#SaveWritingNSW

The week before last, the NSW writers’ centre, Writing NSW, received the devastating news that their multi-year funding would be discontinued. The fate of the writers’ centre is now at risk, as is the ecosystem of writers, teachers and readers that the Writing NSW supports. New South Wales also risks becoming the only state without a writers’ centre.

When I was a young writer living in Sydney in the noughties, Writing NSW (then known as the NSW Writers Centre) was vital to the development of my literary career. They published a little yellow book which listed all of the journals and magazines that accepted submissions. I thumbed through that book religiously and repeatedly sent out my work (in hard copy, with stamps!). The majority of it was rejected, but without this resource, I wouldn’t have published the first few pieces that gave me a leg up into the writing world.

In 2001, I attended a day long festival on writing historical fiction at the Writers Centre with my friend Robin Barker, with whom I was studying writing at the University of Technology, Sydney. It was a clear and bright winter’s day, and at lunchtime I sat in the sun with Robin and her friend and editor, Julia Stiles (who would edit my first novel, A Curious Intimacy, with the aid of an Australian Society of Authors mentorship), and outlined the idea I had for my second novel, though I was still writing the first. I had a strong sense, that day, that I was forming my identity as a writer through the people I was meeting.

Later, in one of the sessions, Robin and I were seated with most of the audience, waiting for the speakers to come in. I sensed a disturbance in the room, and when I looked around for the source, I saw an elegant woman taking her seat on the left-hand side of the front row. ‘That’s Tara Moss,’ Robin explained to me, ‘she’s a model and a writer.’

Tara Moss and I went on to become successful authors (though Moss has written and sold truckloads more books than me!), both of us benefitting from the networks and events associated with the Writers Centre.

Another example: in 2016 I flew from Brisbane to the writers’ centre to attend Quantum Words, a one-day festival centred around writing and science. I knew very little about science writing, but I was interested in learning about how one could communicate plant science. I thought that the ecobiography I was writing could be one way of doing this and wanted to share and test my ideas. Quantum Words was one of the best festivals I’ve ever attended. It was small, which meant it was relatively easy for me to meet people, and the sessions were fantastic, with a keynote by Nobel Prize winner Peter Doherty. Four years later, I drew on a number of the ideas and contacts I made that day to put together Science Write Now, the platform which scientist & author Amanda Niehaus and I are launching this Wednesday to publish and promote creative writing inspired by science.

A writers’ centre isn’t just a place where people go to attend workshops. It’s an ecosystem that nourishes connections, helps with building a literary profile, and offers critical support for the often hard and relentless journey of writing.

One of the saddest aspects of Create NSW’s decision is that the funding Writing NSW asked for is only $175,000 a year. Given the amount that politicians waste (flying business class, for example), how hard can it be to come up with these funds? The centre isn’t a white elephant, as two-thirds of its income is derived from courses, membership and workshops.

Disturbingly, too, only 5% of ongoing funding from Create NSW was dedicated to literature. This means that the state’s future storytellers will not get the support and publication opportunities they need to develop as a writer, and that the stories of people in NSW - particularly marginalised groups who may not have the resources to persist with a writing career - will not be told. This seems to be part of a larger trend of defunding literature in Australia, which the literary scholar and historian in me cannot help but link to book burning by authoritarian regimes, because books disseminate ideas.  

If you would like to protest Create NSW’s decision, here are some actions you can take:

• Write to or phone your NSW Member of Parliament. Contact details for all state MPs are here. Customise this template letter to make your views known.

• Send a copy of your letter to the Honourable Don Harwin, Minister for the Arts: office@harwin.minister.nsw.gov.au.

• Post about the funding decision on your social media platforms tagging @writingNSW and using the hashtag #SaveWritingNSW

• Spread the news to your colleagues and friends in the writing community and ask them to make their views known

• Sign this open letter to Create NSW and the NSW Minister for the Arts from writers and active members in the literary community

• Sign this petition from Jamie Parker, MP for Balmain, to NSW Minister for the Arts, the Honourable Don Harwin.

