He obviously has not seen the Americanised versions of Australian children’s picture books that I have seen and compared with their authentic Australian twins. These books were re-published in the US for the American market.

Benjamin Solah, it’s not just the weird spelling and the changing of Australian references that I’m angry about – it’s the changes the US publishers made to turn these fine stories into bland facsimilies of the Australian versions.

Now, if that’s what American parents prefer their children to read,that’s their problem – but it’s these versions that will be imported into this country if the Parallel Importations restrictions are lifted; and they will be in direct competition with the authentic Aust editions.

That’s what pisses me off most about this current threat to the Australian publishing industry. And also that people carry on about spending money on a book when they’d spend more on a meal in a restaurant without a whimper. Bah humbug!

Check out the new fight-back campaign http://savingaussiebooks.wordpress.com/

My assertion was simply from my observations. I have nothing to back it up.

However, I think it can be generally argued that having the general public read more is a GOOD thing, and I believe that PIRs work strongly against that.

Honestly, $30 for paperback (as is often charged in this country) is too much for many people. They see computer games, music, or movies as being better value.

See… two can play at that game.

Books are made more expensive by PIRs than otherwise. This causes people to buy less of them. Your assertion that ‘people will always buy books’ is meaningless. The number of books people buy, and how often they buy them, is dependant on a number of variables, of which price is one. The high price of books in this country (and yes, the price of books here is high) causes people to buy less of them. Anyone who believes otherwise is quite simply economically illiterate.

You also speak as though I’m the one who needs to prove some case. But the status quo is only maintained through protectionist coercive laws that make it illegal for books to be traded freely. I am simply advocating more freedom; something that the socialist intelligentsia despise.

I couldn’t care less about a ‘thriving local publishing industry of Australian stories in Australian English’. I only care about good authors being published, and I don’t really care where they’re from. If an author is good, they will find a publisher, irrespective of PIRs.

As for those who do value Australian literature for the sake of its Australian-ness, goody for them. They can go and buy some, and the proceeds will go to the author. No protectionism needed.

More broadly though, I think you’re wrong about there not being anything special about Australian writing. The point of any writer is their individual experiences, imagination and sensibility, and the experiences, imagination and sensibility of an Australian writer are necessarily different from those of an American or Argentinean writer. That’s true whether you’re an Anglo-Australian like me or a writer from a non-English speaking background like Christos Tsiolkas. Liikewise the experience of recent migrants is experience of migration to Australia, and is going to be different to the experience of migrants to America. The two aren’t interchangeable either – both Christos Tsiolkas and Jhumpa Lahiri are the children of migrants but their work and the experiences in which it’s founded are quite different.

I think the mistake you’re making is in assuming an argument for the particularity of national experience is the same as suggesting there’s a single way of being an Australian writer, or that Australian writers have to write about particular subjects. Indeed one of the joys of the last decade or so has been the way Australian writing has begun to look outwards, and to feel more confident about the range of subjects it can address. I’m with you every step of the way in being resistant to being ghettoized as an “Australian” writer, but as a writer I can’t deny my Australiannness (ambivalent as I often am about it) is part of who I am, and therefore part of why write and what I write about.

I’m tempted to say things might be different in the more internationalized genres in which you work, but I’m not sure I think they’re really as internationalized as that. Even in a field as globalized as SF, there’s a recognizable difference between British SF and American SF. And if we’re talking about crime fiction, the whole point of crime fiction is regional specificity – Peter Temple is one of the best crime writers working anywhere in the world today, but a lot of his genius lies in his ear for the rhythms of Australian speech, and his unsentimental grip on the uglier side of Australian culture (not bad for a bloke who actually comes from South Africa).

I also think Australian voices matter in a deeper way as well, because they help us see ourselves more clearly. I still remember discovering Peter Carey and David Malouf when I was about 18, and how liberating and transforming it was for me to begin to see Australia as a place that was interesting, and somewhere stories might come from. I’m not sure I would have become a writer without hearing those voices, and learning to think about Australia as a place worth writing about. And in the end that’s why we need Australian writers and Australian writing, because they show us who we are, and where we come from, and understanding those things is vital if we are going to exist in a larger world.

Why? I think this idea that Australian literature is somehow more valuable is bunk, that we need to be taught “Australian culture” whatever that is implies an underlying racism.

