned many significant arts practitioners including Sydney Theatre Company Executive Director Patrick McIntyre, television producer Todd Abbott and actor Hugh Jackman, not to mention Labor Deputy Leader Tania Plibersek). I also have a Master of Arts in Literature from the University of Sydney, and a Master of Creative Arts and a Doctorate of Creative Arts from UTS. I work as a book reviewer for journals as diverse as The Australian, Sydney Review of Books and the Guardian. For these journals I also write personal essays. I also work as an independent manuscript assessor, reading and assessing the work of a very diverse range of Australian writers, from those at the top of our profession, and those just beginning to be publicly noticed. I am occasionally employed by major Australian publishers in this role, although I have no permanent positions with any institution. I have worked and will continue to work as an assessor for the Literature Board of the Australia Council; this too is not permanent but rather intermittent employment. I run panels for writers’ festivals, most significantly the Sydney Writers’ Festival, which draws thousands of people to Sydney every year. I take positions on judging panels; in recent years I have been sitting on the judging panel for the Australian/Vogel Literary Award, administered by publisher Allen & Unwin. I run mentorships and masterclasses through cultural institutions such as Varuna, The Writers’ House and Writing NSW. Finally – and this is the main source of my income – I have worked since 1996 as a lecturer and tutor in Literature and Creative Writing at a wide variety of institutions. This is casual work. I have taught at UTS, AFTRS, Charles Sturt University, the University of Western Sydney and the University of Notre Dame. I have been the recipient of several grants from the Literature Board for the Australia Council. My last Australia Council grant was for $50 000, over 2 years, on which I paid around $12 000 tax. This left me with approximately $19 000 a year, money I used to buy out some of my work as a casual tutor at university. In simple terms, it bought me about two days a week to work at writing. I have a partner and two teenaged children. I live in Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains. We cannot afford to live in Sydney, where we both grew up. At the beginning of every financial year I sit down with my partner and we estimate my earnings, from all of the sources listed above. I generally earn between $40 000 and $50 000 a year. Since COVID it has become apparent that universities, already drastically underfunded, have lost students and as a result are cutting jobs. I am not sure whether my current teaching work is under direct threat – I can only wait and see. None of the positions I’ve described above are remunerated by the JobKeeper scheme. Still, though, my life is a privileged one, rich in freedoms and rich in my access to practitioners of all kinds of arts. I know musicians, composers, playwrights, arts administrators, screenwriters, actors, novelists, dancers, painters, poets, photographers, all of them recording and translating Australian experience into art. I also have a broad acquaintance, maintained over 25 years of tertiary teaching, with the young people of Australia. I’ve watched them change: seen their concerns and preoccupations shift, seen some difficulties recede and some grow significantly worse. Mine is a good life and most of the choices I’ve made are ones I wanted to make. I give my story simply to give a background to my most important statement. I want to show how important the arts are to Australia, and, most significantly, how important Australian literature is to me. I ask the committee to turn their minds, first, to those bookshelves in my childhood home. I ask them then to turn their minds to the bookshelves in their own homes. I ask them to consider the books they read to their children at night. Books like Possum Magic or The Magic Pudding, Dark Emu, Diary of a Wombat, Animalia, Edward the Emu, Are We There Yet? or Horrible Harriet. I ask them to consider who might have written these books. The answer is, of course, Australian writers; Mem Fox, Norman Lindsay, Bruce Pascoe, Jackie French, Graeme Base, Sheena Knowles, Alison Lester and Leigh Hobbs. Then I ask the committee to consider the current crisis in Australian literacy, reported in ever- more urgent tones by every major newspaper in the country. It seems everyone cares very much that our children are taught to read, and cares about how this is done. But what do we think our children might read, once they have learned to? Every year I say to my students that if they want to know Australian history, then they need to read Australian literature. No other form can capture the voice and attitudes of a time so well as a novel. If I want to know about growing up queer and migrant in Australia in the 1980s I read Christos Tsiolkas. If I want to know about the growth of Australian feminism – and contemporary attitudes to this – I read My Brilliant Career. No other form so faithfully – almost unconsciously – records the voices of an era. Every year, too, I teach Australian students who have never heard their own voices on the page, never heard the sound of themselves resonating across Australian culture, before reading. I have taught Indigenous students the work of Kim Scott, Tony Birch, Alexis Wright, Tara June Winch and David Unaipon. This very week a Fijian-Australian student said to me that she did not hear enough about the Polynesian experience: I was able to introduce her to the work of Winnie Dunn, and the movement of Pasifika women writers that is burgeoning through the Writing and Society Centre at the University of Western Sydney. Every year I meet Vietnamese-Australian students who find the work of Nam Le inspiring. But more than this: the Indigenous students read Nam Le and Winnie Dunn. The Anglo- Australian students read Kim Scott and Alexis Wright. The straight students read Christos Tsiolkas. Through literature my students broaden their access to their fellow Australians: reading and writing literature helps them become open-minded, generous participators in a proudly diverse culture. Everywhere, history is being recorded as well as actually made, day after day, by writers. Our lives are immeasurably enriched by this. Our writers are not. The average yearly income generated by an Australian writer (from their writing alone) is $12,900. (Source: ‘The Australian Book Industry: Authors, publishers and readers in a time of change’ Dr David Throsby, Macquarie University) If we do not support literature – if our Australian writers can earn only a tiny amount of their living wage from writing, and have to use most of their time finding other sources of work – how is Australian literature to survive? If we fail to properly fund the arts, we do not fund a conversation that saves lives, that opens minds, that broadens cultural connections, that makes us the richly diverse but single-mindedly generous country we are and should always be. If we turn our backs on the arts we make ourselves silent and stupid, thick-headed and dull. In his essay on cultural value, The Pie Chart of Happiness (https://www.sydneytheatre.com.au/magazine/posts/2017/april/the-pie-chart-of-happiness- patrick-mcintyre), the Sydney Theatre Company’s Patrick McIntyre finishes by quoting Brian Eno, who said, ‘You have to eat, for example, but you don’t have to invent Baked Alaska. We have to move, but we don’t have to do the rumba.’ McIntyre suggests that the impulse to make art, and the results of it – the food, the dance, the book – are true wellsprings of happiness. It feels vitally important, right now, in October 2020, that we fund happiness. .