Notes from the Field (x)

I was last in Newcastle in 2014, ushering in the New Year and then my birthday with some very good friends, one of whom had been in my London book club of expats (with a few English folk tossed in), the Book Rangers. I blogged about that trip here, but I didn’t mention the mead we drank on NYE as we watched the fireworks and the drive to Solway Firth (which was freezing but gorgeous – the morning light was silver), then up to Hadrian’s Wall (the temperature was 2 degrees celsius!) thence to the famous Barter Books bookstore (housed in a restored train station), where I bought a copy of Praed’s Political Poems by Winthrop Mackworth Praed. We then headed down to a beach with a view to a ruined castle. It was almost pitch black and the wind cut my skin, but it was exhilarating to be beside a castle and the sea in air which, but for the moon, was thick with night.

This trip was more scholarly, though it was great to see my friends again and to meet their new addition, a charming son. Before I left for the UK, I contacted the Hancock Museum to see if I could find out any more about Mangles’ correspondents, author Jane Loudon (Mangles sent a copy of Loudon’s Ladies Flower Garden to Georgiana) and horticulturalist George Hailes (who grew some of Georgiana’s seeds). My query was passed on to Les Jessop, honorary librarian of the Natural History Society of Northumbria. There was no George Hailes, he wrote, but there was a George Wailes, founder of the Natural History Society.

I went back to Mangles’ letters and checked the writing; that lovely, scrolling ‘H’ was indeed a ‘W’. This was a revelation for both of us. Les had known Wailes mostly as an entomologist, but now realised that he’d had extensive involvement in plants. As for me, it meant I could check Kew Gardens’ and Chatsworth House’s archives for other letters by Wailes (I found one in which Wailes got a bit shirty with William Hooker over an exchange of plants, which amused me).

Saltwell Towers

George Wailes had a brother, William Wailes, who set up a successful stained glass manufacturing business, and his windows feature in dozens of churches. In 1860 William bought Saltwell Park, built a mansion and set about improving the grounds. He later ran into debt and sold the house and grounds to the Gateshead Corporation. It’s now a gorgeous park, so I took myself off to look at it on an unseasonably warm day (summer in England continues to surprise me). The house, known as Saltwell Towers, is still there, and I thought it was lovely.

Saltwell Park

I also took myself to Newcastle University’s archives to look at some letters between Jane Loudon and Pauline Trevelyan. Jane Loudon is a fascinating woman. I knew of her from Ann Shteir’s wonderful Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science, for she was a pioneer in making botany and gardening accessible to women by writing entry-level manuals (those that existed were for people, largely men, who knew quite a bit about these fields). I also knew her husband had died prematurely, leaving her high and dry, so she had turned to writing to support herself.

As I read more about Loudon in preparation for this trip, I found that history had repeated itself. Jane’s father had died when she was 17, so she published a novel she’d written, The Mummy, in 1827 to raise some some funds for herself. So Jane Loudon was one of the world’s first science fiction writers! Wonderful stuff. Also amazing was that John Loudon, editor of a magazine, reviewed the book and asked to meet the author. He assumed the person who turned up would be male, but then he discovered it was Jane, and married her a year later.

Laura Trevelyan, to whom Jane wrote the letters housed at Newcastle University, was a lightening rod for Victorian culture. She met her husband, a geologist, at a conference for the British Association for the Advancement of Science (which I think is a great story). She was an artist, and made her house in Northumberland, Wallington Hall, a place where she gathered friends such as John Ruskin, the Brownings (Robert and Elizabeth Barrett), the Rossettis, John Everett Millais, Thomas Carlyle and Swinburne beneath its roof.

Alas there was no mention of Mangles in the letters (it was a rather long bow to pull, to be honest, but I had to check). Still, I was so pleased that I’d grown to know more of these two remarkable women.

