This page is a record of a scholarly article relating to Fremantle.
- Part of: Fremantle Studies Volume 11
- Title: Four Decades of Fremantle Press
- Authors: Jane Fraser
- Published: 2022 Fremantle History Society (Fremantle)
- Reference URL: https://freopedia.org/Four_Decades_of_Fremantle_Press
- Tags: Fremantle Studies
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Thank you for having me here today to talk to you about four decades of Fremantle Press and Western Australian publishing. I have been at Fremantle Press for nigh on ten years, and am very familiar with events over the last decade, so it was a lot of fun for today’s presentation finding out more about the other three decades. Here we go.
In 1972, Fremantle City Council established the Fremantle Arts Centre, appointing local poet and visual artist Ian Templeman as its inaugural director. Housed in the refurbished Fremantle Lunatic Asylum, the Centre quickly established a community arts program offering hands- on classes in arts and crafts as well as in creative writing and literature appreciation. While the historic building provided plenty of opportunities to exhibit the work of visual artists, staff at the Arts Centre noted that no such opportunities existed for writers. This led to the creation of a poetry magazine called Patterns and Pinup – a poster designed to be pinned to community noticeboards, which Templeman described as an ‘experimental project aimed at making more widely known the work of Western Australian writers’.
From the beginning, Templeman felt that neither helped fully resolve the difficulties that Western Australians had getting published. Academic Barbara Milech reports that author and Fremantle Arts Centre creative writing instructor Elizabeth Jolley found publishing ‘a slow, hard business from Western Australia’, which seemed to her a result of the fact that those who governed Eastern States publishing houses had little interest in literary offerings from the west.
In 1975, spurred on by premier Sir Charles Court’s promise that, if elected, he would establish a Western Australian literary fund to help local writers get published, Templeman commissioned Terry Owen to conduct a feasibility study into the establishment of a publishing house. That study led to the creation of Fremantle Arts Centre Press, now known as Fremantle Press. Not only did support come from Court’s promise to establish a literary fund, but also from the Whitlam government’s establishment of the Australia Council, which provided publishing subsidies for literary works: books were exempted from sales tax and a government-run Book Bounty system subsidised printing of books in Australia. That, teamed with the City of Fremantle’s support in the form of staff and a home at Fremantle Arts Centre, made the establishment of the Press and the publication of its first titles possible.
From the start, though it was housed at the Arts Centre, the Press was designed to run independently and was set up as a not-for-profit organisation. Nonetheless, Templeman was appointed Chief Executive and Terry Owen became the Press’s first General Manager, drafting our constitution and our first mission statement, which has barely changed in four decades. That was:
To publish and promote to the widest possible audience the works of Western Australian writers and artists who may otherwise not be published by commercial publishing houses, and to record the cultural heritage of the State in a form that is easily accessible to the widest possible audience.
With additional staff members Sue Grey-Smith and Joan Sullivan, Terry Owen set up the Press in a poky attic at the Arts Centre. They leased an IBM Selectric composer, which at the time was cutting-edge technology. The machine produced camera-ready copy and most importantly could be operated by a typist rather than a professional compositor. This meant the book’s pre-production and design could be undertaken in-house, just as it is today. Unlike today, however, the Selectric had just thirteen fonts, which could be printed in only a handful of font styles from eight to fourteen points. It also had a fragile and tricky to replace typeball system, which meant that most books were in fact printed in the same font.
In 1976, the Press published its first book, Soundings, an anthology of Western Australian poetry edited by Veronica Brady. Though critically well received by the local media, the book’s production values left a lot to be desired. Poor binding meant the book fell apart in reviewers’ hands and had to be returned to the printer to be stapled through the cover and spine. Then the book had to be withdrawn from sale altogether after Dorothy Hewett’s ex-husband, solicitor Lloyd Davies, threatened to sue the Press for allegedly libellous material contained in one of Hewett’s poems. It was withdrawn from trade, though by this time, most of the initial print run had already sold. Local artist Guy Grey-Smith’s woodcuts adorned the cover of Soundings and the cover of our second publication, New country. The latter was a collection of short stories that, as editor Bruce Bennett pointed out, was the first of its kind to feature Western Australian writers since 1959 – a clear indicator that the state needed a local publisher dedicated to supporting local authors.
