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Stuart Glover, "Brisbane Literature and Identity: Two Entwined Projects of Change" In the 1990s the Brisbane literary scene was transformed as part of a wider renewal of the city and of the state's cultural institutions. There was a significant increase in the visibility of cultural products and cultural creators originating here: Queensland/ Brisbane books and writers, visual art and artists, music and musicians. The image of a culturally resurgent and transformed Brisbane was championed locally--sometimes with crowing delight, sometimes with awkward self-consciousness, and sometimes ironically (as seen in the celebratory but deprecating term BrisVegas). This new identity was written over, or at least contested, still active images of Queensland as a politically conservative, racially intolerant, cultural wasteland. Brisbane's cultural renewal is usually described as a Post-Expo cosmopolitanism. It might, however, be viewed as having less to do with the importation and acceptance of ideas and culture from elsewhere than the transformation and projection of the local. This circulation of Queensland/Brisbane culture (and success stories) encouraged further development. This renewal followed a transformation in the social and institutional conditions for the production, transmission and reception of cultural products and figures. A host of interlinked factors seem to have been in play in this: cultural globalism, the fall of the Bjelke-Petersen government, cultural policy reform, change in the performance of the local media, the slowing of the cultural-brain drain, the growth of a local cultural class, interconnections between this group and cultural apparatus elsewhere. Queensland writers went national and global from Brisbane--rather than by leaving Brisbane. A new "productive" parochialism in the media, in the strategies of bookshops, and in government cultural policy supported change. This paper argues that change in both the local and national institutional conditions for production, transmission and reception of literature made literary success possible for writers such as Venero Armanno, and Andrew McGahan in the 1990s in a way which was not available to writers such as Gerard Lee in the 1980s. This literary success generated symbolic capital and was regularly employed in the task of renewing Brisbane/Queensland identity. The invisibility of Queensland writers or their identities as disruptive discursive agent was replaced with the idea of the writer as agent of tourism development and gentrification. Writers were employed alongside the coffee house as a trope of cosmopolitanism and central to the cultural re-branding of Brisbane culminating in the use of novelist Nick Earls as the face of the recent Brisbane Marketing campaign. Biography:Mr Stuart Glover lectures in writing and publishing in the Creative Industries Faculty at QUT. He was the inaugural Manager for Writing at Arts Queensland, founding Director of the Brisbane Writers Festival, inaugural Director of QPIX, founding Chair of Multi-Media Art Asia-Pacific (MAAP Festival), and Deputy Chair of the Queensland Writers Centre. He has been a consultant to the Queensland Government, the State Library of Queensland, University of Queensland Press, and to QUT. Currently he is Chair of Q Music and a member of the Queensland Theatre Company Board. He is the co-editor of a forthcoming book Hot Iron Corrugated Sky: 100 Years of Queensland Writing. He is currently doing his PhD at the University of Queensland on Australian literary culture and publishing in the 1990s. He has also worked as a television columnist and freelancer for The Courier Mail. |
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