Streets of the Long Voyage

Fryer Library at the University of Queensland is one of my favourite places. Compared with the cathedral-like reading rooms of the British Library or Sydney’s Mitchell Library, the scale of Fryer is much more welcoming, with portraits of writers from the collection gracing the walls: Peter Carey in a Hawaiian shirt perhaps – or a pugnacious Xavier Herbert glaring at the artist.

The library’s godfather was English Department lecturer and World War One veteran Dr FW Robinson. ‘Doc Robbie’ as he was known to his students used a small donation to purchase a glass-fronted cedar bookcase which he found room for in his university office. The new library was named in honour of Lieutenant John Fryer who’d rejoined the university as an arts student after service on the Western Front. He died from lung disease in 1923 – in the same month Robinson was appointed to the teaching staff. According to historian and former Fryer Libarian Mark Cryle, the name of a former soldier may have been chosen for the library to aid university fund-raising after the war.

It was another forty years however before Fryer Library began attracting serious researchers. In 1967 – the year before I started my part-time arts course – an obsessive Queensland collector donated his private treasure trove to the university. Father Leo Hayes’ collection of Australian books and manuscripts was legendary among bibliophiles though few realised the full extent of its riches. Archdeacon Hayes had accumulated so much material that his house in Oakey on the Darling Downs was filled to overflowing. Even more was stored in the basement of the Convent School next door.

Three weeks before his death, a team of university staff and a convoy of removal trucks were dispatched to Oakey to bring back 25 tons of material packed into 80 large crates and 400 cartons. This extraordinary hoard included 25,000 books as well as manuscripts, journals, newspapers, letters, maps, and photographs. There were also Indigenous artefacts, guns, rock specimens and even cattle bells – a total collection of more than 100,000 items.

Hayes’ bequest coincided with the introduction of an Australian Literature subject in the English Department. This was taught by the pioneering scholar Cecil Hadgraft and then by Laurie Hergenhan who moved his journal Australian Literary Studies from the University of Tasmania to the University of Queensland. In the 1970s I copy-edited the first two volumes of Laurie’s Portable Australian Authors series for the University of Queensland Press and he became a friend and colleague as well as a mentor.

In the 1980s and 90s Fryer began acquiring contemporary author archives including those of UQP authors like Peter Carey, David Malouf, Olga Masters, Michael Dransfield, Rodney Hall, Judith Rodriguez and Thomas Shapcott. When I was a postgraduate student in the English Department, the Fryer Librarian Margaret O’Hagan asked me to help value literary manuscripts on offer to the library. After I rejoined UQP in 1983 Margaret and I began discussing the archival significance of the Press’s publishing files. The most valuable, but also the most sensitive, of these were the 1500 or so author files.

Every few years I’d alert Fryer that another tranche of old files was available for collection and a library van would be dispatched to transport them across campus from UQP’s small warehouse to the loading dock of the university library. It wasn’t quite as dramatic as that convoy of trucks from Oakey on the Darling Downs but over a decade or more Fryer acquired a priceless publishing archive.

I first joined UQP fifty years ago, having completed a diploma in journalism and most of an arts degree. One of my lecturers was Frank Thompson, and at his last American Literature class for 1971 he said he’d show anyone who was interested over the Press. At that point I knew next to nothing about UQP and wasn’t even aware that Frank had been running it for ten years. I thought he must be on the staff of the English department.

I was the only student who took up his invitation for a guided tour of the Press, then housed in a new, brick wing of the original bookshop. He showed me the engine room of the operation – the production department – with its four-metre blackboard to keep track of the complex publishing schedule. With a staff of fifteen, the Press had widened its horizons and Frank was justifiably proud of his purpose-built headquarters which had been designed by his friend, the university architect Jim Birrell.

On my tour, Frank showed me the half-dozen editorial offices which opened out on either side of a long hallway of bright orange carpet. His own, book-lined office was separated from the conference room by sliding, Japanese-style screen doors. On closer inspection, I could see that their paper panels featured the architectural drawings for the building. The conference room itself was like a small art gallery – with paintings by well-known Australian artists.

