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.

If they are any of these workers and parents, the struggle intensifies further. If they are, in addition to all of this, primary carers of children or aged parents or adult children with problems or other dependants, the necessary sacrifices are often too big, too impossible, and the obstacles will prevent a great many talented writers from going on working. They will be forced simply to give up.

Practical costs

Luckily for us, unlike painters or filmmakers, writers’ production costs are very small. At the very least, we can produce our work with a pencil and paper. The major production costs for writers are research materials, quiet time and working space.

Very few writers live in a house large enough for space that allows quiet thinking time, let alone a garden or any other leafy buffer from neighbouring noise. A working day for me in inner Sydney, where I am incredibly privileged to have a mortgage on a house (made possible only through the personal generosity of friends in offering to co-purchase with me and my husband) is accompanied by high-decibel construction noise for WestConnex and Sydney Metro infrastructure, as well as a shopping centre construction, constant traffic, leaf blowers, shouting or violence from passers-by (there are many people living with mental illness and in poverty nearby), severe aircraft noise and all the other noise pollution of the inner city.

I mention this detail of my living arrangements, as a stupendously lucky writer, to highlight that the movie-scene fantasy of a writer sitting at an antique desk in a beautiful room staring through gauzy curtains into a peaceful garden is, for the vast majority of writers, just that: utterly, unattainably, fantastical. Dr Charlotte Wood AM – Creative & Cultural Industries & Institutions submission 6

Most of us, in fact, work at the kitchen table or in our bedrooms, on the couch or in cafes. Some have a dedicated working room, but it is often shared with spouses, housemates or school-aged children. Some go to a library to work, or to McDonalds in the early morning. Some don’t have their own computer, or their own mobile phone, but share these with other family members. A very, very few can afford to rent a separate working space away from the interruptions of home. I have mentored writers whose working space is a tiny table in a hallway of their house, or a desk in a cupboard.

Kate Grenville has spoken about writing in the car while waiting for her young kids at sporting events. Writers are incredibly adept at working anywhere – but you can imagine the interruptions to focus and concentration that comes from working in piecemeal ways at either end of a working day, in spaces completely unsuited to deep thinking and focused work. If you have kids, that time and space is even more squeezed.

Many writers have chronic health problems associated with poor working spaces and general stress – neck and back injuries and chronic pain, along with long term mental health challenges. I suspect very few have private health insurance, and a huge number carry HECS debt well into middle age. This debt will only last longer, now that humanities degrees have doubled in cost.

Other pressures

The constant interruption, financial stress, noise and other pressures faced by writers explain why they are so incredibly grateful when they are accepted for residencies at places like Varuna, the Writers’ House in the Blue Mountains and Bundanon Artists’ Centre in the Shoalhaven area of NSW. The volume and depth of work achievable in these places is staggering, and continuing funding for these institutions is crucial to the production of literature in this country.

Writers are astoundingly tough and resilient people, but we also suffer a great deal from depression and anxiety. Thinking of my own most difficult times in the past, and looking around at the writers I know of many different ages, it’s strikingly clear that most of this mental ill health comes from the economic strain under which they live. Dr Charlotte Wood AM – Creative & Cultural Industries & Institutions submission 7

Many writers are financially supported by their own partners, parents or families – a situation that is fortunate indeed, but often also highly stressful. Given the highly competitive world of publishing, it is difficult for a novice writer to feel their ambition is anything but ludicrous, and the generosity of partners or family in supporting those ambitions often causes intense guilt, relationship tensions and general household strain. In addition, many writers partner or live with other artists, themselves living in similarly stressful penury, and the strain is multiplied accordingly.

I don’t know a single writer (myself included) with a healthy or even adequate superannuation fund. Women especially have extremely low funds, or none at all.

The impact of public funding

‘Life-changing’ is the way writers often describe the receipt of one-off grants from public funding, from the Australia Council, the Copyright Agency or other bodies. Usually these grant amounts are pitiful compared to normal incomes – a grant might be $40,000 or $20,000 or $10,000 - but writers make that money last longer than seems humanly possible. They use it to buy child care for time to write. They use it to finally get a tooth filled, to buy food or pay the rent, keeping enough aside to buy a week or a month off work to write.

It must be noted that every cent of public funding for writers and all prizemoney (except the PM’s award) is also subject to income tax – so a $30,000 grant or prize soon shrinks. Income averaging benefits only a very few writers.

There are also agents’ fees of around 15 per cent to pay on any book earnings, if you are lucky enough to have an agent. If you are even luckier and have international publications secured by your Australian agent working with a sub-agent in the overseas territory (almost always necessary), 25 per cent of your income goes to the agents. This is not to whine about agents – they make very little money themselves and are essential and valiant protectors of writers’ rights and incomes. Nor do I wish to complain about the publishing industry, which is largely run by highly skilled and severely underpaid women. Nobody in the book world is rolling in cash. Dr Charlotte Wood AM – Creative & Cultural Industries & Institutions submission 8

Any public funding to writers is spent directly, totally and immediately in the local economy. No writer with a grant is hoarding money; they can’t afford to. I have known hundreds of writers, but not a single one possessed of the luxury of stocks, shares, other investment funds or investment property. Of all those I know, I can think of one aged over sixty with a paid-off mortgage. Everyone else is either (like me) mortgaged into very old age, or permanently renting with no hope of owning a home unless they inherit from their families. For many, especially first nations writers and those of immigrant backgrounds - the authors of exactly the stories we need to properly reflect the full reality of our national culture – the chance of such inheritance is non-existent, and in fact they will end up even more financially burdened by the need to care for ageing parents in future.

