Australian stories : books and reading in the nation

Just over a third of Australians also read books by or about Indigenous Australians for their own interest or pleasure. If this can be seen as an encouraging figure, it's also the case that in a list of twelve different kinds of books the Indigenous category ranked third last, above only sports books and romance fiction. Then again, books by or about Indigenous Australians would be much less visible to ordinary readers than these and many other kinds of books. These results are derived from the Australian Cultural Fields (ACF) project, an ongoing study of Australians' cultural tastes and participation, and in particular from a large-scale social survey conducted in 2015. The ACF project can be linked to two earlier: studies, the Australian Everyday Cultures Project and its publication Accounting far Tastes (Bennett, Frow and Emmison) from 1999 and the UK Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion project, which resulted in Culture, Class, Distinction (Bennett et al.) in 2009. All three can trace their origins to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, especially Distinction, his major work on class, education and taste. The earlier Australian and UK studies both surveyed reading habits across books, newspapers and magazines, but our focus, here is more on the nature and extent of people's engagement in 'book' culture' within either the domestic or public sphere. 'Thus we asked questions about knowledge of selected authors, preferences among a range of fictional and non-fiction genres, ways of obtaining books print and ebooks owned, and participation in a variety of activities such as reading book reviews, attending literary festivals, and being a member of a reading group. These measures of cultural knowledge, taste and participation are being mapped against a range of social and economic factors such as gender, education, age, place of residence, and occupational class. In this essay we investigate what the data tells us about national practices and tastes for books, and for Australian authors and writing in particular.