Two weeks later Frank called me at home to say a position had suddenly become available in his editorial department. It was an entry level job and the pay was low but it was also a rare opportunity to work in publishing. I was still living with my parents and about to return to the Brisbane Courier-Mail where I’d suspended a journalism cadetship to study fulltime. Working with books was more appealing than the life of a newspaper sub, so without hesitation I accepted Frank’s offer.

I’ve written at length about my thirty-year publishing career at UQP in Under Cover: adventures in the art of editing (2015). I was the inaugural fiction editor from 1973 to 1980 and then publishing manager from 1983 to 2000, followed by a short stint as editor-at-large. I left the Press for the last time in 2005 to concentrate on my own book history projects.

One of the areas that remains under-researched is that of university publishing which has a very long history, beginning with the two most venerable presses – those of Oxford and Cambridge. Both began printing books in the late fifteenth century and became established publishers several decades later during the reign of Henry VIII. The first American university press began operating in the seventeenth century at Harvard where it produced a succession of mostly religious texts, including a translation of the Bible into the language of the local Indigenous population.

The oldest continuously operating university press in the United States – at Johns Hopkins University – began as recently as 1878. Twelve years later the University of Chicago Press was established and is now the country’s largest scholarly publisher as well as one of the most respected in the world. Each year it publishes almost 300 new books and more than 80 journals.

After a copyediting and proofreading department was established in 1906 the University of Chicago Press published the first edition of its now legendary Manual of Style: for authors, editors and copywriters. When I began as an editor at UQP, I was given my own copy of the 556-page, second impression of the twelfth edition. Imported direct from Chicago, it was bound in orange cloth that matched the colour of the carpet in the hallway outside my office.

Chicago University Press became profitable after the Second World War but many other American university presses were struggling. In 1957, with the success of Russia’s Sputnik satellite, the US found itself falling behind in the Space Race, and spending on education and research suddenly became a national priority. Library budgets increased as did investment in scholarly publishing, and the 1960s were boom years for American university presses.

In Australia, Melbourne University Press had begun in 1922, initially operating as a student bookshop. Its first title was Myra Willard’s History of the White Australia Policy – published at the author’s expense – and among other early titles was Percival Serle’s Bibliography of Australasian Poetry and Verse. Later in the decade Frank Wilmot became MUP’s first fulltime manager. He was also a published poet, writing under the pen name ‘Furnley Maurice’, and ran a small literary publishing imprint of his own. At the age of thirteen he’d begun working for Cole’s famous Book Arcade in Melbourne.

Like Frank Thompson thirty years later in Brisbane, Wilmot ran the university bookshop as well as the Press and gave literature lectures to students. In the inter-war period he also began accepting volumes of original poetry for the MUP list. In 1938 he received a positive reader report on RD Fitzgerald’s poetry manuscript ‘Moonlight Acre’.

‘Is it so good,’ Wilmot asked the reader, ‘that it is our duty to lose money on it?’

As a publisher, and a writer himself, Wilmot had a nose for new talent, and Moonlight Acre went on to win the prestigious Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, establishing Fitzgerald’s reputation as a poet.

It wasn’t until after the war that another Australian scholarly press was established, this time at the University of Queensland which had been issuing handbooks, lectures and the occasional book under its own coat of arms. In 1948 the university Senate created a separate department with responsibility for both publishing and bookselling. Throughout the 1950s the part-time manager of UQP was Athol Perkins, head of the Entomology Department, who’d chaired the publications committee prior to the establishment of the Press. Scientific research dominated the publishing list, and its first Australian literature title was a celebration of Queensland writing for the state’s centenary in 1959.

Two years later the university replaced Perkins with a young American, Frank Thompson, who’d grown up in Los Angeles before studying literature and economics at Michigan State University. He was the student magazine’s fiction editor, and worked part-time in the warehouse of Michigan State University Press. After graduating, he became assistant to the director of the press, Lyle Blair – an Australian who’d previously worked at Jonathan Cape in London.