Impact of COVID 19

While the book industry appears to have recovered relatively well with some rise in fiction sales, this is generally for big-name authors with established readerships, of books published prior to this year and often for international authors, not Australian writers. The impact on sales of new books by early-career writers won’t be known until the next royalty period but we can expect it to be fairly dire. Anecdotal evidence from independent bookstores who have been running online launches and conversations is that sales for new authors are very much down. One well-established bookseller who has been running constant online events told me that, with a few surprising exceptions, event-related book sales are down by 90 per cent.

The impact of the pandemic on the income-earning capacity of writers in all their other jobs – the bar work and copywriting and Uber driving and teaching and so on – has been vast. For many writers, Jobkeeper has been a lifesaver (sometimes literally).

Three major income streams for writers have vanished almost entirely: events, freelance writing and teaching.

For many writers, public speaking at festivals, libraries, schools and corporate events is a solid income stream. With worldwide travel and event cancellation, not only have the paid speaking opportunities vanished, the chance to sell books at those events has also gone. In my Dr Charlotte Wood AM – Creative & Cultural Industries & Institutions submission 9 own case, an international book tour of eight weeks to promote my novel’s new publication in the UK, Europe and US, was cancelled and has probably affected sales in most of those territories as a result of cancelled media and bookstore events. Like many of my peers, I was booked to speak at 15 festivals this year in Australia and New Zealand, four of which went ahead prior to the pandemic and 11 of which were cancelled or changed to online versions (but mostly cancelled). My personal loss of income from festival gigs and attendant book sales was a minimum of $8000.

University teaching in creative writing and English literature degrees is now seriously unstable, and the next wave of economic disaster for writers will come in this area. With the doubling cost of humanities degrees, nobody knows what future enrolments will be. Almost all teaching staff are on casual contracts so they face the possibility of no work and no Jobkeeper next year. I don’t know what will happen to those people in first semester of 2021 – many have already lost their jobs entirely.

Freelance writing for general media, another income stream for fiction and non-fiction writers, has almost completely dried up. With the onset of COVID 19, advertising revenue plummeted, and budgets for freelancers – slender at the best of times - were frozen.

All of the above has been made much worse by the continuing vast inequity in funding available to literature through the Australia Council. Funding for the Major Performing Arts sector is quarantined from any of the cuts repeatedly made to the Council. The remaining funds are shared among all other art forms, but literature suffers the most.

According to the Australia Council annual report 2018/19, literature is the least funded art- form by dollar value other than Emerging and Experimental Arts in the contestable funding rounds, with $5.1 million given to literature. This is about half the spending on music ($10.6 million), theatre ($14.1 million) and visual arts ($12.7 million). Yet books inspire stories across all art-forms including screen, stage, opera and visual arts.

There was nothing in the Government’s $250 million COVID arts rescue package for writers. Literature is created by individuals, not organisations, and writers are very rarely associated with organisations except on a casual basis as event participants, workshop leaders etc. The fact that no funding goes to literature in the arts rescue package reflects a serious problem for Dr Charlotte Wood AM – Creative & Cultural Industries & Institutions submission 10 us: even people working in the arts which often rely on writers for ‘raw material’ don’t see us as part of their own industry.

A solution to this would be to vastly increase funding for the Australia Council, and mandate that literature receives an equitable portion of those funds. We need protected, quarantined, decent funds to go to writers, focusing on individual grants as much as (or more than) organisations.

Writers are crucial primary producers of Australian culture – our books are adapted for screen and film and stage and opera; we write fiction and screenplays, stage plays and short stories, poetry, novels and journalism. Without writers there is no publishing industry, no bookselling industry, there are no literary agents, no book reviewers or printers, no book and mixed arts festivals drawing tourism to regional areas out of season. Without writers there is no film industry, no theatre or television. With our imaginations and our intellects we create jobs of many different kinds in all these industries.

Primary producers in agriculture and mining are offered subsidies, incentives and business development opportunities, but none of that is available to us; instead we are offered the smallest possible – and diminishing – proportion of federal arts funding.

And yet - optimism!

So that’s all the dire news. Now here’s the good news, for our nation and our culture.

Australian literature is central to how we see ourselves and how we want the world to see us. We define ourselves through our favourite books’ evocations of landscape, history and character. The international success of our writers – the likes of Tom Kenneally, Patrick White, Richard Flanagan, Liane Moriarty, Shirley Hazzard, Jane Harper, Kate Grenville, Mem Fox, Gerald Murnane – inspires us and builds national pride.

Bookshops, literary festivals and libraries have created positive ways to rebuild communities affected by bushfires, drought and other hardships. Reading was one of the central ways by which Australians pulled through the tough times of COVID lockdowns. People turned to books to make sense of what was happening to us, or to escape it and be reminded that we Dr Charlotte Wood AM – Creative & Cultural Industries & Institutions submission 11 have survived worse times through our history. Bookshops delivered orders by bicycle, librarians left books on doorsteps and phoned their vulnerable library members to check on their welfare.

Literature is the most democratically available art form of all, in that you can partake of it in its pure, original form, for free (through libraries), anywhere you live. You can’t see the real Blue Poles unless you go to Canberra. But you can read the real, original A Fortunate Life or Possum Magic anywhere, anytime. This is indeed magical, and crucial.

Writers are superlatively creative, resilient workers and have much to offer in re-imagining a post-COVID world. All we need is some basic, sustained, protected, equitable financial support to do so.

Thanks so much for reading.

Dr Charlotte Wood AM www.charlottewood.com.au