It was with a great deal of pleasure that the Club invited Louise Adler to deliver the thirty-eighth Angus Mitchell Oration on 25th February 2009.

This is the text of her presentation to the Club.

"I am honoured to have been invited to give the Angus Mitchell Oration both because of the dauntingly distinguished list of orators and the important role that Rotary has placed both in Australia and internationally.

There are other connections between Rotary and Melbourne University Publishing: we published Owen Parnaby’s history of Australia’s first rotary club 2002, and we continue to publish the Australian Dictionary of Biography, in which many Rotarians are listed.  It was in the ADB that I discovered the entry regarding Sir Angus Mitchell – which informs us that Sir Angus lived in the Windsor Hotel for the last 15 years of his life.  So I’m delighted to deliver this year’s Mitchell Oration in this place in memory of Sir Angus and the Rotary values he held dear.

Other orators have acknowledged the importance of Rotary’s guiding principles: truth, fairness, international goodwill, friendship and peace.  But today I want to focus on another central tenet of Rotary – service above self.

According to Owen Parnaby, Rotary International issued a statement in 1940, as Europe descended into the dark years of conflict. It is a remarkable declaration:

“In these catastrophic times, the Board feels that it should re-emphasise to Rotarians throughout the world that Rotary is based on the ideals of service.  Where freedom, justice, truth, sanctity of pledged word and respect for human rights do not exist, Rotary cannot live nor its ideals prevail.  These principles which are indispensable to Rotary are vital to the maintenance of internal peace and order and to human progress”

These principles clearly articulated the hopes for a better world and a fairer society.  But at the heart of that declaration is an abiding belief in the principle of a civil society.  We have seen much evidence in recent weeks of the virtues of a civil society: the community support, both material and emotional, for the bushfire victims has been tremendous.  It is just another example of our capacity and willingness to live decently, with ethics, with empathy and compassion for our fellow citizens.  I remember one small story on the news of a man who took off his boots and socks and handed them to a man left without anything.  I think that vignette perhaps might be evidence of our shared sense of service above self.  There’s much talk these days about the selfishness and self-obsession that modern life engenders.  But I think it is vitally important to emphasize and indeed celebrate those instances where we reveal our better selves.

Forgive me if I appear partisan, but it is my view that the cultural health of our nation is fundamental to the maintenance of a civil society.  Recently I was involved in a public conversation with the philosopher Peter Singer about his new book: The Life You Can Save.  In this way the West can eradicate global poverty.  His argument is that global poverty is a personal moral responsibility – it is  certainly a challenging, confronting proposition.  In the course of making the case, Singer suggests that the purchase by the Metropolitan Museum of a $45m Italian Renaissance painting is an obscenity in an era of such human suffering.  His view is that philanthropy should be directed to eradicating human suffering before we look to enhancing our collective aesthetic experience.  I think Singer is right and wrong.  We all share responsibility for the state of the world, the injustice of the starving children on one continent, while children on another continent demand the latest ipod.  And yet our experience of that great painting purchased is an enlarging one: a community of viewers come away from seeing such a work with renewed respect for the artist, a deeper understanding of the history of art.  The connection to art as a way to understand ourselves.

My professional life has taught me that reading offers us the same opportunity to know ourselves more fully, to learn about the world beyond our own experience, and to connect in an intimate, personal fashion with the literary imagination.

Most writers I know admit that writing is a highly personal habit, a guilty pleasure, an addiction they feel compelled to indulge.  The best writers in exploiting their own compulsion to write, offer us readers a large sense of humanity in all its weaknesses and strengths.  Whether the canvas is epic or domestic, whether the tale concerns the consequences of the industrial revolution as in Charles Dicken’s Dombey and Son, or the tussle between romanticism and reason in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice – these great writers take us to other worlds, other lives, and deliver us insight into our own.  The moral philosopher Gillian Rose once said: “If I knew who I was or what I was I would not write”.  So writing is the act of discovering oneself. But in the process we, the lucky readers, discover ourselves too.

It is that opportunity to understand myself, to think quietly through the pleasure of reading fine writing, entering another imaginary world – that has led me to a life in publishing.  But it has also been a profession chosen because of the conviction that books matter; that books can shape and influence a community, that books create public discourse.  Books are a contribution to the public sphere, they are a service, a personal and public gesture of our conviction that ideas matter in a civil society.

I have been fortunate to work in the ideas business for almost 30 years, helping in a small way to shape Australia’s literary culture.  If it hadn’t been so much fun, I would gladly accept the dictum of service before self as a guiding principle of my career.  But that would be to ignore the great pleasure and fascination that working with writers has brought me.

Today I would like to offer you some insights into the publishing business by sharing with you some tales from the frontline of author management.  However let me begin with some statistics. Last year over 8,500 titles were published in Australia.  Only one title published last year sold more than 200,000 copies: a self published cookbook rejected by every major publisher in the country called 4 Ingredients.  Only two books sold between 100,000 and 200,000: Underbelly and Adam Gilchrist’s autobiography.

It was John Mortimer, the creator of Rumpole of the Bailey, who once said, “the shelf life of the modern author is somewhere between the milk and the yoghurt”.  He was right – publishing is a tough business.  If the writer gets it right the rewards are immense, if they don’t their hard work just disappears.

When I arrived at Reed books in 1989, the company had just published Bryce Courtenay’s first novel The Power of One.  As you will remember it was hugely successful.  As the Publishing Director, Bryce became mine to manage.  It was a hugely instructive experience.  The literati like to mock successful mass-market fiction writers.  In my experience Bryce was immensely professional, focussed, pleasant to deal with and full of enthusiasm and innovative marketing ideas.  Publishing is still a gentlemanly game.  But Bryce came from the rough and tumble world of advertising. I think he probably found his early forays into our world quaint and a tad frustrating.  I though he was refreshing: he’d challenge our assumptions, test the truisms on which we’d base our judgements.  In editorial terms he was a pleasure to work with.  Bryce’s capacity for hard work was remarkable.  He was the only writer I knew who would hand write letters of thanks to Australian booksellers for supporting his novels.  That work has paid off, he has been a great commercial success, although he remains the subject of cynical and disparaging critical commentary.