One such author was Elizabeth Jolley – one of Western Australia’s great literary success stories. Her first book, Five acre virgin and other stories, sat alongside Nicholas Hasluck’s Anchor and other poems as one of two single- author books published by the Press in its first year. Jolley had begun teaching at Fremantle Arts Centre in 1974 and by the time of her first publication was one of the Centre’s most popular tutors. We held our first launch in the grounds of Fremantle Arts Centre in the middle of a Perth heatwave. The scorching temperatures didn’t stop five hundred guests turning out to celebrate and, in less than a month, Fremantle Press had sold the entire print run at the recommended retail price of $2.95. Jolley’s speech on the night was a hit and she added an eccentric twist to the evening when she moved among the crowd giving out ‘little treats’ – one woman was presented with a can of beetroot!
Clive Newman, who was the Deputy Director of the Fremantle Arts Centre at the time, said:
Five acre virgin and other stories provided our first rush of adrenaline when enthusiastic reviews prompted strong sales in Perth. We boldly sent review copies of the book to literary editors around Australia, most of whom responded by running prompt and positive reviews, and discovered what was to be a major problem for the Press for many years – how to effectively and efficiently distribute our titles on a national basis. Discerning readers outside Western Australia had to demonstrate remarkable persistence in order to acquire a copy of the book.
The review in the Sydney Morning Herald, for instance, sent a customer scurrying in to Gleebooks in Sydney, then and now one of the finest independent booksellers in the country. Good old Dave Gaunt (who was then good young Dave Gaunt), co-proprietor, mailed us an order for one copy. We obliged, of course, with an invoice for $1.77 – that’s $2.95 less the booksellers’ discount. Dave sent us a cheque for $1.77 and remains one of our favourite people in the book trade. What this story highlights is the fact that, until we had good distribution, the Press spent inordinate amounts of time and money sending single book parcels to the Eastern States, then chasing up outstanding invoices for ludicrously small amounts of money.
Five acre virgin has since been published in a number of different editions, both in Australia and overseas, and the stories remain as fresh and enchanting today as they did when they first appeared in 1976. Elizabeth published five more books with the Press as part of an acclaimed international career.
Another early success that highlighted our urgent need for adequate distribution was A fortunate life by A.B. Facey. The bestselling memoir was pulled from the submissions pile by Fremantle Press Commissioning Editor Wendy Jenkins. A fortunate life arrived as a roughly typed manuscript tied together with green-and-white waxed string. Wendy said:
It did not look promising but almost immediately had my attention – and kept it. I read with growing interest, then excitement, skipping ahead to get a sense of the sweep of the life and to see if the story and voice were sustained. I experienced that almost visceral feeling I have had maybe three or four times when reading a manuscript by an unknown author that has arrived truly out of the blue.
There was no marketing budget for the book, so the Press approached well-known figures such as former prime minister Gough Whitlam and renowned historians Humphrey McQueen and Geoffrey Dutton. These endorsements, as well as a particularly strong recommendation from the host of a books segment on a high-rating Sydney radio station, plus extracts in both national and local papers, drove a demand for A fortunate life that could not be fulfilled by single-book mail parcels.
Publisher Ray Coffey said:
The book almost sent us broke! It took off so quickly, before it had even been released, really. The orders were such that the first print run was gone and we didn’t have the money to pay for a new print run. So we took out a little low-interest loan to do that. But within weeks of those copies arriving from the printer we had to reprint again. Soon after Penguin came to the Press and offered to buy the book, which was refused, but [we] agreed to license the rights, a deal which is still in play today.
After the phenomenal success of A fortunate life, when the time of the first lease agreement was due for renewal in 1986 we were able to negotiate a national distribution deal with Penguin – the first of its kind and one which persists to this day.
This was around the time when the Press was working on another memoir called My place, which became the first book to benefit from the new distribution deal. The Press had inaugurated its Indigenous list with Gularabulu by Paddy Roe with Stephen Muecke in 1983. According to academic Bob Hodge, this book heralded the birth of a new Australian literary tradition. That was because the book could be understood in both the Aboriginal and the colonial cultural contexts. You have to remember that this was the early 80s, before the time when Indigenous presses such as Magabala Books and Aboriginal Studies Press existed. So books like Gularabulu, with its mix of Aboriginal English, true stories and myths, were seen as groundbreaking texts. When My place came out in May 1984, there had been some published work by Aboriginal writers, but still not a great deal. In addition to this, women’s experience was just starting to be noticed in fiction and non-fiction and, with the bicentenary approaching, there was a marked interest in Australian narratives. Using the same PR and marketing techniques we had employed for A fortunate life, the book began to sell within the first few weeks of getting it out into shops. This time when Penguin came to us with a lease agreement, we were able to say no thanks, we have a great distribution deal in place! So we still hold the rights to My place, with three quarters of a million copies sold to date.
