stuff 'n other stuff

One aspect of life in Australia is the domination of overseas anglophone media. Our bookshops are full of books by overseas authors, our tv of overseas shows, all reviewed in our newspapers, which also recycle work by by overseas reviewers.

Now if we really were just a ‘Hot Britain’ or a ‘Hot Canada’ this probably wouldn’t matter. But of course we’re not. We’re 24 million people on a hot dry continent on the dark side of the world, and a quarter of us came from somewhere else, and most of us live in one of the five or six big cities.

And this makes us unique. We live on the most different, the most alien of the continents other than Antarctica, with strange vegetation and stranger animals, seasons that are six months out of sync with the northern hemisphere.

We are, in effect, a suburban version of Mars. And you would expect that this would give rise to some pretty unique writing, and at 24 million, we’d have a strong enough voice to be heard.

Not a bit of it. Our literary giants have mostly escaped to the north to pursue their careers there, and our standard run of the mill working writers find their voices drowned by the northern hemisphere publishing machine.

I’d have thought we’d have had a healthy range of crime fiction telling ourselves grim stories about bushrangers and colonial life, or about the various suburban mafias that flourish among migrant communities in the outer suburbs of our cities.

Not a bit of it. If it exists, I should have found it by now.

Which is kind of curious. Crime fiction are the stories we tell ourselves about what’s bad in our society, stories about corruption, stories about the dark places we’d rather not go.

And then, in a strange random intersection I cam across our new science fiction writing. Now science fiction is something I’m over. From the age of about twelve to the age of about forty I read science fiction obsessively, though not exclusively.

The golden age greats, cyberpunk and the rest, I read them all. Dystopias and utopias all. Growing up in the cold war spending afternoons lazily watching airforce jets practise for armageddon, the grim dystopian stories seemed to make sense and describe a possible future.

If crime fiction describes who we are, including the unpleasant bits, science fiction describes who we seek, or fear, we will become. And strangely even fantasy writing can fill that role. After all Dracula can be read as story of scientific progress and advancement defeating an old and alien evil.

And then I happened across two collections of Australian science fiction/science fantasy stories by two different writers, one bought a light relief to read on the interminable country train to Melbourne, the other bought because it had the word ‘Roman’ in the title and I’ve always had a soft spot for stories of classical times.

And they were different, original and reflected that we are a suburban version of Mars, or a disparate group of city states pretending to be a single polity or whatever.

Science fiction, which allows us to invent the future, lets us tell stories about who we are and who, or what we might become …

I’ve been rereading Charles Miller’s The Lunatic Express, which is ostensibly a history of the building of what is now the Mombasa Nairobi railway, but is much more than that – essentially a history of the early days of British involvement, and latterly, colonialism in East Africa.

In the book, Miller mentions the off the wall hypothesis that the Masai are the descendants of a lost Roman legion, the basis of which seems to be

• warriors wear red cloaks
• warriors carry short swords
• warriors use a battle formation akin to the testudo

and of course three coincidences do not a hypothesis make. In fact the idea seems to be on the level of Howard Dubs’ hypothesis that the population of Liqian in descended from prisoners taken after Crassus’s disastrous foray into Parthia.

As it is the Masai/lost legion hypothesis probably owes more to nineteenth century racial prejudice and a misplaced belief in European exceptionalism than solid facts.

In fact the most interesting thing about the hypothesis is that a google search produces few if any references to the hypothesis, and what it does turn up seem (to me) to be references or quotes from Miller’s book, which has an infuriating footnoteless index.

Miller was clearly well read and well versed in East African history – I doubt he invented the existence of the hypothesis, but where did it come from ?

[update]

I’m still no closer to finding where the idea came from – I suspect some nineteenth century traveller with a classical education and a set of imperialist prejudices, but I can think we can confidently say that the hypothesis is a pile of the proverbial.

Masai oral histories place their origin to somewhere in the Turkana valley around the year 1500 when they coalesced out of other tribal groups. DNA studies show that the Masai, unlike other closely related groups such as the Samburu have had repeated admixtures with Cushitic speaking peoples from what is now Somalia and Ethiopia, but with no serious evidence of mixing with ethnic groups from elsewhere.

