To: Tayyeb Shah, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Global Partnerships, UWA
Dear Professor Shah Re: Proposal for change, UWA Publishing I wish to express my profound dismay at the proposal to close down the operations of Australia’s second oldest university press, one of the country’s most respected publishing houses, and one of UWA’s, and Western Australia’s, most important cultural assets. I write as an author whose writing career was launched, and has been encouraged, nurtured and supported, by UWA Publishing and its director Terri-ann White. In 2015, it was my great honour to have been invited to speak at the 80th Anniversary celebrations of UWA Publishing. I talked about my long association with the press, at the time going back more than 28 years, first as a freelance editor and later as an author. The following is a brief extract from that speech: I have now published three books with UWA Publishing, and the experience of being published has been life-changing, for many reasons. Most authors would say the same. At the heart of those reasons, I think, is faith. Publication is an act of faith in a writer. The publisher—a bridge between creator and audience—shouts to the world: This book, this one here, has been worth our time, and it is worth your time, too. It becomes a crucial validation of the faith that any writer, in order to write, must find in themselves. Faith also kept reappearing in my thoughts about this small press, led by visionary thinking, and what it manages to achieve today in often-precarious, always-challenging times. This press has faith in substance over fluff, originality over formula. It believes in ideas, in diversity, in inclusivity; in the examination of the social world, the natural world, the political, the ethical, as a necessary human endeavour. It respects readers: it has faith in them, too. It honours the beauty and power of language. It honours scholarship. It upholds the conviction that illuminating the past is vital to imagining a future. It has faith in the capacity of books to engender empathy and compassion. To be enriching and redemptive. To aspire, at least, to effecting change. Faith in the secular miracles that the arts are capable of. I am proud to be on the list of this kind of publishing house. I remain proud, immensely proud, to be a UWAP author, and grateful to the press for its support of my writing career. I write mostly literary historical fiction, with a strong focus on Western Australian history, and the press’s acceptance of my first novel (the product of a PhD) was for me a strong validation of my belief that our history is a rich source for fiction, for exploring what makes Western Australia unique and what makes the desires of its people universal. The fact that some of my fiction has been inspired by the work of eminent historians with whom I’ve worked as an editor for UWAP, and by many other UWAP books, speaks to the strong relationship between creativity and scholarship that a flourishing university press fosters. But my faith in the university itself—what it stands for, what it values—has, as a result of this new proposal, been shaken. I have just returned from China, where I spent four weeks as a guest of the Sun Yat-sen University Writers’ Residency, the one Australian writer among a group of eight from around the world (United Kingdom, United States, New Zealand, Spain, Austria, Italy, Jamaica). The residency provided outstanding opportunities for cultural exchange, for talking about Western Australian history and literature, and for international exposure (my work was translated into Mandarin during the residency)—a ‘global partnership’ of the most enriching kind. I owe these and similar opportunities to the fact that UWA Publishing took a chance on me. And I know that I am only one of many writers who would tell you a similar story. Please reconsider your proposal to dismantle something so precious, so fine and so important to the culture, history, and creative and intellectual life of Western Australia. Please reassure Western Australians that the state’s oldest university understands the value of what it has in UWA Publishing. Yours sincerely Dr Amanda Curtin https://uwap.uwa.edu.au/collections/amanda-curtin Comments are closed.
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