But the 1980s were not just notable for these two books and it would be remiss of me to not mention that this was also the time when we released the first book Joan London ever published, Sister ships, which went on to win the Age Book of the Year. The 80s were when we began publishing the botanical artist Philippa Nikulinsky, and it was the decade when we started our long association with two of Australia’s most important poets, John Kinsella and Philip Salom. Indeed, Salom’s The silent piano and Sky poems won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1981 and 1987 respectively, being named Best First Book and Best Book of Poetry published in the Commonwealth countries during those years.
By the 1990s, the Press had long moved from the Fremantle Arts Centre attic and into South Fremantle. The premises were so cold that, when working late, employees usually found themselves sharing the heater with a resident mouse, who would pop up from beneath the floorboards to shiver alongside the editors and production assistants.
A new partnership between Fremantle Press and New Edition Bookshop saw the creation of the T.A.G. Hungerford Award for a previously unpublished manuscript by a Western Australian author. It was named for author Tom Hungerford, who was described as one of ‘the Grand Old Men of Australian Literature’ and who was thrilled to have the award named in his honour. Hungerford had had a long association with the Press, since the late 1970s, publishing six volumes with us and receiving the Patrick White Award for literature in 2002.
The inaugural Hungerford winner in 1990 was Brenda Walker, whose winning novel Crush was published in two editions by Fremantle Press and went on to be published in an Italian translation. The next emerging writer to win the award was Gail Jones, with her book The house of breathing. Gail has of course gone on to even greater literary successes, including having won the Western Australian Premier’s Award for Fiction four times (1993, 1997, 2002 and 2004), three times being shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, and being recognised in several international awards including being longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and twice longlisted for the Orange Prize.
While Jones’s The house of breathing won the 1991 Hungerford Award, a fellow entrant identified that year was Kim Scott, whose manuscript we later published. Fast-forward into the past decade of the Hungerford Award and we see Alice Nelson being named Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Novelist for The last sky, Jacqueline Wright’s Red dirt talking being longlisted for both a Miles Franklin and a Nita B. Kibble Award, and Robert Edeson’s The weaver fish being picked up for publication in the UK and US.
One part of the program that commenced in the 1990s has arguably done the most towards helping Fremantle Press continue to thrive in the fickle world of publishing. When author Ellisha Majid’s children Robert and Sarah were little, she decided to write a story just for them. ‘There was a small plastic sausage squashed in their big toy box wanting to get out and run away,’ said Majid. ‘And so it did.’
Published 25 years ago, A sausage went for a walk was our first children’s book. At the time, the then sales manager said it would ‘never sell’, but 20,000 copies later, he’s been well and truly proved wrong. It eventually became a Spare Parts Puppet Theatre production and perhaps the only person who doesn’t remember Sausage fondly is their current director Michael Barlow – he spent more years in a Sausage suit than he perhaps cares to remember.
Former publisher Ray Coffey said the creation of the children’s list was driven by demand, with unsolicited children’s manuscripts being sent to the Press even though we did not have a children’s program. Ray said:
there was a young fella called Shaun Tan. We saw talent there but we couldn’t help him because we weren’t publishing in that area. Within twelve months we totally changed direction regarding picture books and went back to him but by then someone else had snaffled him. [Lothian Books]
Before commencing the list, Ray immersed himself in children’s books and did a lot of homework, talking, over quite a period, to writers and academics, teachers and librarians who specialised in kids’ books. He said: And after some time we felt we were in a position to begin feeling our way in this area of publishing with some confidence. And basically that’s how we work with every area. In a real sense it’s driven by authors who are looking for an outlet for their work.
Those early children’s books included Bawoo stories by May O’Brien, one of the first books in Australia to feature an Indigenous language (Wongutha), and Cat balloon, which came with a CD-Rom soundtrack and which also went on to become a very successful Spare Parts Puppet Theatre production.
The deep by Tim Winton and Karen Louise was another early and very popular publication. The book was shortlisted for a Western Australian Premier’s Book Award and Highly Commended in the Australian Family Therapists’ Award for Children’s Literature in 1999. It too was adapted for the stage by Spare Parts Puppet Theatre and is still a part of their repertoire.
We ended the 90s, however, on a different kind of high. The early and continuing success of his book Australia’s west made it an easy decision to partner with Richard Woldendorp’s own Sandpiper Press in 1999 to publish an extraordinary collection of his aerial photography, Down to earth: Australian landscapes. Richard’s work had always featured aerial landscapes, but the new book focused exclusively on this presentation and reflected his passion for flying over Australia in small planes, armed with his cameras, to record the landscape in his own particular way.
