Nineteen seventy-three was an auspicious year for the arts in Australia. It saw the announcement of a new structure for the Australia Council for the Arts by the newly minted Whitlam Government. And, more importantly, it was the year when Overland revived its regular [sic] editorial column, Swag, absent from the preceding few issues, and intermittent throughout the journal’s history. The tension between governments and artists, and politicians and their public, and any number of permutations of those combinations, is everlasting and in many ways inevitable. While this discussion is almost half a century old, anyone working in the arts will see the contemporary parallels. The specifics are no longer entirely relevant, but the issues raised still hold true, and are, even fifty years later, yet to be resolved, if indeed they can be.

“For a start,” wrote Stephen Murray-Smith, the journal’s founding editor, to begin the debate in issue 56, “editors should disguise themselves, not display themselves” (1973:16). An ironic comment given how large his personality loomed in the journal’s pages during his editorship. He also remarked, with a characteristic, literary smirk, that he was pleased to bring Swag back because many found its name objectionable. “To them”, he wrote, “it smacks of bushwhackery and not of the trendiness that a modern major magazine should display in the cut of its uniform.” He used his revived editorial to fulminate against the Literature Board’s rumoured move from Melbourne to Sydney, and argue that the Council for the Arts should be dissolved and the individual boards subordinate to it be left to do their work as they once had.

Over the next few years, Swag staged a series of debates on the merits of the Whitlam government’s new program, and the problem of arts funding broadly. They featured responses from John McLaren, Geoffrey Blainey and Ian Turner, who exchanged screeds picking apart the wording of the Australia Council Act, the inner workings of the newly established Australia Council, and the ways in which the council’s structure could help or hinder the arts. Arts funding has always been a contentious issue, in Australia and elsewhere.

Murray-Smith continued his tirade with another Swag, in issue 57. Gough Whitlam had recently pointed out — Murray-Smith doesn’t say where — that he had not received one message of appreciation for the $15 million his government had injected into the arts. Whitlam was entitled to that annoyance, wrote Murray-Smith, but it was also a pity that members of the old Commonwealth Literary Fund (CLF) board had been dismissed without a word of thanks (1973–74:27), and the previous program of literary pensions had been suspended on the apparent advice of Nugget Coombs, a noted economist and public servant who was at the time a consultant to Gough Whitlam. Writers don’t get superannuation and have not taken a sabbatical in their working lives, Murray-Smith wrote, so the pensions are a “tremendous boon”, citing the example of the poet and novelist Martin Boyd, who was starving in Rome before being given a pension for service to the development of Australian literature.

He finished by criticising the appointment of Peter Karmel, an economist like Coombs, to the Australia Council’s chair. He cited Karmel’s own admission of little knowledge of the arts, and wondered if this appointment was intended merely to help the council wring a bit more money from the treasury. He lambasted the ideological confusion and lowest common denominator consensus of the council’s bureaucratic constitution. He finished by questioning the need for the council at all — it would likely spend most of its time working busily to justify its own existence (1973:27–28).

In the same issue, Geoffrey Blainey, former chairman of the advisory board to the Commonwealth Literary Fund and historian, academic, occasional purveyor of racist views and novelist, writes an account of government patronage of the arts in Australia, and a commentary on patronage in general. What follows is the partial regurgitation of some of the most poignant points. I do encourage readers to go over the piece in full, found conveniently in Overland’s online archives, to truly appreciate Blainey’s arguments.

Alfred Deakin’s government set up the CLF in 1908. Its original aim was to provide a pension for aged and infirmed authors. It was expanded in scope and funds by the Menzies government in 1939 to provide funding fellowships to authors, as well as some funding to literary publishing and lectures on Australia literature in universities.

In 1967, the Holt government announced the creation of the Australia Council for the Arts. Then, after Harold had disappeared, his successor John Gorton appointed the first ten members in 1968. In 1973 (where we find ourselves now in the archives), the Whitlam government announced a new structure for the body, which would see funding recommendations made by several individual boards, each for a different area of the arts, that would report to the Australia Council. The body became a statutory corporation in 1975 with the passing of the Australia Council Act 1975. (Blainey didn’t know it would pass at the time of his writing.)

