Australian Bigots Are Also Dishonest, Who Knew?

In Australia one of the current favourite targets for bigots, scumbags, libertarians and other assorted Trump-emboldened shitheads is section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, which makes unlawful any act reasonably likely to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or group of people because of their race, colour, nationality or ethnicity. There's a push, which our Prime Minister (a weak-kneed and utterly pointless shell of a man who has mastered the lawyer's art of believing and orating pompously about whatever he has been paid to believe) now supports, to have it removed from the nation's laws.

Yesterday I saw this book, No Offence Intended: Why 18c Is Wrong, published by local right-wing dipshit press Connor Court, and the total dishonesty and speciousness of its cover really riled me up.

It's not young Asian women who are being "censored" by 18C. It's invariably the sort of white men who want to deport Muslims and abolish feminism, and who are terrified of the reality of a world that doesn't all look exactly like themselves, and whose frothing rabid hate speech hasn't exactly been curtailed by this law they claim to be so restrictive. Until 11 September 2001, these turds were shitting on Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants (when they weren't taking sex tours to Thailand). Now they pretend that these victims of theirs are the ones being oppressed, and that they are bravely defending their freedoms. To which we can only respond with a hearty Go fuck yourselves!.

Penguin Australian Classics

As my country stumbles dickheadedly into the shitbin, a population of bigots and morons led by a government of mendacious and vindictive arseholes, it's nice to have one small positive to note: the design of the Penguin Australian Classics series. This (supposedly ongoing) series of smallish hardbacks have their cover designs printed directly onto the boards.

Designed by Adam Laszczuk, with illustration by Josh Durham, they make use of fields of flat (yet lightly weathered or textured) colour and sharp-edged illustrative elements. Click on each image for much, much bigger versions.

Note that all of these books were already in print from Penguin Australia, some as Penguin Modern Classics: I hope future entries in the series will rescue out-of-print titles from oblivion, as does the sterling Text Classics series.

Writers No One Reads 2

My second Writer No One Reads entry, George Edgerton (Mary "Chav" Chavelita Dunne) is up here.

Shameless Self-Promotion

Having long been a fan of the work of Will Schofield, the vast throbbing brain behind 50 Watts (and its forerunner, A Journey Round My Skull) and one of three behind Writers No One Reads, I was thrilled to be asked to contribute the occasional contribution to the latter. My first is about would-be assassin, poet and novelist Peter Kocan.

WTF GDR?

I just readAnna Funder's most excellent Stasiland, only 9 years after everybody else. But for the life of me I cannot make sense of the cover of the Australian (and first) edition. The book is about life under the all-encompassing surveillance of the East German secret police and their vast network of informers. The cover is a cold-looking woman wearing a glittery top. I don't know what it is meant to represent, and it's really bugging me. Does anyone have any ideas?

Long Story Shorts

There's an Australian designer who has done some wonderful covers recently, and who I'm ashamed to say I'd not heard of until I read the excellent interview he gave to Óscar Palmer at his site Cultura Impopular. His name is Dean Gorissen. I urge you to go there to read it, and here's why: the six covers he designed for Australian press Affirm, the 'Long Story Shorts' collections of short stories by emerging Australian writers. Click for bigger versions.

Peter Carey and the Paper Pubes

(Sorry about the title, but I couldn't resist.)

A couple of posts ago, I showed a couple of Australian designer Jenny Grigg's covers for Vintage Classics Australia. I first became aware of her work when she redesigned the Peter Carey backlist for his original Australian publisher, the University of Queensland Press, using lovely woodblocky letters and textures.

Unusually, when Carey jumped ship to Random House, the same designer was asked to redesign all of his works, which she did using what look like layers of folded and crumpled paper (hence the paper pubes on Illywhacker).

Carey's an unusual writer in that he seems to be held in much higher esteem overseas than he is here in Australia. Part of this is the standard (and sometimes unthinking and automatic) irritation Australians have with those who move overseas but keep pronouncing on Australia and its problems (see Germain Greer, Clive James, etc). But part of it must be that for every genuinely great book he writes (like Oscar and Lucinda or True History of the Kelly Gang) he produces a tedious dud (Theft, His Illegal Self, etc) that plays literary games that weren't worth the playing in the first place.

From one somewhat overrated author to another: Grigg has also produced a series of gorgeous covers for the Danish Linghardt og Ringhof editions of Ernest Hemingway's work. These, unusally, put the major graphic elements on the back covers, leaving the fronts bare of all but a little type.

Absolutely gorgeous.

Black Cockatoos and Crying Children

Australian publisher Allen & Unwin is celebrating its 20th birthday with four "classics" from its backlist (I use inverted commas as The Slap is too new and anything by Andrew McGahan is not good enough to qualify), done up in fancy screenprinted fabric boards, without any text on the covers. The four books in question are (click for much bigger versions):

Journey to the Stone Country by Alex Miller

White Earth by Andrew McGahan

Lilian's Story by Kate Grenville

The Slap by Christon Tsiolkas

 I really dig these--the textlessness, the limited colours and the bold graphics really work. I don't know who any of the artists are as yet, but am endeavouring to find out.



UPDATE: Annette of Allen & Unwin gave me the designer details--"It was our two very talented inhouse designers, Lisa White for 'Lilian's Story' and 'The Slap' and Emily O'Neill for 'Journey to the Stone Country' and 'The White Earth'. Lisa reworked the artwork on 'Lilian's Story' from the original cover art by Hans Selhofer. We're very proud of these 20th anniversary editions and very proud of our excellent designers."