Culture

A Policy of Splendid Isolation

The tension between British and Australian publishers has long been a central thesis of antipodean print culture histories about the early twentieth century, particularly in relation to Angus & Robertson whom British publishers looked upon with some unease. However, John Barnes in arguing that the “model of Australian creativity and originality unappreciated and resisted by London publishers has been generally accepted”, demonstrates the utility of questioning this history by revealing the readiness of some British publishers (like Blackwood, Duckworth and Jonathon Cape) to contribute “significantly towards the beginnings of an [Australian] national literature”. Similarly, though the archival record chronicles a certain amount of antagonism towards Angus & Robertson and that British publishers as a collective actively made the path of an Australian publisher more difficult through confirming agreements that froze out opposition, pre-Second World War documents also reveal an attempt to create a co-operative “axis” between Angus & Robertson in Sydney and George G Harrap and Co in London, with the Australasian Publishing Co (who was considered “a part of the Harrap organisation”) as sales representative to both. Their collective aim, to quote Walter Harrap, was to “work closely in harmony but yet as distinct entities”. The Australian market might have been perceived to be the “special preserve” of some British publishers but in the late 1930s Harrap took a broader view that Angus & Robertson could be “used in an intelligent way as part of one huge machine whose object it is to increase the sale of books in the English language”.

Conscious of how the Australian and British book trade might react, Walter Harrap, in writing to Stanley Bartlett of the Australasian Publishing Co about his London-based discussions with Angus & Robertson publisher George Ferguson, remarked that “a copy of this letter will be given to Mr Ferguson but it will not be seen by anyone and will be destroyed when he has read it”. Fortunately, copies of these personal discussions survive in the Mitchell Library and thus this paper will briefly trace Angus & Robertson’s negotiations within the “axis” and the broader issues confronting an Australian company which sought to become a publisher of consequence within early twentieth-century English-speaking markets. Because the production and selling of the written word “transgresses the boundary between the incommensurable sacred and the marketable profane” – with books often the centrepiece for arguments about literary merit, national representation and commercialism – publishing company histories can provide useful case studies that join together economic, social, cultural and political tensions. My intention therefore is not to contradict the established history of Australian publishers struggling to develop during the early twentieth century within “the framework of old imperial connections” nor is it to recuperate the reputation of British publishers in Australian print cultures studies. Rather my aim is to complicate it through exploring the ways in which some Australian companies actively sought out “new imperial connections” during the pre-Second World War period. On the one hand, the local industry is indeed characterised by a sense of exasperation at Australia continuing after Federation to be regarded as “an appendage of Great Britain” and, according to Martyn Lyons, “as a huge continental extension of a typical British circulating library”. Yet on the other hand, in some quarters the industry is energised by the potential opportunities afforded through negotiation with London publishers in placing Australian books “behind the lines” and the possibilities of establishing an Australian export market, what Richard Nile and David Walker refer to as “the complex art of owning and disowning London, of courting its influence and resenting its power” …

Jason Ensor, “A Policy of Splendid Isolation: Angus & Robertson, George G Harrap and the politics of co-operation in the Australian book trade during the late 1930s”, Script & Print 34.1, Burwood, Victoria: Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand (BSANZ), 2010.