Blainey spends some time praising the CLF’s ability to handle its substantive administrative load before describing it, without malice, as being elitist in its aim of fostering literary merit. The elitism there is clear: merit is subjective and ultimately up to those who are bestowing it, with their various backgrounds and levels of privilege. Other criteria such as “literary stamina” (read that as the ability to keep producing work) and the author’s income, are taken into account. But that idea of literary merit is at the fore of the CLF’s decision making. The advisory board, he says, to his knowledge, has always tried to ignore any political opinions in the work they assess. However, it is not the advisory board alone that makes decisions.

Above the advisory board sat a political committee that had the power to reject recommendations from the literary board. The committee was made up of senior politicians, representatives of the three major parties — at the time Liberal, Labor and the Country Party — whose role when making those final decisions was largely unknown. Blainey notes that this arrangement has no parallels in the cultural affairs of Australia, and even perhaps of any other country.

So why does literature have a political committee when other cultural affairs do not? In Blainey’s opinion, with which I think most cultural critics would agree, literature is more politically “hazardous” than other art forms. “Words,” he writes, “are the currency of literature but also the currency of politics.” So a politician pays more attention to literature than, say, operatic overtures or portraits. He goes on:

Secondly, a political message — soft or loud, blunt or subtle — can be conveyed in every art form; but political messages in the printed word are potentially more conspicuous and probably crispier than those conveyed through painting, wood carving, or oboe concertos. Political messages in books and magazines are certainly more portable, more quotable, than any other form (1973:40).

Politicians understand the power of words much more easily than the currency of other forms, and so they perceive them as more threatening. Additionally, writers have more access to public channels of criticism than other artists, so any subsidised work with a politically unfavourable message — to any side — can attract criticism of the government’s literary transactions. He cites the example of a biography of the late Archbishop Mannix written by former priest Michael Parer, which attracted criticism of the CLF’s funding by orthodox Catholics before a single chapter had even been written. “If Mr Parer’s book can be called a literary child,” Blainey writes, “then this is one of the rare instances when Catholics favoured abortion.”

The political committee attempts to minimise this kind of outside influence. Its multi-party nature does have some advantages, and Blainey is not sure if its abolition would benefit Australian literature. The political committee is a valuable contact between politicians and writers, and that contact can lead to the promotion of Australian writing. And more importantly its existence likely prevents literary issues from becoming party issues, and in parliamentary debate those issues are not likely to be framed on literary grounds. If the advisory board was completely independent, without any strings, it would be open to political attacks that could lead to decreased funding and appointments to the board could be influenced by political rather than literary considerations.

Blainey finishes his article with a postscript, written in 1973 after the changes to the Australia Council of the Arts have been announced. Those changes saw the CLF, with its advisory board and political committee, abolished. In its place a Literature Board was created as part of the Australia Council for the Arts, which in turn belonged to the Prime Minister’s Department. The government would now grant an annual sum to the council, which would then break that sum into eight parts: one for the council’s activities and one to each of the seven boards. Where the CLF had seven members, the Literature Board now has eleven. Membership of the council totals twenty-four, which Blainey believes is too large for it to pay attention to the actions of the seven boards of which it has oversight. He cites some criticism of its size and that lack of oversight, but thinks that a smaller council may be more meddlesome in the affairs of the boards. This quirk of the new structure, like the inclusion of the political committee in the previous one, might lessen political influence rather than enlarge it (1973:42–43).

