Frank Moorhouse on Final Draft Audio Transcript

Frank Moorhouse was a titan of Australia’s literary landscape. In 2017 I had the good fortune to interview Frank for Final Draft and what follows is a transcript of that conversation.

*Note - this transcript was generated using an AI assistant. I’ve read through the conversation and have tried to clean up any errors but please forgive me if I’ve missed anything.

Andrew - You are tuned into 2ser 107.3. My name's Andrew Pople, and you're listening to Final Draft.
Meanjin is Australia's second oldest literary magazine, founded in Brisbane in 1940 before moving to Melbourne. The magazine has published literary luminaries from Australia and around the world, and the latest issue features an essay from Frank Moorhouse entitled ‘Is Writing a way of life, and if so, what is the Literary Life?”
Now, if you're not familiar with Frank, look, we scarcely have time to catch you up on his entire. The library suffice to say, he's a leading light in Australian letters. A member of the Order of Australia for his service to literature, and won the Miles Franklin in 2001. His novel Dark Palace are part of the Edith Trilogy, a fictional chronicling of the birth of the League of Nations. He's also joining me on the line. Welcome to Final Draft. Frank, I'm sorry I couldn't do your full catalogue.

Frank Moorhouse - Thank you very much. Very generous interview introduction. Thanks.

Andrew - We would have clearly run out of time because you have such a career. I’d love to sit down and check through it all.
I really loved the question that you pose in your essay ‘Is writing a way of life?’. It's undoubtedly one that many of our listeners have considered. I know I'm guilty of it myself, scribbling in my notepad. Your essay begins by discussing your journey to becoming a writer, aspiring to the great literary tradition.
So are you the answer to your question about a literary life?

Frank Moorhouse - I had a friend over dinner I thought was talking to him last week about or whatever about the about the SAN. And he said well. Is it no. I said, I said it's a bit like Ho Chi Minh's reply to an interviewer who asked him what he what he thought of the French Revolution and he said it's not over yet.
So yeah, actually, as I say in the in the essay, that in fact, that raised very interesting existential questions for me. After 50 years It's a question I should have asked myself, or maybe I did ask myself back when I was. 18 or whatever. Well, actually, I started. I left full-time employment when I was, I think 28 or something like that. I've been working part time in journalism and I've been a journalist and worked as an organiser and for the WWE and things like that. Edited country newspapers, but in my first book came out when I was 28, ‘Futility and other Animals’. We've got great reviews and I thought now's the time I'd always wanted to quote, be a writer, unquote. That had been something that had formed in my head when I was, as you say, when I was a teenager, I published my first short story in the oldest literary magazine. It's just lovely. When I was 18 and so I launched when I was 28.

Andrew - And is having it as a as a way of life. I'm going to say way of life in scare quotes there because of this question is it is it simply a matter of making a living off it or is there something more?

Frank Moorhouse - Ah, yes, yes, in in many ways.
From quite an early age, I not only wanted to be a writer, but after I started publishing stories I and I thought of myself as a writer. Although I was working as a journalist and I had an old a friend, a cadet friend, John Kentwell, and he also thought of himself as a writer, but we did never say this as cadet journalist.
Scott, the chief of staff, would have hit the roof. We would have probably been fired and our other cadet mates would have laughed at us. But we thought we were going to be writers, not just, not only and so it was as I outline, I explore in the essay. I explore the characteristics of that attitude or that sort of approach to living. And it does require some sort of separation from the general run of life and to become not only an observer, but an explorer and an explorer of self as well as an explorer of the wider world. And it's an act of imaginative support and intellectual inquiry. That does mark it off because it involves the imagination. It's marked off from journalism, and it's marked off from scholarship and it's marked of from gossip. Other forms of inquiry. And it's a, it becomes a way of the mind as well as a way of the World. The way of life Allows once you become published and People say, are you the writer?

Andrew - That's when you know?

Frank Moorhouse - Yes, that's when you know.

Andrew - In the essay you discuss that there are many things necessary to being a writer. Enthusiasm, diligence, sincerity, perhaps. But none of these are sufficient in themselves. Are there any crutches a prospective writer might lean on as they embark on their career? Anything that you think maybe is sufficient or to strive for.

Frank Moorhouse - Well, when you're young, or when you're beginning, people begin writing all sorts of points in their life. And it's a, it's a sort of a vocation that doesn't require you to have a degree. In writing, it doesn't require you to have any Essential training. But I suppose that you have to, I have to, you have to continually ask yourself. Am I good at it? It goes on throughout your life. Am I good enough? And am I good? And there are all sorts. The invitations that the the world give you, I mean it starts even at high school and when the English teacher says this is very good essay and you've got good ideas and so the invitation to continue to take writing seriously starts then and then. Submit to as an unknown my case, teenagers start submitting stories to literary magazines and other places and then you get quote acceptance or quote rejection. One of the toughest words in the English language, and it's used for, of course, when your work is rejected, not accepted by a magazine or a publisher. So you look out, you look have to look for those sorts of signals that the society is giving you about whether you want should how seriously you should take yourself and how far you should go. But, Essentially All the good writers seem to have been conceived of as the way they were, as a way of being and a way of living in a way of, and that this was central to their lives.