His obsession with landscape was shared by Tim Winton. At the breakfast launch of Down to earth, Tim told a story about flying with Richard one day just to see how he did it. Tim said he got the biggest fright of his life when he turned around to see Richard (who would have been in his 70s by then) hanging halfway out of the plane with his camera dangling around his neck. Twenty years later and Richard, who is now in his 90s, is still at it. We’ll be publishing another book by Richard later next year.
Back in the 1930s with the paperback barely invented, the concept of ebooks and ereaders was proposed by the American writer Bob Brown. He said, ‘To continue reading at today’s speed, I must have a machine.’ He described his ideal future ereader as ‘A simple reading machine which I can carry or move around, attach to any old electric light plug and read hundred-thousand-word novels in ten minutes if I want to, and I want to.’ Furthermore, this machine would ‘allow readers to adjust the type size and avoid paper cuts.’ Seventy-three years later, after floppy disc books and CD-Rom expanded novels, Sony released the world’s first ereader – and Fremantle Press was ready (sort of !). Working with local company eBooks. com, Benang by Kim Scott became our first ebook to be published in a format approximating what we know ebooks to be today.
A much more compelling ‘first’ for Kim Scott and his book was to come, though. In 2000 with Benang, he became the first Aboriginal writer to win Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award, which he won again with That deadman dance in 2011. Talking to Susan Midalia at the time of Benang’s publication, Kim explained that he wanted to deal with his sense of being psychologically damaged and culturally dispossessed as ‘the first white man born’ in his immediate family, the product of a long-standing, systematic, state-sanctioned policy of assimilation or the ‘biological absorption’, as it was called, of the Aboriginal race. To this end, his research, conducted over a five-year period, was both personal – tracing his family history though Welfare files – and more broadly historical – drawing on a diversity of sources including books, letters, parliamentary debates, a Royal Commission report and newspaper articles. An imaginative blend of fact and fiction, archival documentation and invention, Benang was designed to be educative in both historical and emotional terms – to inform us about the shameful history of the white treatment of Aboriginal people and also, centrally, to ‘speak from the heart’.
After starting the millennium with this historic Miles Franklin win, Fremantle Press went on to publish two award-winning books that highlighted the histories of post-settler life for Aboriginal people. Anna Haebich’s history of Australia’s Stolen Generations, Broken circles, won the New South Wales Premier’s Book of the Year, the Gleebooks Prize, the Victorian Premier’s Book Award and the AIATSIS Stanner Award, while Stephen Kinnane’s Shadow Lines won the AIATSIS Stanner Award and the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award for Non-fiction.
Within a decade of commencing the children’s list, Fremantle Press was publishing the first Australian young adult novel to cover the topic of cyberbullying, the bestselling Destroying Avalon by Kate McCaffrey, and winning this country’s most prized children’s book award, the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Picture Book of the Year Award for In Flanders Fields by Norman Jorgensen and Brian Harrison-Lever. Illustrator Harrison-Lever said creating a book based on the appalling conditions of World War I was emotional and stressful. He said:
Being the proud father of a nineteen-year-old son does have advantages, I discovered, when son Tom willingly agreed to allow me to pose him in all of the attitudes and situations described in my ‘storyboard’ … This unexpected though possibly predictable outcome had the advantage for me of allowing a relationship or bond to develop between me the artist and the character I was leading through Norman Jorgensen’s storyline. It also had a stressful and emotional outcome in that over the period of several months of concentrated research and actual work on the drawings, I became, for many hours each day, totally absorbed by the appalling conditions of the Western Front and the happenings in Flanders Fields. Having to turn off the desk lights and close the door on it all each night, feeling at times that I was leaving my son in there, was difficult. It was necessary on some nights to open the door to his room just to reassure myself that he was sitting happily working at his computer.
Another adult author to work on a children’s book with Fremantle Press was Craig Silvey whose spin-off picture book The world according to Warren was created with illustrator Sonia Martinez. The book featured Warren, the guide dog from Silvey’s first novel, and was a Children’s Book Council of Australia Notable Book and shortlisted for the Crichton Award for New Illustrators in 2008. Famously turned down by his now current publisher Allen & Unwin because he was an unknown, Craig Silvey was only nineteen when he finished his first novel, Rhubarb, which he funded by cleaning toilets, selling ice creams and working in a hardware store. It was published by Fremantle Press in 2004 and won Craig the Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist award. The book was hailed by critics and readers alike, was chosen as the ‘One Book’ for the Perth International Arts Festival in 2005, and was included in the national Books Alive campaign. The Sunday Times reported that the book made him the darling of reading groups from Rockingham to Joondalup, who hung on his every word and made him eat lots of rhubarb pie.