The next planned change, which at the time of Blainey’s writing was yet to come, would see the Australia Council become a statutory body. While statutory bodies usually enjoy less political interference than those beholden to political committees, Blainey wonders if that will be the case in this instance. He employs an apt metaphor to elucidate his case. Such a body can be seen as a “kind of fortress of cultural independence”; he wonders what will happen once that fortress is built. He thinks that fortress will have weak walls and is likely to surrender to a siege, especially a financial siege directed by the government of the day. And the strongest advocates for surrender may be found within the Council for the Arts — the head of this metaphorical fortress. As they “quickly swallow every cheque handed to them”, they become more vulnerable to financial threats. The representatives of those less conspicuously political arts — opera, ballet etc. — may soon realise that their funding is endangered by the state-sponsored activities of writers and other more politically conspicuous artists. And so there may be pressure from the less-political on the more-political representatives of their forms to avoid actions which may arouse public or political anger which could lead to vote in parliament for a decrease or freeze in funding. “Deprived of its former political censors,” he writes to underline his point, “[the Council] will soon provide its own”. Further, if members of each varied board win the right to elect all or most members of the board, they may be even further inclined to self-censor (1973:43).

Blainey finishes on a more optimistic note, emphasising the council’s increased budget, which saw it able to support as many writers in a single year as it had in the period from 1940 to 1970. In fact, in its first year the literary board had been able to support nearly as many writers as the CLF supported in the decades between 1940 and 1970. There had been criticism of this increase in funds by commentors, but Blainey puts this down to jealously rather than outside interference; many of these critical commentators are writers themselves, he says, whose applications have been rejected.

The debate continues in the next issue, Overland 58, with Stephen Murray-Smith repeating one of Blainey’s main assertions: government patronage of the arts, it seems, is here to stay. And since this is so, those interested in Australian writing should be concerned with “the nature and quality of the institutions which will dispense that patronage” (1974:36). The implication here is of course that the quality of these institutions should be doubted, or at least suspected.

Murray-Smith had experienced a “precipitate dropping” as chairman of the Literature Board, “despite the fact that the Board unanimously and strongly requested the Prime Minister to retain Blainey as chairman” (1974:36). Those lovely italics for emphasis are entirely his. As a connoisseur of Murray-Smith’s bushwhackery, I can tell you his words are rarely set in such a fashion. He was bashing his keyboard — or slashing parchment with quill like a sword, whatever they did in the 70s — as he wrote this.

And then, set in regular roman, he lists the names of a few other members who had left the Literature Board: AD Hope, Manning Clark, Geoffrey Dutton and Judah Waten. He admits that their terms had expired and that some probably let theirs expire of their own volition, but nevertheless the board is less experienced now than it was with their membership. More serious, he writes, is the departure of Blainey and Clark, the board’s only historians. This is an issue given that many of the manuscripts and applications the board reviews are from “non-fiction and non-poetry areas” (1974:36). (Non-poetry presumably being anything that isn’t poetry, which draws a wide circle around the literature it describes. I guess poets were less optimistic toward positive funding outcomes than they are now.)

The Literature Board had submitted a list of recommended new members, which was “almost totally disregarded in subsequent appointments” (1974:36). Murray-Smith was not on the list, but he assures his readers that these are not “sour grapes” on his behalf as he is ineligible to sit on it given his position as editor at Overland. But Barrie [Barrett] Reid, Overland’s poetry editor, is apparently able and has been appointed, and Murray-Smith is pleased. Every one of the new appointees has a valid claim to their place on the board, but Murray-Smith wonders: “Who is doing the choosing? What advice is Whitlam being tendered, and by whom, and what kind of arguments are being used?” (1974:36). This secrecy around appointments and the vagueness of the criteria under which they are made point to what we might call a kind of cultural deep state (but Murray-Smith uses the much more appropriately dated “secret government”) that whispers in Whitlam’s ear like Wormtongue.

Some of the blame for the board’s perceived mismanagement could be due to what Murray-Smith calls a backfiring of participatory democracy — the “rapid” turnover of jobs, the ability for members to nominate themselves — that creates a “smoke screen” behind which the very notion of democracy is being mocked (1974:37). He offers the example of Nancy Keesing, a poet and contributor to Overland, who was the only member of the old board to be reappointed. She has been appointed as the new chairman of the board and was “known to be a closer supporter of Jean Battersby’s than another other member of the Board” (1974:37). Battersby was the founding and current chief executive officer of the Australia Council, who had what Murray-Smith called a “permanent bureaucracy at the Council for the Arts head office” (1974:37). He admits that Keesing could be the best chairman the board has ever had, but can’t ignore the perceived favouritism in her selection. He finishes that section noting that if Blainey were not re-elected, the old board had recommended that either Ian Turner or John Douglas Pringle be appointed.