Andrew - In discussing the various styles and genres that go into making up our writing culture. Throughout the essay you note the success of things like cookbooks and gardening books and the like, and how they contribute to what you call the art of connoisseurship. And I love that. I love that phrase, and how this in turn, this art of connoisseurship further informs both writers and readers, and I wondered what changes you've seen in readership and perhaps cultural reception of writing in Australia through your career?

Frank Moorhouse - Well, yes, there's been quite significant changes. One that I talked about is that of course that we at some point I think was only about say 25 years ago or 30 years ago, maybe that we started to buy and read more Australian writers than we were reading English or American. That was a tipping point. It's suddenly more Australian books were being sold, but still, you know, we still buy a huge number of books from American writers and English writers, and even Asian now, Asian writers. But that was a tipping point when we started to turn to our own stories and our own books. I'm glad that you picked up on the art of connoisseurship. That it was another shift in in the Australian way of living, but we took an interest in astronomy. We took an interest in gardening at a greater depth. We'd always been interested, but we started to go deeper and in a in a wider and more adventurous way. And the arts of living, actually, and crafts and travel and so on. And these were these Books that are wonderful contributions to in to creating an approach, an exploratory approach to the daily life, to whether it's designing a room or Buying fabrics, I mean, we have, we've become a richer more knowing country.

Andrew - There's a spin on the art of connoisseurship that I wanted to put to you, particularly in the online world, what we might call geek culture, things that Once Upon a time might have been hidden or shameful or only for certain people who might have become social pariahs, like reading science fiction or reading comic books, or any of them. Are now at the mainstream and I wondered if there's an element of Australia moving away from the tall Poppy syndrome and just embracing all of the things that excite us now.

Frank Moorhouse - Yes, We're much more Catholic in our taste. We don't read comic books. We now read graphic novels.

Andrew - I have many graphic novels. I don't know where my Old comics went.

Frank Moorhouse - Yes, I can remember the comic there used to be some superior comic books called the Classics in probably the first graphic novels of Dickens novels and told stories. Novels were known as comic Books in my In My childhood.
It is a broadening of and deepening of our ways of living and it informs fiction, and an imaginative work, imaginative.
The saying is it takes 100 books to write, to make a book and all our reading and all our knowledge of the world. A lot of it comes through all those wonderful books that are, are produced about on how to the aesthetics, if you like, of life. I don't know. There's always been great examples of books that rise. To the surface in all the.
You know one or two great cooking books that everyone would know. There's the art of angling, I think 16th century, which it becomes a stand alone book that's working in other genres and of course. Perhaps books like Sherlock Holmes stories and detective stories that rise above and, and that's the same with now with long form television, some series just classic will become classics, and some books become classics in all genres, but they are. There are examples of outstanding excellence in the genre and there are, I'm afraid there will always be tall poppies.

Andrew - It's just that we try to cut them down.

Frank Moorhouse - Yes. Oh yes. There's plenty of tall poppy cutters, in fact. Yes, more of those than there are tall poppies. But anyway, of course.

Andrew – ‘Will I get paid?’ Is one of the chief concerns anyone embarking on any career has to ask or will ask? I was really interested in your thoughts on the economics of writing from the beginnings of a literary enterprise where the writer may have no thought of the cost of the venture in time and the like. The unpredictable process of publishing with no Absolute certainty of return and the various ways in which the public receive and recompense the artist for their work. Do you think we're doing a good job as a Society of, of cultural consumers? Do we recompense writers adequately for their work?

Frank Moorhouse - No, no. And that this life as a as a as a, a theme of the essay is that. Art funding is in a mess and. Right across the arts. Will there be music or painting and and some and theatre. And it's in a very big mess. There were attempts to there have been various governments post Second World War with the, with the Menzies Government and the setting up of of cultural institutions. Actually, it goes back much further that but. The the acceptance that the that the that the the one of the roles of governments is not only to. To nurture and and encourage excellence in sport and science and research and scholarship, but also in the arts, and this has fallen away a bit there. Quite a few arts sceptics, I think, in politics on both sides of the of the political spectrum. But the the acceptance in most Western countries and other countries has been for many centuries now that the arts. Are important part and the very, very unusual and strange part. But the art sits along science and scholarship as being part of a civilised society, and we've in the last, I think, the last 10 years maybe. There's been a a neglect and part of this is because in the case of writing I'll return just now to talking about writing, but the economic structure has in many ways collapsed. The loyalty system is, which is one of the main used to be the mainstream of income for a writer. That has collapsed because. Of the number of books available tends to slice the readership pie smaller, but also the price of books in the last 10 or so years and cost of production, by the way, has fallen and books are cheaper now than they've been and cheaper by about a third over the last 10 years. So that the royalty coming, the 10% has now been cut by a third, that source of income arts funding through grants and fellowships and research grants has been cut back and cut back and cut back the freelance rate. The payment that is via magazines and other publishers and. For contributions from writers has also been stagnant now for at least 10-15 years, so that the some of the essential features of the components of the economy of writing. Have fallen into disrepair and we need a rather sort of. Smarter, more sophisticated government to say we've done, we're neglecting our duty here to the, to the society.