It was a four-year publishing apprenticeship ‘so intense, so frustrating and so fraught,’ Frank later wrote, ‘that I remember those years with a combination of terror and pleasure’. Blair had often spoken with enthusiasm about Australia, and at the age of 26 Frank bought a one-way ticket to Sydney to see for himself. After teaching for a few months, he joined the staff of Angus & Robertson – then Australia’s largest publishing and bookselling company, with more than 500 staff. At first he dusted and shelved books as a shop assistant before joining the publishing division in the production department.

‘I was very happy but broke,’ he remembers, ‘because Angus & Robertson had a certain Scottish Presbyterian reluctance to expose its staff to the temptations of wealth.’

He left A&R and joined US publisher Prentice-Hall as their first Australasian tertiary rep. After calling on academics at the University of Queensland he was invited to apply for the new position of General Manager, Bookshop and Press. The selection committee were impressed with his publishing and bookselling experience but especially the latter as there were problems in the bookshop which required urgent attention. Revitalising the Press however was a much tougher assignment.

‘On my arrival I found not only did I have no publishing staff, but I had no place to put a desk and a chair.’

He spent a couple of weeks in the vacant office of the university auditor before accommodation was found – not far from the Bookshop – in the General Purposes Hut, a makeshift building left over after the war. The inside walls were more like partitions, and student weightlifters worked out in the room adjacent to those occupied by UQP.

Frank’s first secretary and then editor was Ann Lahey, who’d been working in the registrar’s office producing the book-length University Calendar each year. Ann had majored in English at the University of Queensland and later spent eighteen months in London working as assistant to the director of special projects at Readers Digest. She was a skilled and meticulous editor who tamed the most demanding and complex works of scholarship, and trained a new generation of UQP editors.

Another talented staff member was Cyrelle Birt, a young artist who’d worked as an assistant in the Bookshop. Frank Thompson offered her a position as UQP production assistant and arranged for her to receive work experience at Wilke Printers in Melbourne and Halstead Press in Sydney. She learned quickly, becoming production manager and chief designer, and earning the respect of printing firms throughout Australia and Southeast Asia during her dozen years in the role. Briskly efficient, she kept the publishing schedule on track and always dealt with editors fairly but firmly.

In his early years at UQP, Thompson had to deal with university committees that knew little about publishing. He did however benefit from the support of vice-chancellor Sir Fred Schonell, a respected education scholar and UQP author. Thompson also befriended fellow Brisbane publisher and bookseller Brian Clouston. The larger-than-life Clouston was then running his family’s bookshop in the city as well as Jacaranda Press in Milton, producing text books for the lucrative schools market.

In the 1960s Australian publishing was dominated by British firms – along with Angus & Robertson and Horwitz. After the comic novel They’re a Weird Mob by John O’Grady became an unexpected bestseller for art publisher Ure Smith, that firm began producing mass-market titles, including a series of Weird Mob sequels.

Early in the decade Penguin began experimenting with Australian titles and soon found themselves in competition with Sun Books – set up by Penguin staff unhappy with head office in the UK. Clouston’s Jacaranda Press had begun a creative writing list, publishing first volumes of poetry by Ipswich accountant Thomas Shapcott and Oodgeroo Noonuccal – then known as Kath Walker. Other schools publishers like Rigby in Adelaide were diversifying into general books.

Frank Thompson was not slow to start his own literature list. Along with English Department drama scholar Eunice Hanger, he established the long-running UQP Contemporary Australian Plays series. Hanger was actively involved with theatre in Brisbane, and the extensive collection of unpublished playscripts she acquired over many years is now housed in Fryer Library. The first title in the Contemporary Australian Plays series, A Spring Song by Ray Mathew, was published only months after Frank took over UQP. This was followed by David Ireland’s play Image in the Clay, later reprinted as a high school text.

The treeless campus had only been fully operational for a few years and there was no university staff club. Instead the bar of the Royal Exchange Hotel was where academics, writers and artists met, and where Frank Thompson forged creative alliances and acquired new authors. This raffish hotel beside the railway line at Toowong was not only the de facto university staff club, it was also the watering hole for the nearby ABC headquarters.