Nugget Coombs – the miserly opponent to literary pensions and advisor to Whitlam – had (with Battersby) apparently “rolled” Blainey. Murray-Smith suggests that this was due to Blainey’s independence – that he spoke on matters that Battersby and Coombs thought they should determine. More importantly, Blainey had argued that the board remain in Melbourne, rather than move to Sydney with Battersby, where, he notes, Keesing now had an office.

And skilled writers “whose social conscience are beyond any debate” (1974:37) such as Geoffrey Serle, Max Harris and Arthur [AA] Phillips are being passed over for roles in the council and its boards. Murray-Smith could see a Liberal government passing them over and was infuriated at the irony that the “sordid back-room politicking ensure[s] that they are blackballed by a Labour government also” (1974:37). He suggests that, due to all of this dysfunction within the board and in the greater council, writers and artists should demand a commission into its operations.

We’re treated to more inside baseball (or, I suppose, cricket) when Murray-Smith amends his earlier statement that those receiving subsidies from the boards are not eligible to sit on the various boards. He reports that he was told, “the other day”, that Mr John Winter, the general manager of the Australian Opera Company, sits on the Music Board. And Mr Richard Walsh, who runs Angus and Robertson, site on the Literature Board. The Australian Opera Company receives about $1 million a year, and Angus and Robertson receives “considerable subsidies”.

The debate changes tack in Overland 59, when John McLaren takes Swag’s reins; he’s less inclined to gossip, but equally critical. He diagnoses the disappointment of the Australian arts scene as less a matter of Whitlam disillusionment than of the structural disconnect between writers and artists and the people who claim to represent them, observing that the North Sydney office from which the council legislates aesthetics exemplifies the “air-conditioned metropolitan ugliness which is the antithesis of the arts” (1974:55). This is a discrepancy which reflects a more centralised, bureaucratic funding model with less artist involvement.

Nonetheless, McLaren admits that the council has done some good work, citing the example of a new collection for the National Gallery, which, although under the purview of the council, was not within its “direct authority”. That’s a strange construction from McLaren, and one I’m not sure how to quantify. He provides some detail of its independence, which may clear things up. The project, he writes, had “all the necessary attributes of a successful program in the arts. A clear objective had been set — the development of a collection of art works of world significance — a firm budget had been provided, and the Director and his expert advisers have been left free to carry out their task.” (1974:54). Independence from oversight was key to its success. In other matters, “[t]he Council and its agency are seen as the policy makers, the artists — writers, directors, painters, craftsmen or whatever — as supplicants” (1974:55). If the gallery project had been beholden to this relationship, an application would have had to be made to the council before making any purchases.

(I note that that project included the purchase of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles, a purchase that caused somewhat of a stir on the opposite side of the political spectrum. I wonder if either McLaren or the boffins across the road knew that the CIA were Pollock’s biggest fans.)

McLaren finishes this portion of his critique of the council by lambasting its “fundamental inability to understand the nature of the arts and their relationship to society”, which are “crystalised in wording used in the Australia Council Bill to describe the functions of the Council”. Words such as “appreciation”, “excellence”, and “knowledge and recognition”, according to McLaren, are those of the “dilettante, the cultivated amateur who regards the arts as an item of consumption to be enjoyed as relaxation from the true business of life” (1974:55). This professionalisation of the arts has turned it into a product to be managed, with intent and purpose.

The Bill requires the Council to “foster the expression of a national identity by means of the arts” (1974:55). This reminds McLaren of Anzac Day parades and “speech night ceremonies”. The idea of a fixed national identity reflected through the arts, and formalised as in the Bill, enshrines “a concept that has done more than any other single idea to inhibit the development of the arts in Australia” (1974:55). This may seem an odd argument to read in the pages of Overland, given its historical association with Radical Nationalism. However, most connoisseurs of Overland under Stephen Murray-Smith’s leadership (all three of us), would agree that the journal had largely moved on from the sharper ends of the Radical Nationalist knife by the 70s.