Andrew - Your idea of a cultural use index I thought was fascinating as this mechanism whereby a writer could receive a return when their work is perhaps lent or borrowed, discussed, sighted, even dreamt, yeah. Even dreamt about. I love it. And look, while some of the finer points like dreams may be harder to calculate. I wondered, perhaps if you're familiar with online music streaming services like Spotify. And whether that model might work where whereby works could receive sort of a piece meal remuneration when they are in some calculable way used.

Frank Moorhouse - Yeah, yes, yes. Yes, the social use of the book is of course remarkable and and very strange. I mean. Play Shakespeare's plays end up in every speech, right, every speech writer, every Rotarian, every good politician. Ultimately, quote Shakespeare and may even quote Henry Lawson or May quote Banjo Patterson the the way that that writing. And of course, there's 500 years of books in in a big queue. We're on the end of a big queue here, as writers are now the these the these books are studied, certainly in exams. Used as as sources for for faeces sources for journalistic work for policy making. There, there it. It it as I say, I think it's a bit like the nutrients, nutrient, nutrients of the soil that that produce beautiful roses and beautiful plants. And all sorts of things. That writing is a. Is part of the. Unrecognised and in terms of economic terms, this would has not been properly recognised and and we have to redefine. I think the economy of writing to include and to recognise and recompense writers. For the social. Use and I think you could have a. It could be reduced to a string. Boxes, you know, have you know how many copies of your book or in the public libraries where people can move them for free? We get a small payment for that, but that would be one of the boxes you've chicken and your book studied on on reading this years and tick, tick, tick. And do you go overseas. The does the government send you overseas? As I've just been sent overseas by default two weeks to talk to universities and literary festival in India. And this is called public diplomacy and ducat have programmes for this, and of course we get one of the rewards is to get one of this or to do this, and I've done it quite often, but that is our public service we're doing as well, I mean. So there are many ways that writers interact and inform and enrich and and I think it can be reduced to an an index and a a payment, a payment? Yeah. Same as we get a payment now for the books in the library.

Andrew - Yeah, it strikes me the economic concept that you're describing has parallels in the increasingly understood environmental idea of externalities and the idea that externalities need to be brought into the economic system to fully take into account environmental impacts. And so a power plant that pumps pollution into the air has to pay for that and somehow we're not, the writing work isn't a pollution being pumped into the air, but that nutrient that you described in the ground soil and if we could somehow properly bring the externalities in so many more profits would flow to the rubber.

Frank Moorhouse - Yes. Yes, yes, that's a good. That's a good parallel. There are I think. Right as the third tough on each other and on themselves some I think some some books like with classifiers, pollutants but but yes, no, it's a good parallel that that of course and I just as I've outlined it that it can be reduced to an index.

Andrew - Something for the listeners, something for the policymakers. The voice you can hear is Frank Moorhouse. His essay ‘Is writing a way of life?’ appears in the latest copy of Meanjin, which is on sale now. Frank, thank you so much for joining me.

Frank Moorhouse - Thank you.

Andrew - That was just a nice wrap up for the on air, Frank, that I really appreciate.
That that was such. A great chat. I appreciate the time. I'll let you get back to your day. Probably need to have some breaks or some lunch.

Frank Moorhouse - Thank you. Right. Yes, you shaped it up very well.

Andrew - Thank you so much. This will be on the radio tomorrow. You're in Sydney.

Frank Moorhouse – Yes that’s right

Andrew - So this will be on the radio tomorrow and it will Be online.

Frank Moorhouse – I’ve heard the show. Yep, you do a good show.

Andrew – Oh, sorry, I don't often get to hear that. Thank you. That was a very nice thing to say. I really appreciate that. Cheers.

Frank Moorhouse – Right, Well, you're part of the picture, the culture, the literary culture, you're part of it, yeah.

Andrew - Ah, thank you. That's nice to have that said, thank you so much, Frank. Yeah. Hopefully I get to chat to you again. I hear there's a new book coming.

Frank Moorhouse - Ohh sooner or later. Sorry.

Andrew - Sooner or later, I'll look forward to it. Thanks mate. Bye.