Publishing from the provinces

Though I have called my lecture ‘Publishing from the Provinces’ I don’t intend to refer much to the most obvious implication of my title, which is that all Australian publishing is necessarily ‘from the provinces’, given that we operate at a great distance from the centres of English-language publishing in London and New York, and from the foreign-language publishing centres in Europe. We are interested in their books, but alas, they are not all that interested in ours. No, the province I have in mind is even more remote, a province within or beyond the provinces, the place occupied by literature in Australia, at the far edge of trade publishing, or as a barely visible enclave within it, its titles scarcely known to the general reader, and bought by few, its existence dependent on what is more like a subsistence economy than the profit-driven commercial economies of the multinationals and larger independents that dominate our publishing landscape.