This key issue of bureaucracy and centralisation bedevils the Whitlam government in other areas. To fix national issues, it must take a national approach. This involves funding from Canberra with which a national structure is set up, and the nature of that structure determines how that funding should be spent. He cites the example of funding for Indigenous communities, which has floundered.

Local communities in Queensland and the Northern Territory and in the Kimberleys continue to starve while state and federal officials wrestle with the momentous problem of who signs the cheques, and a white backlash develops from Brisbane to Wyndham, and from the Murray River to Townsville, against policies which are still not in operation (1974:55).

I don’t know that this comparison of starving artists to starving communities would fly these days, and I’m not sure how prescient McLaren knew he was when he wrote this, but he makes a good point. Politicians in Canberra and other centres, who are beholden to their mostly white constituents, are asked to pass bills which may not be popular in their own electorate, and the passing of such bills may compromise their beloved positions of power, but would benefit the country overall. I’ll extend the metaphor a bit here at the risk of being insensitive: politicians are beholden to their mostly non-artist constituents but must make decisions that affect artists. I could also replace “politicians” with “bureaucrats” and “non-artist constituents” with “politicians” to elucidate one of Murray-Smith and McLaren’s main positions: a mistrust of centralisation.

The next and final volley in this debate comes in the Swag of the next issue, Overland 60. It begins with a personal note from Murray-Smith, addressed to Ian Turner. He begins:

As you know Overland is in a peculiar position. Two of the editors, John McLaren and myself, have shown a distinct hostility to the Australia Council, in some of its manifestations, in recent issues. However, another of our editors, Barrie Reid, is on the Literature Board of the Council, while you are both deputy chairman of the Council and head of its finance and administration committee. I suppose it says something for the empathy in which we work with each other that only a very few cross words have been exchanged on these issues. I remain unrepentant, and I suppose John does too, but it’s time you had a say. Will you take over the next “Swag”? (1975:66).

He continues with a few direct questions for Turner:

Why did the Council go to water, so to speak, when its proposals (eg for election of board chairmen) were not accepted by the Minister? How was it that the recent debate on the Australia Council Bill, in both the Reps. and the Senate, and from both government and opposition benches, was so disappointingly vacuous and congratulatory, so that the whole pass of the Bill looked like a political deal, a put-up job? At a lower level, we all notice that the Council apparently intends transferring the Literature Board from Melbourne to Sydney (or so its advertisements say), so that everything will be centralised in North Sydney? Is that really the way the arts are going in Australia? (1975:66).

Unrepentant indeed. He signs off “Sorry to be a bastard. Over to you.”

The leading nature of Murray-Smith’s opening address and the lateness of Turner’s right of reply should not go unnoticed. Nevertheless, Turner was given six pages to address the other editors’ concerns.

Although Murray-Smith and McLaren have raised some important questions about the Council, Turner feels that most of the commentary has emerged from “either misinformation or pique”. The commentary in the pages of Overland has been uncharacteristically lacking in generosity. He describes the general response to the Australia Council as a “tide of philistine mockery and querulous complaint” (1975:66).

Turner begins his response by providing some context to the debate, rehashing some of the critiques by implication, while making reference to the Bill itself. I won’t go over them again, but I will include his underlining of the changes:

The structure established by the act for the Australia Council is substantially the same as that which is already in the Australian Council for the Arts, so that there will be a continuity of operation, except that the Australia Council now assumes certain functions which were previously carried out by the Prime Minister’s Department and by Treasury — notably the formal approval and processing of grants and the payment of salaries and allowances. (1975: 67)

This addresses the critique of substantial change while leaving out a few other criticisms: the benefits of a statutory corporation over a Ministry of Arts; the stated functions of the council and whether they expressed the preferred aim of government’s function in the arts; if the relation between the council and its boards would best serve the arts; and the process of appointments, including the definition of who should be eligible to be appointed.