Politicians are another very interesting category of author.  Certainly publishing Mark Latham’s Diaries was a challenge.  Editorially there was the complex matter of publishing an actual diary.  Latham wanted to preserve the authenticity of the actual entries, even if the prose seemed inelegant he was determined not to “doctor”/improve the diary in any way.  The Diaries proved to be a legal challenge and we had many long days and nights of argument about potentially defamatory material.  In the end no one actually sued.  But I learnt a lot about defamation law in the process.

Last year MUP was again in the eye of the storm with the publication of Peter Costello’s Memoirs.  I met Peter Costello for the first time on a plane from Canberra to Melbourne two weeks prior to the 2007 election.  MUP had recently published a biography of John Howard.  Costello’s brief comments for that book made headlines.  I thanked him for his support and quietly inquired if he’d be interested in writing his memoirs if all didn’t go well.  As we approached the luggage carousel he graciously gave me permission to call after the election.

It took two months to persuade him of the value of the task, I conscripted an old school friend to vouch for MUP’s bona fides and dragooned Peter Costello’s father-in-law into collaborating on the project.  Politicians are often partial to the idea of writing their contribution into the public record.  But all too often they are unaware of the enormity and intensity of the work involved.  Peter Coleman, a former politician, journalist and published author and Costello’s father-in-law seemed the best person to assist the novice writer.  In fact the process has been genuinely collaborative despite generational and political differences.  Political books start as a private projects, but they are inextricably bound up with the contemporary political discourse.

MUP has also had success working within more traditional spheres of the universities.  We decided we needed to find the Australian academics that had a story to tell and either knew how to write that story or were willing to learn.  My very first commission at MUP was Stuart Macintyre – well known to all of you as one of Australia’s finest historians.  I had noticed that our broadsheet newspapers were thoroughly preoccupied by the question of Australia’s history: is it a story of dispossession and colonialisation or a story of the triumph of British civilization and enterprise?  Successive Australian prime ministers had made public statements on the issue and the newspapers kept returning to the debate.  I asked Stuart to tell us why history mattered, what this debate was all about.  His writing instructions were clear – he had three months to write 60,000 words and he was to write to a general audience, not his academic peers.  He did a marvellous job, we met every week to discuss his chapters, and he delivered on time.  The former Prime Minister, Paul Keating launched the book to much media hoo hah, and the opinion pages were filled with debate for two months.

MUP has always been a renowned publisher of the humanities.  We wanted to move into the sciences.  I had been told in reverential tones that the Nobel Laureate, Peter Doherty, was now at the University of Melbourne and that, if I was very good, a meeting might be arranged.  Well publishing isn’t about being well behaved; it’s to do with seizing the opportunity.  So we side stepped the protocol and the niceties and simply called him to make a time to meet.  We did meet and got talking about American politics, the ongoing crisis in the Middle East and all sorts of other matters.  It became clear we could work together and that Peter had intended to write a book at some point.  So a deal was struck and we came up with a title that appealed to him – The Beginners Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize.  Peter’s media tour was gruelling since he is rightly everyone’s favourite scientist.  The book has done very well, but it was not a simple matter for him and for us to get the book right.  Scientists aren’t used to writing to the length of a book, they usually write refereed journal articles.  But we agreed that the book should be part memoir, part champion for the benefits of science to the community, part advocacy to the young for the joys of a science career.  The Beginners Guide was a great success and we have now proudly published Peter’s second book, “A Light History of Hot Air”.

Most of you will be aware of the Miegunyah Press imprint, which we reserve for books of national significance.  The Miegunyah Press has the good fortune to be the recipient of a very generous bequest from that great benefactor Russel Grimwade; our only obligation is to make beautiful books.  One of the many books we are proud of in this imprint is Geoffrey Bardon’s Papunya – an extraordinary account of the birth of the Papunya Tula art movement.  As a young art teacher Bardon went to work in the Western Desert region and was instrumental in assisting indigenous artists to move their work from the impermanence of sand to the permanence of canvas.  The project was immensely complex; Bardon’s documentation was comprehensive but unsystematic.  And tragically the author died months before the book could be completed.  However we are delighted that his work has been honoured by many awards and accolades since the book’s publication.  It is this kind of book that makes our work of genuine significance.

Of course publishing is not always exhilarating – there are books we lose to other publishers, books we passionately believe in but don’t sell, authors who are grumpy, don’t deliver, won’t listen to our advice, refuse to go on national TV programmes at 7am because its too early and so on. And of course publishing is always a lottery.

Book publishing is a business, but it’s also at its best an intellectual contract between a writer and a reader.  In a publishing house such as MUP, we have the privilege of making a real contribution to the national debate, to foster a commitment to ideas and promote cultural literacy.

It surprises me how rarely I hear my colleagues admit that publishers are privileged.  Over the years I have been fortunate to encounter many fascinating individuals and riveting personalities.  The courage, ambition, vanity and vulnerability displayed by writers have enriched each remarkable journey from idea to book.  The intensity of these engagements never diminishes for me because at the centre of this hectic business is a deep satisfaction of feeling we have produced a well made book, a book that matters, a book that will contribute to shaping public debate, a book that will enlighten each of its readers.  It is certainly an act of service.  But it is also true that publishing is a privileged occupation for those of us fortunate to spend our working lives in this field."