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Dr Charlotte Wood AM – Creative & Cultural Industries & Institutions

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Dr Charlotte Wood AM – Creative & Cultural Industries & Institutions Dr Charlotte Wood AM – Creative & Cultural Industries & Institutions submission 1 Submission to the Inquiry of the Standing Committee on Communications and the Arts into Australia’s Creative and Cultural Industries and Institutions Dear Committee Members, Thank you for the opportunity to submit to this inquiry and describe in detail the life of a typical Australian writer in 2020. Writers are exceptionally flexible, entrepreneurial, energetic and resourceful workers. We can be considered primary producers for many diverse forms of the creative arts, from books to films, theatre, opera, television, games and other ‘products’ (although few of us would ever describe our art as a product, for its value lies beyond the purely economic). Public investment in funding for writers is exceptional value for money – apart from keeping poverty (just) at bay, it benefits the wider community as books and literature are proven to promote social cohesion and mental health, improve literacy and numeracy and have a powerful community-building function across all levels and regions of our nation and community. During our various pandemic lockdowns, people have turned to the art forms we make – especially books and television - for sustenance, connection, information and escape. Despite this, writers are in serious economic difficulty and we need your help. My background & credentials As the author of six novels and two books of non-fiction (with a third forthcoming in 2021), and the editor of two books of short fiction by other writers, I have been publishing books for 21 years. My latest novel, The Weekend, won the 2020 Australian Book Industry Award for Literary Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2020 Stella Prize, the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal and other prizes, as well as being longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. The novel has been a bestseller in Australia, the UK and Germany, and has recently been published in North America and Italy, with other European publications coming soon. Dr Charlotte Wood AM – Creative & Cultural Industries & Institutions submission 2 My previous novel The Natural Way of Things won the 2016 Stella Prize, the Indie Book of the Year and Novel of the Year and shared the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction. Last year I was named one of the Australian Financial Review’s 100 Women of Influence and was made a Member of the Order of Australia for significant services to literature. I hold three degrees, including two postgraduate degrees in Creative Writing – a MA in Creative Arts from the University of Technology and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of NSW. In 2016 I was the inaugural recipient of the Judy Harris Fellowship at the Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney, and in 2019-20 was the first writer in residence at the University of Notre Dame, Sydney. Among my non-fiction books is a collection of interviews about the creative process with Australian and NZ writers called The Writer’s Room and I produce a podcast of the same title now. In 2014-15 I was Chair of Arts Practice, Literature, at the Australia Council for the Arts. I have been an active member of Varuna, the Writer’s House, have taught writing at many levels - privately, at Varuna and state-based writers’ centres, and as an invited guest lecturer at many tertiary institutions in Australia and New Zealand. I have been a grants and residencies assessor for the Australia Council for the Arts, the Bundanon Artists in Residence program and Varuna, the Writers’ House. I am a board member of the Charles Perkins Centre Writer in Residence Fellowship at the University of Sydney, assessing applications for the lucrative $100,000 Judy Harris Fellowship. Over two decades, this combined experience has allowed me a deep understanding of how literary art is produced in Australia, and it’s from this perspective I’d like to offer a detailed picture of a typical writer’s life in 2020. Income from books Writers in Australia earn negligible income from sales of their books. Just a tiny handful of us earn as much as the average Australian wage from our writing. Only since the 2015 publication of The Natural Way of Things, my seventh book and a surprise bestseller, have I been able to make a living purely from my books. Prior to this my writing life resembled that of most of my peers: I was productive, resilient and imaginative, but my life was also stressful, exhausting, filled with financial anxiety and deep uncertainty Dr Charlotte Wood AM – Creative & Cultural Industries & Institutions submission 3 about the future. For the first 15 years of my publishing life I worked several poorly-paid part-time jobs at once to make ends meet, only