Contrary to Murray-Smith’s contention that there was little debate around the bill that established the council, Turner asserts that there was “considerable discussion” (1974:67–68) around those very questions while the bill was being written. Before entering into the details of those discussions, he provides the caveat that he does not speak for the council but will offer some personal comments.

He’s in favour of a statutory corporation. It distances art and artists from ministerial control, and although picking up on Blainey’s point from Overland 57 that various pressures concerning the allocation of funding will continue, those pressures are best resolved within the structure of the corporation.

McLaren’s characterisation of the Australia Council’s function as viewing art as an item of consumption is next in line. While he agrees that the language used in the bill does suggest some level of elitism, it is “very much a matter of balance” (1975:68) Such language provides the council with a broad purview of functions that allow it to establish its own priorities from time to time. Further, he believes that technological development has “changed dramatically both the ideology and the practicality of the work/leisure dichotomy”, and that this will mean “a growing emphasis on both the dissemination of the work of professional artists and broad participation in creative activity” (1974:68). The policies of the council, he thinks, will necessarily reflect this change. He was ahead of his time in the former assertion and hopeful in the latter prediction.

Next up is the is the relationship between the council and the boards, a sticking point for Murray-Smith. If you accept that the statutory corporation is the preferred way to arrange this kind of funding, then there are two ways to apportion funding decisions: centralising them within the council or delegating them out to the boards. If the delegation of funding was the realm of the boards, the government of the day would have to decide on the various levels in each board, and so each art form. Turner thinks that it was “quite reasonable for government to delegate to a Council of people with special knowledge of the arts” (1975:68). The Australia Council Act also directs the council “to formulate and carry out policies in respect of certain broadly stated functions, and to delegate powers to the Boards in respect of these functions” (1975:68). So, the relationship between the council and its boards is formalised, and it is the Australia Council that is beholden to the Minister for the Arts and to parliament. That the Act obliges the council to operate in this manner necessitates its own authority, so any questions of its powers are effectively moot. I feel like I should make some mention of the circular logic Turner has applied here, but I think, if he were alive, he’d use something like the same fait accompli he deployed earlier in this answer — let’s assume a statutory corporation is the best method. However, he mentions that the council has “resolved” to allow boards some autonomy over the allocation of grants, loans and scholarships with respect to their own artforms on such conditions as the board sees fit, which gives some solace to the complaint of centralisation.

He addresses the process of election of members to the council and its boards, as well as their eligibility for election. Members could perhaps be elected by a nominated electoral college. Nominated by whom? Perhaps you could further nominate an electorate of electors. The issue seems intractable. And to the question of eligibility for membership, he writes that:

I cannot accept that as a matter of principle the administration of funds provided by government for “the support of the arts” should be in the hands exclusively of the present practitioners. That is a terrifyingly elitist concept. The “consumers” of the arts, and those who would like to become practitioners, have an entirely legitimate interest. If that is granted, then the precise definition is a matter of semantics, legal drafting — and the good will of the Minister (1975:69).

I think McLaren’s statement here points to a compromise, a nod to complexity, and a level-headedness that we haven’t seen in earlier portions of this debate. Yes we need artists making decisions on the arts and yes non-artists should have a say too – these groups make up the boards. And ultimately, regardless of the structure, the Minister will have influence.

Next he takes specific issue with what he calls “accusations” levelled against the council around bureaucracy, centralism and “commandism”. For Turner, the most serious accusation is that of commandism. He took particular offense at McLaren’s view that the council “imposes” itself on the boards, that it views artists as “supplicants”, that it micromanages the boards, and that it makes decisions without consideration of individual artists and local communities. In his experience, none of this is true. The boards are able to make their own definition of their functions and allocate funding as they see fit. The council, according to McLaren, gives the boards broad independence.

