Professor Jane Lydon is the Wesfarmers Chair of Australian History at The University of Western Australia. Her recent books include The Flash of Recognition: Photography and the emergence of Indigenous rights, which won the 2013 Queensland Literary Awards’ USQ History Book Award, and Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire.
I write to express my concerns regarding the intended closure of UWA Publishing after 85 years of cultural leadership in Western Australia and beyond. I urge you to re-consider this decision. As I know you have heard from many people by now, UWAP is very highly esteemed across Australia, and its publications are world class. Under Professor Terri-ann White’s acclaimed direction, UWA Publishing has been a powerhouse of creativity, serving to identify, nurture and produce work of the highest quality, including many award-winning books. While it is distinctively West Australian, the work it produces makes a crucial contribution to our national scholarly and literary culture. University publishing is of inestimable value to the intellectual life and reputation of the university, and performs both an institutional and public good. Within a global ideas ecosystem, UWAP serves as a portal between university scholarship and the wider world we seek to engage. In a national context, closure of UWAP has been perceived as an attack on Australian humanities and social sciences (HASS) scholarship and culture. HASS research, unlike that in the STEM disciplines, continues to find its primary scholarly and general audience through books, including book collections, and scholars working in these fields will be disproportionately affected by this loss. You will be aware that recent national debate was prompted by the withdrawal of support from the University of Sydney’s Chair in Australian Literature, and media queries were directed to UWA regarding its prestigious Chair of Australian Literature, established in 2009 as a result of the University's successful bid to the Federal Government. Many of us felt proud of UWA’s re-commitment to this position (The Australian, 16 October 2019). While you have stated that the press serves only a small number of UWA staff, the School of Humanities performs very highly across all academic criteria, and its scholarly achievements are demonstrated for example in the most recent Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) exercise. We consider UWAP an important element of our success. Until now, UWA has acknowledged the value of UWAP as a global ambassador of the university’s brand and has rightly trumpeted its many achievements. For example, both the 2018 Division Report — Community and Engagement and the UWA’s 2018 Annual Report note that UWA Publishing ‘continues to be recognised nationally as a publisher of new ideas and brilliant writing’. ( https://www.annualreport.uwa.edu.au/annual-report-2018/our-year/division-report-community-and-engagement andhttps://www.annualreport.uwa.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/3399200/Annual-Report-2018.pdf) Given this acknowledgement, it is disappointing that the sudden closure of UWAP has been announced without any financial or other justification. Two key questions have been voiced: first, what is the financial basis for the decision, and what alternatives are proposed? While profit must not be the measure of academic value, this seems relevant. Second, in various responses you have specified that plans for the future centre upon ‘open and digitised access’. More detail about these plans would be very reassuring. Successful open access models are not readily available for humanities publishing. Immediate precedents indicate the challenges for such models in the Australian context: for example, the University of Adelaide Press (UAP) published peer-reviewed scholarship produced by staff in print and open access ebooks between 2009-2018 (https://www.adelaide.edu.au/press/about-the-press ). During the era of HERDC block funding there was an advantage to publishing in quantity in order to generate points for UoA staff, however in the shift to ERA it became more difficult to sustain the so-called 'world standard' argument for a publishing house that only published in-house academics. UAP closed in February 2019. Conversely, when Stanford University’s provost announced the cessation of funding for the highly respected Stanford University Press in April 2019, the overwhelming response very quickly caused her to reverse this decision, and instead she has committed to developing new initiatives through the existing press infrastructure (e.g., https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/05/01/stanford-backs-down-year-ending-support-university-press). My appointment as Wesfarmers Chair of Australian History – the first endowed position of this kind in Australia- is intended to further teaching, study and public engagement with history from a West Australian perspective, and the loss of UWAP will be severely felt in achieving these aims. UWAP has been a major partner in developing scholarship in this field through actively seeking out the best research conducted by my colleagues and students and making it accessible to a wide audience. Since my appointment, ground-breaking research has been published by UWAP in the fields of Aboriginal and colonial history, immigration and imperial history, local West Australian history and biography. The publication of Noongar culture, history and language is of exceptional significance. Just this year, historian Anna Haebich’s Dancing in Shadows was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award and Rozanna Lilley's Do Oysters Get Bored? was shortlisted in the National Biography Award. As a judge of the State record Office of Western Australia’s annual Margaret Medcalf Award, I note that UWAP’s work is always prominent in submissions and recipients. More personally, as a UWA historian and author, my intellectual life will be significantly damaged by this decision. I write Australian histories set in a global context, and I have an international profile beyond my immediate audience of fellow Australians. In publishing this work I therefore alternate between international and domestic presses, but always seeking those of the highest possible quality. So, for example, last year I published a book collection with UWA Publishing, titled Visualising Human Rights, presenting research emanating from the Australian Research Council-funded Discovery project Anti-slavery and Australia (DP 140101793), while my most recent monograph has just appeared with Cambridge University Press’s prestigious Critical Perspectives on Empire series. (As an aside, I write from Hong Kong, where I have been the guest of an international symposium. As a gesture of thanks, I gave my hosts a copy of my UWAP book, which they admired in part for its beautiful design and production values.) My current research agenda will be directly injured by the closure of UWAP. I am currently a Chief Investigator on a major Australian Research Council-funded Linkage project, Collecting the West: How collections created Western Australia, (LP160100078, $750,000), led byProfessor Alistair Paterson and Prof Andrea Witcomb, with UWA colleagues Prof Stephen Hopper, Prof Jenny Gregory, Dr Shino Konishi, Dr Jacqueline Van Gent, Dr Toby Burrows; British Museum – Dr Jeremy Hill, Dr Gaye Sculthorpe; Lincoln – Dr Sarah Longair; The Western Australian Museum – CEO Alec Coles, Ms Corioli Souter, Ms Amy Wegerhoff, Ms Patricia McDonald, Dr Moya Smith, Ms Diana Jones; Deakin University – Prof Andrea Witcomb, Dr Tiffany Shellam; the State Library of Western Australia – Dr Katherine (Kate) Gregory, Ms Theresa Archer; the Art Gallery of Western Australia – Ms Melissa Harpley. In addition to the major book already contracted (‘Collecting The West: Revealing Western Australia Through Its Collection’ ), I have received a commitment from UWAP to publish a companion book, titled Seeing The West, which will include ground-breaking research produced by project collaborators and doctoral students aimed at a wide readership. For the first time this project aims to demonstrate the important but overlooked history of West Australian visual culture in a national and international context. This project is to be submitted to UWAP in 2020 and published in 2021 to coincide with a 3-day international conference to be held in the Cultural Precinct in Perth in March 2021, and closely associated with the opening of the new WA Museum at the end of 2020. Finally, I wish to note the outstanding achievements of Professor Terri-ann White, whose leadership has put UWAP on the national cultural map. Terri-ann’s stature as writer, thinker and publisher is indicated for example by her election as Honorary Fellow to the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the national body for the humanities in Australia. Honorary Fellows are elected in recognition of their significant contribution to the humanities and the arts, and to Australian cultural life; Professor White is the only West Australian Honorary Fellow. She closely and generously engages with the UWA community of staff and students- for example recently judging the School of Humanities Three Minute Thesis competition for HDR students, alongside the Dean of FABLE. It would be very disappointing to lose her deep knowledge of publishing, the humanities, and UWA. In sum, the closure of UWAP will constitute a major blow to UWA, to Australian history and literature, and to our national public culture. I would welcome the opportunity to discuss this issue further with you and the Executive. With best wishes, ****** ***** Support UWAP by signing the petition at Change.org Comments are closed.
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