Migrant families won’t care whether or not their stories have kangaroos in them or not. I certainly don’t need to read things that reflect Australian culture and to paint all Australian writers with the same brush is problematic. We’re not all the same just because we happened to write our books within the same borders.

I certainly agree with you regarding people arguing for cultural nationalism. It’s a bad look and if people are going to be clear about this, we need to move away from these kinds of arguments.

Australian publishing is no better or worse for its ‘cultural value’ and I hope people wouldn’t just buy a book because it’s local. There are many Australian writers I would not buy, and there are many foreign writers I love.

I’m still formulating my ideas about this but am hostile to any campaign that aligns itself with nationalist arguments because I’m a writer of the world, not an Australian writer and you won’t see me flying our flag.

First – sure. As I agreed. But you don’t ‘create’ copyright. You create words. Copyright over them is created by inviolable international treaty. Its industrial fact has got nothing to do with your labors, government legislation, or publisher largesse. This matters because those in your camp are clearly of the view, one I think wrong, that ‘territorial copyright’ is a rights-component of ‘copyright’ that is similarly ‘created’ by PIR’s. We will have to disagree on this.

Second – if you want positive arguments for the abolition of PIR’s, mine abound: here, on threads at Crikey, at Claws. You could also read my PC submission, number DR432. It’s a bit rude, a little dated, too. When you ask why: “…Australian authors and publishers should enjoy less rights than their overseas counterparts” I recognise, again, that we are going to have to politely disagree (as above) , but when you write, to Simon H, of o/s contract-derived retail exclusion from Oz: “And it wouldn’t do anything to affect the problem for publishers here, since they’d never be able to buy rights with full confidence a deal wouldn’t get struck elsewhere sometime later without such a clause in it”, I simply suggest – as I have already done at Claws and Crikey – that Australian publishing put riders on their local contracts, too, requiring writers to insist on a ‘not for retail import/sale in Australia’ on any subsequent o/s contracts on the same material. I won’t outline here why I think this would be an eminently feasible and vastly more efficient and equatable mechanism for achieving for Oz publishing and writers what PIR’s so sloppily do now, with so many other downsides – we are discussing it in detail on the Claws thread if you are interested.

But it’s your ‘copyright’. You can frame contracts to achieve whatever you want, or can. Your negotiating heft derives from the heft of your product. When writers peel off a stock phrase like “the question of contracting rights is a complex one’, two thing occur to me. The first is to frown impatiently and mutter: ‘No, it’s not, James. Not really. You either sign a contract or you don’t.” The second is – just talking rhetoric – to wonder why this very good writer is suddenly blowing very ordinary chaff.

Third – I am well aware of Mike’s and Henry’s fine legacies. My admiration for them knows no earthly bounds. It was probably rude – and certainly blowsy rhetoric – to use words like ‘con’, but there’s altogether too much hollow fawning and platitudinous banality from the players in Oz Lit as it is, for nobodies like me to think we have any place or point adding to it. But sure, fair point on the ‘absurd’ hyperbole: I guess it’s not so much false consciousness I think they and et al are afflicted by: more the slightly/temporarily out-of-perspective fixation that arises from a long lifetime of tenaciously and honorably fighting the same defensive battle over and over again (when it was crucial), until one day you mount the barricades on exhausted auto-pilot, not quite realising that to the left and right of your legendary redoubt, there are no barricades remaining, and – what’s more – your defensive line is no longer a last stand at all, but the launching pad for a war-winning counter-attack. And former comrades-in-arms are five miles yonder into the enemy’s territory already. Alright, so that metaphor’s flogged dead…I just think it’s a terrible strategic error to be fixating on PIR’s at this happy moment in writerly history, is all I think. The last thing anyone should want is to migrate the current system of ‘territorial copyright’ into digi-cyberspace.

Imagine a landscape in which you leverage your copyright to ‘target’ your paying market with PR & marketing precision at last?

Four – James, I know I’m not a very likable person in these long threads I have an occasional habit of hijacking. My laborious mode and style is not something I can do much about, or really want to. Arguing this debate as a failed and failing writer is of course a bit like climbing nude into the ring with Mike Tyson. Easy enough to take cheap shots of the kind I’ve worn elsewhere, so thank you v. much for not offering any. Thank you also for the space and patience. We will have to disagree, I think. I may well be (more) wrong, and you may be (more) right, but I think this is the critical Ozlit debate of the hour, and if I don’t see it that way I feel the need to say as much. Good luck with your proper work.