Before finishing with some “major worries” about the arts in Australia, he waves away the critique of bureaucracy and centralism. There are always, inevitably, tensions between temporary policy makers (read: board and council members) and permanent administrators. A greater concern for Turner is the allocation of funding for administration: “How do you balance the need for, say, an accountant or a stenographer against the need for a journalist or a project officer? I don’t know. Within certain broad priorities, I can only try to make the best judgement in the given circumstances” (1975:70).

And as for centralism, what are they to do? Should they base each board wherever the respective chairpeople happen to live, or should they have all administration in one place? It seems to him to “be more a question of effective practice than of principle” (1975:70).

The issues of elitism, funding levels between forms and the various costs of each, and wider participation in the arts continue to worry Turner, and the council doesn’t seem to be addressing them.

To counter elitism, he proposes the council should explore more funding of the popular arts as they enhance and are enhanced by the high arts. To Blainey’s point that more-political forms of arts may be underfunded in favour of the less-political, well, he doesn’t think it’s a problem. He sees the rising costs of all arts, and particularly the performing arts, as the true issue. How can we continue to keep the more expensive arts at a standard level without impoverishing the “individual” (air quotes are mine) arts such as literature? And finally, if we accept that public support of the arts is linked to participation, how can we grow the community without imposing elitism? Mass media is the answer, he says, and I wonder if he could have conceived the consequence of that most massive of medias, the internet. I’m not sure if he’d like what true artistic democracy looks like.

Turner finishes as his Swag started: “So it’s back to you, you old bastard — and I hope that you may have the grace to feel just a little repentant.”

Murray-Smith gives himself the final word, with a postscript that repents slightly but in typical fashion can’t help but land a few final blows. He’s worried that Turner’s position as a member of the council is “subjectively exposed” and he may be in danger of “ignoring the trees for the wood”. He admits, however, that Turner has made some excellent points and the critics, himself included, could have been more positive. But still, he thinks the council will become a monster with “far too much subvert as distinct from overt power” (1975:71).

And he finishes his postscript with a note for readers: Turner had not at the time of his writing read the two pieces published in the review section of these issues, by John Timlin and Geoffrey Blainey, which analyse the Australia Council’s first annual report. I won’t cover those review here other than to point out that these reviews appear immediately after Turner’s Swag.

I don’t want to accuse Murray-Smith of “commandism” in this debate. But it is obvious that the dissenting voices drowned out the assenting voice (singular), and the placement of the one positive piece about the council immediately before two more dissenting pieces is suspect. I will (almost) finish with mention that this was the last Swag until Overland 64 (1976), save for a fairly toothless one that appeared in Overland 62 as part of the 1975 21st anniversary issue.

I hope readers haven’t been overloaded with the cavalcade of funny Anglo names (“Nugget” and “Pringle” are a few of my favourites) and have been able to follow the spinning of this tangled, literary web of a debate that so epitomised the journal under Murray-Smith. And I hope that some of the complexities around government funding of the arts have been made clear. The specific matters, such as membership, location and board sizes are no longer directly applicable. Successive governments after Whitlam continued to rejig and refashion and restructure the funding bodies in ways that seem to either obscure or make obvious the political strings tied to all state funding. In another Swag (in Overland 86, 1981), Murray-Smith discusses the validity of private funding by petrodollars and uranium miners, with a thesis that is equally as complex and erring on the side of erring. In writing about these historical debates, I do not intend to engage in any specificity around the contemporary funding of the arts with any utterance other than the most simple and correct: it’s fucked and will continue to be fucked.

Works cited

Blainey, G 1973–4, “Government Patronage and Literature”, Overland 57, pp 37–43.
McLaren, J 1974, Swag, Overland 59, pp 54–56.
Murray-Smith, S 1973, Swag, Overland 56, pp 16–17.
Murray-Smith, S 1973–4, Swag, Overland 57, pp 26–28.
Murray-Smith, S 1974, Swag, Overland 58, pp 36–38.
Murray-Smith, S 1975, Swag, Overland 60, pp 66, 71.
Turner, I 1975, Swag, Overland 60, pp 66–70.
1981, “Swag”, Overland 86