‘There was no food at the pub except for hot pies, cabana sausage and Kingaroy roasted peanuts,’ recalls novelist Roger McDonald who was a young producer with the ABC when he met Frank there about 1964. ‘Among jugs of Four X in the beer garden, the genial, intelligent and somewhat Machiavellian Frank was found from late afternoon onwards.’

The ‘RE’ was, in Roger’s words, ‘the blacksmith’s forge of an Australian publishing house that took its willing, eclectic and innovative style from the style of Frank himself’. UQP had existed before Frank Thompson ‘but he was its true founder, transforming a part-time university publications office into a national institution’.

In his 2018 Fryer lecture, Nicholas Jose also paid tribute to Thompson, highlighting one of his early UQP titles, The Drunken Buddha, published in 1965. Jose described it as ‘one of the most extraordinary productions in Australian publishing history … a courageous, visionary piece of publishing’.

The Drunken Buddha had been translated by artist Ian Fairweather, then living on Bribie Island. He’d travelled widely since the 1920s and had spent several years in Shanghai and Beijing, becoming familiar with Chinese languages and culture. Among the texts he’d translated was the story of a wandering Buddhist monk prone to bouts of drinking and showing off. One of his party tricks was to stand on his head without any underwear on.

This popular Chinese story has ‘a certain Rabelaisian pungency’ according to Pierre Ryckmans, who also wrote under the pen name Simon Leys. ‘It deals with the eccentricities and wisdom of a legendary Zen monk who – in a way – embodied in traditional China the sort of counter-culture which came to flourish in the modern West with the advent of the hippie movement.’

In his Fryer lecture, Jose revealed that Laurie Thomas, Director of the Queensland Art Gallery, was planning a retrospective of Fairweather’s work when two University of Queensland lecturers – Paul Gerber from the law department and Clayton Bredt – ‘shepherded’ the manuscript of The Drunken Buddha to Frank Thompson. Gerber was an admirer of Fairweather’s art, and Bredt was an American who’d recently joined the university to teach Chinese history.

After a visit to Fairweather’s bush shack on Bribie Island, Thompson offered to publish The Drunken Buddha – but only if the reclusive artist would illustrate the story. Fairweather agreed, and some months later Frank received a message that the paintings were ready to be collected. Visiting Bribie Island once again, he was astonished to be handed, not a parcel of small illustrations but twelve full-size paintings – now regarded as among Fairweather’s greatest. Prized by collectors, the original edition of The Drunken Buddha went out of print in the 1970s and was not republished until UQP released a special new edition to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary in 2015.

During the 1960s Frank Thompson encountered many artists at the Royal Exchange Hotel, and Jim Birrell introduced him to Charles and Barbara Blackman after they settled in Brisbane on their return from London in 1966. Barbara had been fifteen when two fellow students at Brisbane State High School – Barrett Reid and Laurence Collinson – launched Barjai magazine in 1943. Two years later it was being published nationally as a literary and art quarterly to showcase ‘creative youth’. Other writers attracted to the Barjai group included Judith Wright and Thea Astley.

Barbara had begun losing her sight while still at school, and when she and Charles married in 1952 she helped support them by working as an artists’ model. After meeting Barbara in 1966, Frank Thompson encouraged her writing and two years later published her first book – The Little Lives of Certain Chairs, a Table or Two and Other Inanimates of Our Acquaintance. Illustrated by Charles Blackman, it was later republished by Viking Press under the title Certain Chairs.

In 1971 Charles illustrated the most lavish, large-format book UQP has ever published – Apparition by British poet Al Alvarez. ‘I first met Charles Blackman in 1961, soon after he arrived in London,’ Alvarez wrote. ‘Earlier that year I had seen some of his paintings at that extraordinary exhibition of Australia art at the Whitechapel Gallery. The whole show was explosive and liberating, and Charles’s paintings spoke to me in a powerful and direct way.’

Apparition was published in an edition of 1000 copies at $10.50, with a further hundred bound in leather. These sold for the then astronomical price of $50 – the equivalent of about $500 today. Even the cheaper edition is very special. Lifting off its jacket reveals a Blackman line drawing of two lovers kissing – printed in gold foil on the linen boards.

