Rare books? : the divided field of reading and book culture in contemporary Australia

This paper investigates Australians’ reading tastes and engagement with books and book culture. We examine data from the Australian Cultural Fields survey for evidence of a ‘reading class’ in contemporary Australia. The space of Australian reading as illustrated by multiple correspondence analysis shows demarcated spaces of reading engagement and disengagement, zones of consuming fiction and non-fiction and varying levels of involvement with book culture that map onto socio-economic variables of gender, age, level of education and occupational class. Using cluster analysis, we delineate five groups in Australia in relation to books and reading: non-readers/non-participants, restricted reading, young readers, popular readers and invested readers. These findings largely support the argument that there is an Australian reading class – invested readers – which is rich in cultural capital as it is defined in large part by level of education and occupational class status. There is also evidence of reading ‘interest groups’ – young readers and popular readers. The discrete tastes and practices of these sectioned-off cohorts suggest that cultural capital is not as strong a rationale for the involvement of these groups in books and reading as it is for the reading class.