just paying off a maxed-out credit card and other debts, was often behind in my tax returns and, in my early writing years, sometimes had to choose between having the phone or the electricity cut off for inability to pay the bill. The widely-quoted average income from books of just under $13,000 per annum includes writers of all types of books – including textbooks, cookbooks, sports books and so on. When we think of ‘the arts’ and books, the iconic Australian stories that have defined our culture in so many ways – the Cloud Streets and Too Much Lips and Jasper Jones’s and Secret Rivers and The Slaps, the Carpentarias and Narrow Road to the Deep Norths - we’re talking largely about literary fiction. In this literary genre, an author’s average annual income is even more shockingly low: around $4000 on 2008 figures. Between 2008 and 2015, the median creative income for writers fell by 33 per cent. (https://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/workspace/uploads/files/making-art-work-throsby- report-5a05106d0bb69.pdf) Many people believe writers are financially supported by their publishers, so it’s a surprise for them to learn that writers earn just 10 per cent of the cover price of a book (around $2.50 per new book sold). Experienced, prizewinning and highly respected writers are routinely paid advances of under $15,000 for a book that may have taken five years to write. Many extremely high profile and highly respected writers have struggled on or near the poverty line for years. Before he won the 2014 Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan was on the verge of leaving Tasmania to find work driving trucks in the northern Australian mining sector. Before she won a Copyright Agency fellowship and subsequently the Miles Franklin Award, Melissa Lucashenko had survived by being an Uber driver. Before renowned Indigenous poet Ali Cobby Eckermann won the internationally famous Windham-Campbell award in 2017, she was unemployed and living in a caravan in Adelaide. She told media the $215,000 prize money would allow her to reunite her family under one roof and give her hope of one day buying a house. Before Luke Davies won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2012, the now internationally sought- after, Academy-Award nominated screenwriter of Lion and other films was living in near- destitution in LA, trying to break into the film industry. Dr Charlotte Wood AM – Creative & Cultural Industries & Institutions submission 4 These stories are unusual only in that the writers have been public about their pre-win penury. I would guess that almost all winners of any literary prize live on or near the breadline for most of their working lives. The prizemoney I refer to ranges from around $60,000 to over $200,000. Of those prizes, only the Prime Minister’s Literary Award is tax free. All of these writers described their wins as ‘life-changing’, as was winning the Stella Prize of $50,000 for me, in 2016. For any Parliamentarian reading this, the idea of a one-off payment of $50,000 as a life- changing amount of money might be a bizarre notion. But for writers, it’s a bald fact. And most writers who win a prize will have that experience only once in their lives. Income from other sources Obviously, in order to survive, we writers do other income-earning work. But even combining all income sources, the median total gross income of writers in 2015 was $35,000. It may have dropped since then. Most writers I know have at least one and often three degrees. They are highly educated, highly motivated and highly skilled workers, but in order to make time to write they must accept work that is flexible, casual, part-time, freelance, poorly paid and precarious. We work in hospitality, in teaching (privately, in workshops and occasional classes as well as in universities and schools), in the endangered species of work known as freelance journalism (where pay rates have been dropping for decades), copywriting for corporates and community organisations. We work – when these jobs exist - as dishwashers in airline catering centres, behind cinema ticket counters, in supermarkets and call centres and shops and libraries, in women’s refuges, in hairdressers’ and on building sites. We repair bicycles for a living, deliver for Uber eats, drive Ubers and taxis and soft-drink delivery trucks. We study. And in the hours available to us, we write. Dr Charlotte Wood AM – Creative & Cultural Industries & Institutions submission 5 Some writers have better paid but more intellectually and emotionally demanding jobs – I know authors who are psychiatric nurses, lawyers, vets, doctors, psychiatrists. Most of those struggle to find time or energy to write at all. If they are any of these workers and writers of colour or living with disabilities and/or from cultural or economic backgrounds in which the idea of being a professional writer is alien or shameful, the barriers to writing are vastly greater.
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