Most colour-illustrated Australian books were – and still are – printed in Southeast Asia, but Apparition was produced in Brisbane at Watson Ferguson & Co, where UQP staff could check each proof as it came off the press. As The Drunken Buddha had been, Apparition was an intimate marriage of art and literature, and it won production manager Cyrelle Birt an important award for her design – of the interior as well as the cover. Each of the twenty-one poems is set in Bembo type on the left-hand page, with Alvarez’s handwritten version on the facing page. Seven of the poems are illustrated with Blackman paintings – all reproduced full-size.

Frank Thompson’s friendship with the Blackmans had helped inspire a new UQP series, Artists in Queensland. The first four books were launched in 1967, including Focus on Charles Blackman by Thomas Shapcott and Focus on Judith Wright by Bill Scott, a poet who worked at Jacaranda Press. The series was culturally eclectic. Brisbane poet David Rowbotham was the subject of a later volume, as was the potter Milton Moon.

As well as encouraging his friend Roger McDonald’s literary ambitions, Frank became acquainted with the two most prolific poets of the 1960s – Queenslanders Thomas Shapcott and Rodney Hall. Of the roughly one hundred individual poetry volumes published in Australia during that decade, eight were by Hall and seven by Shapcott.

Books by Queensland poets in fact accounted for more than 40 per cent of the national tally, and Shapcott, Hall and later David Malouf formed a powerful network as writers, friends, critics and editors. Hall, for example, was the Australian newspaper’s poetry editor for twelve years and, along with Malouf, became a poetry adviser to Angus & Robertson. In 1973 Shapcott, along with Malouf, was a founding member of the Literature Board of the Australia Council, and a decade later was appointed as the Literature Board’s fulltime director.

In 1966 Frank had accepted for publication Shapcott and Hall’s anthology New Impulses in Australian Poetry. Unfortunately production stalled when the Commonwealth Literary Fund insisted on significant cuts, and it couldn’t be published without assistance to pay the contributors. As finally published, the anthology was whittled down to 22 writers, only three of whom were women, with Judith Rodriguez and Oodgeroo Noonuccal represented by just one poem each. There were however ten poems by Gwen Harwood, who’d also grown up in Brisbane.

New Impulses was released in June 1968 in an edition of 1500 copies and was reprinted two years later. One of the poets culled from the anthology was Roger McDonald, whose debut poetry volume Citizens of Mist is now celebrated as UQP’s first sole-authored book of poetry. It was published several months after New Impulses, with a print-run of 750 copies.

In the UQP archive in Fryer Library is Cyrelle Birt’s meticulous production logbook which records every book’s format, printing cost, subsidy, and the exact number of copies delivered into UQP’s small warehouse. It indicates that while New Impulses finally received its all-important CLF subsidy, McDonald’s book was published without any financial assistance.

By the late 1960s Angus & Robertson still dominated the poetry market, supplying a regular stream of anthologies, single-author volumes and commercially repackaged reprints of Lawson and Paterson. ‘Aside from our friendly rivals Jacaranda Press,’ Frank Thompson said, ‘very few publishers had attempted more than the occasional volume by a younger poet.’

David Malouf was 34 when he returned to Australia in 1968 with a manuscript of poems he’d been working on in England. ‘Poetry in the late sixties had suddenly become the liveliest and most visible of the literary arts,’ Malouf remembers. ‘Almost any night of the week in Sydney there was a reading, and a good many of them were protests against the war in Vietnam.’ Each weekend, he said, poems appeared in both The Australian and The Age – the first chosen by Rodney Hall, the second by R. A. Simpson, one of the featured poets in the New Impulses anthology.

On a visit to Brisbane in 1969, Malouf visited Frank Thompson to pitch the idea of a book on Australia’s fast-disappearing cinemas – the ‘old palaces of popular culture’ as Malouf described them. During the meeting Thompson asked if he had a book-length collection of poems that might be suitable for UQP which was about to publish a new Shapcott volume. Malouf was prepared to offer his manuscript to UQP but only if it could be produced as a paperback of 64 pages that would sell for a dollar.

