The novel, the implicated reader and Australian literary cultures, 1950-2008

Across countless acts of sustained creativity that can and do take years to perform, and via reading habits, patterns of library usage and book-buying, Australians have established an intimate relationship with the novel that has not been extended on the same scale or in similar manner to other literary forms. Given these patterns of production and consumption, which have been remarkably consistent across more than 100 years, there seems little to dispute the assertion that, despite the often challenging conditions of writing and publication, the novel is Australia's essential literary form. Its centrality to literary culture has continued through many changes in tastes, technologies and markets into the twentieth-first century. Between 1900 and 1969 more than 5000 Australian novels were published for the first time in print runs ranging from the hundreds through to the tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands. Poetry, short fiction and drama did not achieve anywhere near these figures either in terms of published titles, sales or implied readerships. New novel titles doubled again between 1970 and 2000, with more than 15000 published to 2000.