By this time, Fremantle Press was operating out of our current building on Quarry Street – the Dux Building. Originally a bottling works for a cordial manufacturer, the building was renovated in the late 70s as a workshop and residence for the luthier Scott Wise. (A luthier is a maker of stringed instruments such as violins and guitars.) People drop by occasionally with stories about having babies in the top rooms and about our building being the one-time home of a troupe of opera singers who drank their earnings. We’d love to know if that last one is true. In any case, the creativity of the building’s myths feels appropriate for a purveyor of stories.
During my decade at the Press, I have overseen the handover to a new generation of publishing professionals – each with their own specialities and interests. Though she’s been at the Press since 1997, Cate Sutherland took on the role of Children’s Publisher ten years ago. In that role, she has nurtured the talents of local creators and established strong partnerships between writers and illustrators, many of whom are publishing their work for the first time. During her tenure, there has been an increase in rights sales ,with children’s books being the most sought after by foreign publishers.
Indigenous picture book creator Ambelin Kwaymullina was the first Australian children’s author to launch her books in China, and more have since sold into China, South Korea, the USA and Europe. Cate says:
Working with new and emerging authors and illustrators is exciting and incredibly rewarding. For me, these books are very personal. Each book represents many hours of deliberation, discussion and consultation, as well as fun and laughter. Our goal always is to work with the creators to help them perfect their craft and to make a book the very best it can be.
Along with foreign rights sales, Cate’s books have been read on television and on children’s radio and this year, Dianne Wolfer’s books Lighthouse girl and Light horse boy were produced by Black Swan Theatre Company and played to packed houses.
When Georgia Richter took on the role as publisher of our adult titles, one of her first books was a crime novel, and since then she has developed an award-winning crime list with international appeal. Over the past seven years she has nurtured a small but critically acclaimed list of crime novels that have won two Ned Kelly Awards, as well another Ned Kelly shortlisting and a longlisting for the Miles Franklin.
Dorothy Hewett once observed that ‘Perth’s air of manufactured innocence … was in fact the perfect field for corruption’. And Tim Winton has written of a ‘kind of hardness and blindness that comes with an invader’s ethos.’ The boom state, the bloody colonial history, the spectacular and extreme landscape – all are fertile ground for crime fiction.
What we’re seeing right now is authors grappling with our invader past, present and future in works by writers like Peter Docker and Jacqueline Wright. Crime fiction has a way of turning a forensic eye on unpalatable subjects that we may be reluctant to encounter in ‘real life’ and of provoking thought even as it entertains. It’s not an easy space to write in – nor is it always a comfortable space to publish from – but we believe it’s important.
And it is reaping rewards for Fremantle Press with crime list authors selling well, garnering critical acclaim, gracing the awards lists, and being sold into European and other territories.
Over the years we have supplemented our sales income through sponsorship and donations, but also through custom publishing projects for clients from a wide range of backgrounds. For example, we’ve been commissioned to produce books that feature private and public art collections, including the Kerry Stokes Collection and Wesfarmers Arts, we’ve produced corporate and community histories such as those for the Royal Perth Yacht Club, the Metropolitan Cemeteries Board, the City of Bassendean and Shire of Perenjori, as well as a recent publication we produced for the Dambimangari Aboriginal Corporation. We’ve created books for sporting organisations like the East Fremantle Football Club, WAIS and the Rottnest Channel Swim. Since 2006, we’ve been producing books for the State Library of Western Australia and their Better Beginnings program providing books for new mums and dads. Last year we also set up a philanthropic program called the Fremantle Press Champions of Literature whereby book lovers from all over donate each year to support our program of activities.
So here we are, 41 and a half years later, with the same core purpose to identify talented new and emerging Western Australian writers and artists, and to publish and distribute their work to the widest possible audience. When we returned to Fremantle Arts Centre to celebrate our 40 th anniversary last year, we were humbled by the community response. Almost 800 people came along to listen to readings from each decade of our existence and to show their support of what we do.
Ultimately, while these stories germinate in a Western Australian context, what they reveal about the self and society has no borders. I think the best kind of books are those that speak to us personally as readers. Books that help us know ourselves and have empathy for others. Books that transport and transform. Our job at Fremantle Press is to find those stories here in Western Australia, then share them with the world.
1 Endnotes were not available for this paper as the material was produced from various sources, a mix of documents, articles blog posts and personal conversations and therefore difficult to reference. Contact Fremantle Press if further information is required.