‘Frank astonished me by saying that if his people told him it was financially viable he would do it. As I was to discover later, this was a wonderful example of his daring and impulsive style.’ Malouf has a vivid recollection of what happened next. ‘Frank picked up the phone, called in two or three of his production crew (one was Cyrelle Birt), and after a quarter of an hour of argument and calculations they came up with a unit cost of, I think, twenty-three cents.’

‘Okay, mate,’ Frank told him, ‘you’re on!’

At that time UQP was publishing almost forty titles a year, and Frank Thompson wanted to expand his staff. When poet Roger McDonald decided to leave the ABC, Thompson created a position for him as Poetry and Audio-Visual editor. He couldn’t justify appointing an editor whose sole responsibility was poetry but knew the university wanted to embrace new technology.

‘Who better to become audio-visual editor than the bright young ABC television producer? Roger, in fact, filled both roles with distinction,’ Frank said. ‘Not only did we develop, largely through his efforts, the best poetry list in Australia, but we also became early players in non-book publishing.’

The first three slim, small-format books in the Paperback Poets series were published in March 1970. Cyrelle had arranged for them to be printed on campus to minimise costs and thereby keep the retail price down to a dollar as David Malouf had requested. Appropriately it was Malouf’s Bicycle and Others Poems that bore the series number one on its black-and-white cover. The original print run of 1500 was later topped up with another 900 copies.

Number two in the series introduced a much younger writer and a spectacular poetic talent – the 21-year-old Michael Dransfield. The title of his book was Streets of the Long Voyage but his life was tragically cut short when he died from a drug overdose in 1974. When his 1500 copies sold out the reprint this time was 2000 copies – an indication of his future status as a literary cult figure. Before Dransfield’s death, UQP published his second book The Inspector of Tides – generally believed to contain his best work – and by the end of the decade it had sold more than 6000 copies.

Paperback Poets number three was Heaven, in a Way by the prolific and hugely influential Rodney Hall. The more optimistic print run of 2000 copies reflected this, but the book was never reprinted. After Dransfield’s death UQP published another two volumes of his poetry, selected and edited by Hall.

With an eye on the library market, UQP also launched the innovative Poets on Record series of slim hardbacks in 1970. Inside the front cover of each was a pocket and inside that was a small vinyl record of the poet reading his poems. Roger also produced a series of cassettes – Poets on Tape – travelling around Australia himself to record the authors.

In the wake of all these different poetry series, it was David Malouf’s Sydney University colleague Michael Wilding who convinced Frank Thompson to begin publishing literary fiction. ‘Frank didn’t really have to be persuaded,’ says Wilding. ‘Even as I was arguing the case he had already seen it.’ Wilding’s case was that literary fiction was as vulnerable a genre as poetry and that a number of American university presses were now publishing both.

The list was launched with Wilding’s own collection of stories about Sydney bohemian life, Aspects of the Dying Process, and Rodney Hall’s first foray into fiction – with the satirical novel Ship on the Coin. They were published simultaneously in hardback and paperback, with 500 copies for the library market and 2000 for general distribution.

The energetic Wilding – soon to start his own imprint Wild & Woolley – also convinced Thompson to start an Asian and Pacific Writing series which was launched in 1972 with an Indonesian novel in translation, Atheis by Achdiat K Mihardja, and a Filipino story collection, Tropical Gothic by Nick Joaquin – the first two books of fiction I edited for UQP.

That year the Press acquired a very impressive – and no doubt very expensive – new boardroom table. Built of solid silky-oak and several metres long, it took half a dozen of us to wrestle the table up and over the first-floor balcony. Among the early visitors to admire it were Charles and Barbara Blackman, and I remember Charles describing everything in the room in great detail for her.

In pride of place along the wall were his original gouaches from Apparition. Opposite was a large Ian Fairweather oil painting – one of the illustrations from The Drunken Buddha. If you stared at this long enough it was just possible to make out the image of a monk standing on his head. He was to keep that uncomfortable pose for more than three decades, presiding over all our publishing meetings with enigmatic Buddhist calm.

Craig Munro delivered the 2021 Fryer Lecture in Australian Literature via Zoom to an audience at the University of Queensland on 15 November 2021.