On Science Communication

A few weeks back I presented at a symposium at UQ hosted by the Translational Research in Creative Practice group, which explores how creative practice can translate complex research in the humanities into the public realm. It borrows this idea from the medical sciences, which translates knowledge created in the lab to everyday environments – the phrase used to describe this is ‘bench-to beside’, which I like. I signed up to present on writing an ecobiography, because I’m interested in how writers can use their craft to convey science, and I think it's imperative to transmit knowledge from the academy to the public.

Last year I presented at the inaugural Quantum Words Science Writing festival hosted by the NSW Writers’ Centre, where I met plenty of wonderful writers, including poet Carol Jenkins who wrote the marvellous Fishing in the Devonian, and Indigenous writer Tony Birch, who is doing interesting and important work on colonialism and climate change, looking at how the resilience of Indigenous communities surviving colonialism might educate people on how to negotiate the increasing instability which climate change brings. I also caught up with my pal Cat Sparks, a spec fic writer who has just published Lotus Blue and who makes every occasion entertaining, even when she’s talking about the coming environmental Armageddon (which really is on its way, although Cat maintains we’ll be killed by robots first).

At this festival, Nobel Prize winner Peter Doherty gave a marvelous keynote. He expressed his ideas clearly and had a very good sense of humour, which was a balm for everyone’s depression about the US election and the implications of this for our climate. He mentioned how one of the difficulties about communicating science is that science is about quantifying uncertainty and is therefore conservative in its analysis, whereas journalism, which relies on headlines on to sell its news (at least in these days of clickbaiting), is more interested in dramatisation (these are not his exact words, but the gist of them - I had to consult ecologist-philospher-b/f for clarification).

Another part of the difficulty in communicating science is confirmation bias: the more emotionally charged an issue is, the more people will interpret information (especially ambiguous information) in favour of their beliefs.

So, what to do?

Jamie Freestone, a literature PhD student at UQ, talks about the need for making science fun, and points to the success of the World Science Festival in Brisbane. He also mentions films such as Interstellar, and I would also add that docos such as David Attenborough’s Earth II can raise awareness, although Attenborough was criticised for creating an ‘escapist wildlife fantasy’ in which‘worldwide mass extinction is simply not happening’.

I’m a bit disappointed that Freestone didn’t mention literature, however, especially as this is his field of focus.

And mine too. While entertainment has its place, I also believe in seduction, in pulling the reader into a text through imagery, language, plot and character. And this is what I’m trying to do in my ecobiography, as I explained in my presentation. The impetus for writing the book is to raise awareness of the South West Australian Floristic Region (SWAFR) which is one of 25 biodiversity hotspots around the world (and the only one in Australia), by rendering the lives of the plants Georgiana Molloy collected. I’m following them from the south-west at the time she collected them in the 1830s, to England, where they were distributed by James Mangles, a plant middleman, and then back to the south-west to see how they’re faring now. This forms the book’s plot. The characters are Georgiana and the Noongars with whom she interacted, the botanist Mangles to whom she sent his specimens, and his acquaintances, among whom he distributed Georgiana's’s specimens.

The plants, too, are characters, with different colours and textures, and ways of trapping and acquiring food, and responding to air and light. Through rendering them, I’m trying to explain that they are as just as important as humans. In a traditional biography, a human is the focus of the work, but in an eco-biography, the non-human is of equal significance. My premise is that, if we want to have a life, we need to write the lives that support us. And language is of the utmost importance in this respect - through it, I show readers the beauty and vitality of plants.

I’m nearly halfway through the project, and soon I’m heading to England to do research on Mangles and his botanical buddies, which will require much trawling through archives. Hopefully I’ll have time to post as I go, but if not, I’ll be updating my Instagram and Facebook author pages fairly often, in case you want to see what I uncover of 19th century science!