Quite some time ago, we took a long trip out round by Grenfell to look at some sites associated with the bushranger Ben Hall.

Well happenstance is a wonderful thing. Yesterday on our way back from Canberra we stopped in Jugiong to go to the loo and eat lunch in the park, as we often do, but as it was a hot day I parked under a big pine tree next to a modern bush style sculpture of a nineteenth century trooper and his horse.

And of course, I read the inscription, and it turned out to a monument to Edmund Parry, a police sergeant was who was killed in a fracas with Ben Hall and his gang when they held up the mail coach in Jugiong in 1864.

Apart from showing the lawlessness of the times, it also shows quite how far bushrangers ranged ….

despite all the years I worked for ANU, I never once visited the Classics Museum.
Well, today I did –  it’s a nice but small collection of Greek and Roman pottery, some rather nice Roman glass, the inevitable selection of coins, as well as a couple of later Roman grave markers, some statuary and a few papyrus fragments and a nice bit of Coptic textile.
Very much a cabinet of curiosities rather then a full blown museum, but nevertheless, if you are in Canberra somewhere near ANU, it is worth twenty minutes or so for a short visit …

• Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_National_University_Classics_Museum

In 1876, Turgenev wrote a poem Croquet in Windsor about the Bulgarian atrocities in which he imagines Queen Victoria watching a croquet game at Windsor in which the balls were the heads of massacred bulgarian christians.

A very powerful image, and one reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland.

Alice in Wonderland was first published in 1865 in English, a language Turgenev was less familiar with, despite his several visits to England, and not published in Russian until 1879 as Sonya in a kingdom of wonder.

However Turgenev was familar with French and published his own translation in French of Croquet in Windsor in Le Figaro, so is it possible that he had read and enjoyed Alice in Wonderland, which first appeared in French in 1869?

In Australia, we have a system whereby if a local publisher acquires the rights to a book and publishes an Australian edition, distributors are barred from selling overseas editions, except as remainders or as second hand books.

This is supposed to protect the local publishing industry and (hopefully) provide a platform for Australian authors to get published by ensuring we maintain a local publishing industry.

Protectionism with utterly laudable aims, but in practice completely broken. Ebooks are outside of this meaning that they are significantly cheaper.

More significantly the rise of global suppliers has led to the lunacy by which I can purchase an Australian book by an Australian author, printed in Australia, from the UK for 25% less than the ‘special online price’ from the publishers own website.

Such a differential defies all logic – how can it be possible for a UK book distributor to import books from Australia, warehouse them, and sell them to BookDepository, who then mail them to customers in Australia for 25% less than for the publisher to sell them direct.

It’s more than different tax regimes allowing a modest variation in the sticker price it’s 25%.

Second hand books are another case in point.

While we may not like the rise of these big second hand book barns that stock everything, and yearn for the days of little specialist second had booksellers, we’ve all got to admit that second hand book barns are convenient and useful

They’re also cheap. Which leads to another puzzle. I buy a lot of history and classics paperbacks, the history being mostly nineteenth and early twentieth century history. Usually these books cost a couple of dollars at most through AbeBooks and invariably come from these large second hand operations in the UK (and occasionally the USA). Never Australia.

While we know that Australia Post charges over the odds to send packages – about nine bucks for a paperback book, that’s not so different to the international postage charges from the UK or Ireland, yet Australian second hand book sellers either havn’t the scale or the stock and are simply not competitive pricewise.

Now people are not stupid. If I can work this out, other people can which will mean that

• other people will also be buying direct from overseas
• the grey import ban will simply collapse
• Australian publishers will lose any financial benefit from being able to publish local editions of popular books
• Australian authors will lose a local publication platform

and of course, the second hand market will cease to be in any way profitable.

I don’t have an answer, except to say that we can’t continue as we are. Globalisation has done for that, just as it did for the car industry.

A mix of electronic publication plus a bit of print on demand might do it, but then we have to contend with Amazon’s stranglehold on the ebook market.

As I said, I have no answer, but we do need a platform for Australian writing that is sustainable that allows us to tell ourselves stories about ourselves and how we live on this big dry red continent …