#7: Is Brisbane A Literary City?
If I asked you to think of a ‘literary city’, where would your mind go?
Maybe London, in which just the small district of Bloomsbury once housed Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Dorothy L. Sayers, and William Butler Yeats?
Or Oxford, the university town where J. R. R. Tolkein and C. S. Lewis found their feet?
Or New York City, where three of the
‘big five’ publishing houses are headquartered?
Or would you think of a
UNESCO City of Literature – one of the cities which has made a bid for the UN to promote their literary arts scene?
We have one in Australia. No prizes for guessing where (Naarm/Melbourne).
Meanjin/Magandjin is
not included in the UNESCO Creative Cities initiative, but I want to argue for our place as a ‘literary city’ in maybe a less official capacity. Here’s my pitch:
1. Brisbane Writers Festival is the longest-running writers festival in Australia
Brisbane Writers Festival, hosted annually at the State Library of Queensland,
is over 200 years old. When celebrating BWF’s 200-year anniversary in 2022, CEO Sarah Runcie noted the “culturally valuable and unique” scene in Meanjin/Magandjin where “you can hardly run out of talent”.
The State Library also hosted the now-defunct Queensland Poetry Festival, while this year’s Brisbane Festival Storytelling program includes
eight events and Anywhere Festival has staged nearly
1,000 productions over its 14-year life so far.
2. The Avid Reader is Australia’s favourite bookshop
This independent bookstore in West End
won the 2021 Bookshop of the Year award at the Australian Book Industry Awards, and its owner Fiona Stager this year was awarded the ABIA’s
Lloyd O’Neil award for “fostering a vibrant literary community in Brisbane”.
The Avid Reader is the jewel of Boundary Street, along with its sister bookstore Where The Wild Things Are and friendly rival Bent Books. For those seeking independent bookstores a bit further out, Books@Stones down in (you guessed it) Stones Corner
hosts a monthly poetry night, and Harry Hartog opened in Carindale just a few years ago.
3. We’re home to Australia’s darling writers
If you can think of an Australian author, I swear there’s at least a one-in-three chance they’re from Meanjin/Magandjin. Writers from our little-city-that-could are over-represented in our own and the world’s view of Australian literature, and that’s because we’re
good.
Trent Dalton, of
Boy Swallows Universe
fame, grew up on the West side. Former
7:30
anchor and
Any Ordinary Day
author Leigh Sales
went to the Queensland University of Technology. Kim Wilkins, the MVP of Australian fantasy,
teaches at the University of Queensland. We have Benjamin Law. We have Nick Earls. We have Rae White. We have Melissa Lucashenko. Are you kidding me? We’re unbeatable.
4. We have a fledgeling publishing scene
During my master’s, my university mates and I were repeatedly told we should move to Sydney if we wanted to get into publishing. Sydney hosts the Australian offices belonging to the ‘big five’, they said. Our literary publishing scene is dominated by the University of Queensland Press, they said, with only a textbook publisher and a series of pay-to-print services nearby.
But zine publishers like
Mid-Latitude and literary journals like
Blue Bottle are diversifying the mediums under which we can produce literary work from home. This is an area in which I see Meanjin/Magandjin developing a bit further to support our literary talent.
5. Hollywood is pushing into Queensland, and our screenwriters are running with it
An hour’s drive south of Meanjin/Magandjin sits the
massive warehousesHollywood filmmakers are making more and more use of on the Gold Coast, thanks to its cheaper rents compared to Los Angeles. The move has provided work for crew members including make-up and special effects teams, editors, etc. But it’s also brought more money and attention to Queensland’s film talent, which Screen Queensland is leveraging to uplift voices across the state.
Brisbane International Film Festival
kicks off next month, alongside sister events New Farm Queer Film Festival and Noosa International Film Festival. Shayne Armstrong, the script doctor who made
Bait
bearable, teaches at QUT and UQ.
But if you’ve been involved in our supposedly thriving literary community over the last couple of years, I’m sure you’ve noticed a change.
The closing of Cinnamon & Co. in West End also brought an end to SpeakEasy Poetry. When Lonely’s closed, so did its poetry night. And I mentioned before that the Queensland Poetry Festival is now defunct – that’s because Queensland Poetry is now defunct,
wrapped in to the Queensland Writers Centre with cuts to events like Volta.
In a period where our publishing sector is still hungry for more literary houses based at home and our screenwriters are only just beginning to see the benefits of a larger film industry presence in Queensland, we don’t exactly need cuts to literary institutions. As promising as Meanjin/Magandjin is as a literary city, it isn’t yet as established as London and New York. It needs help to grow.
We still need publishing houses to invest in an office in Meanjin/Magandjin. We need studios to invest in Queensland stories told on screen. And now more than ever we need a place for people to share their work aloud.
My housemates and I are putting on a monthly, curated backyard poetry gig featuring four poets and accompanied by baked goods and tea. But to regain our footing after blow after blow to the literary community in the last couple of years, we need poets and organisers to commandeer more venues. We need to re-sow now, so we can all bloom again.
Word count: 929
Photo credit: Chloë Callistemon