by Simon Sellars

‘Melbourne Small Press: Maybe Next Year’. Originally published in overland magazine, Summer 2004.

At this year’s Melbourne Writers’ Festival, John Murray appreciated the fact that short stories are a perfect barometer for measuring fresh literary talent, Eva Sallis likened short stories to “tantric sex in five minutes” and Frank Moorhouse bemoaned the scarcity of outlets for publishing these orgasmic bundles of joy. Meanwhile, the Age highlighted the issue of literary “gatekeepers” – publishers who apparently block up-and-coming writers from readers due to the fear that new Australian fiction won’t sell. Yet when emerging writers unite in their resolve to do something about lost opportunities and lack of outlets, they get ignored. In the 2004 Writers’ Festival program, the local small press was actually invisible.

Cardigan Press, formed by a collective of RMIT Professional Writing and Editing students in 2002, is an independent initiative worthy of recognition. They’ve just released a third anthology of short fiction, All Change Please, the main purpose of which is to showcase the efforts of its core members – all 11 have at least one story in here, some have two or three, and there’s a smattering of contributions from outside. On the whole it’s a strong collection, glued together by a nominal conceit: All Change Please is designed to be read on public transport.

The anthology is in four parts: “Express” stories, with a word limit of 500; “Short Trip” (1000 words); “Unexpected Delays” (2000 words); and “All Stations” (3000 words). The shorter efforts are intricate snapshots, with a sense of life continuing beyond the narrative frame. Jane Ormond’s “A Convenient Mythology” stylishly literalises this technique, with its sneak peak into the Polaroid-obsessed psyche of the central character. Elsewhere, there are vignettes about factory life (“Short Work”, Paula Hunt’s super dissection of the male psyche), tortured booksellers, jilted lovers, phantom limbs. Some are neat summations of irony, some are pastiches, others are worthy experiments, but after one too many “situations”, I yearned for real narrative development, something with a mean kick in the tail. In the “All Stations” section, the writers have the space to really stretch their narrative chops and for the most part the results are worth waiting for.

All Change Please highlights the joy to be had from reading short stories – the sense of delight in unravelling compacted ideas – and while they don’t necessarily conform to Sallis’ tantric euphoria, they certainly linger in the badlands of the mind. One thing to note is the predominance of stories written in the first person – this really is the “me” generation. Cardigan Press, as promising as they are, will become a real force to be reckoned with when their writers develop to the point that they can also trust their interior thoughts to external characters.

Anna Hedigan is one of the Cardigan principals and also a member of the editorial team that publishes Going Down Swinging, an annual “literary magazine”. GDS was the Cardigan Press of its day, formed by Myron Lysenko and Kevin Brophy in 1980 as a reaction against limited opportunities for Australian writers. Twenty-four years on, that attitude endures although the tone has substantially changed. Now under the editorship of Hedigan, small-press impresario Steve Grimwade and poets alicia sometimes and Adam Ford, GDS has morphed into a jokey, self-deprecating exercise in matey banter¬ – “GDS-ness” as they term it. The team’s editorial for the 2004 edition references Kim Basinger as a cod philosopher, while mixing metaphors of its own. According to Grimwade, “Community can still the modern economy” (that might be a typo), while Hedigan promises that “GDS gives a gooey slice of the Australian literary torte”. Actually, the editorial style is a good reflection of the content: a post-mix of pop culture and puns that clearly doesn’t take itself too seriously.

As far as the short fiction is concerned, this means that some of the ideas are in thrall to an arch self-reflexiveness that tends to overshadow narrative and character development. Ultimately, I respond more to the disciplined grit of the longer Cardigan pieces than these loose, unstructured tales that never really kick out of first gear. But then again, GDS doesn’t pretend to be a champion of short story, exclusively; it also includes comic strips, poetry and a spoken-word CD, all under the rubric of “literature”. Without an overarching theme or concept, I find this promiscuity of styles distracting. The kitsch nuttiness and the gonzo poetry is all there, but in the effort to cram so much into one place, some of the writing becomes compromised. Fragments are the preferred option, the quirkier and more culturally loaded the better, but I’d like to see these writers wrestle ideas to the ground, rather then letting them touch the ropes with barely a scratch.

Brophy pops up again as a contributor to Space: New Writing, a new publication from Geelong. Space takes the journal format – short fiction, prose poems, reviews, a photo gallery and essays – and its writers have quieter, more contemplative concerns. A key to Space lies in the reviews: with dissections of Nic Roeg’s multilayered film The Man Who Fell to Earth and the tricky oeuvre of novelist Italo Calvino, you know that Space is dealing with detachment, with the cool irony of popular culture, rather than bathing in the sensory overload of Tarantino, zombies and two-minute noodles. From there, film – of a particular ilk – becomes an effective device in Brian Edward’s series of prose poems that turn the mythmaking of Hollywood “New Wave” movies – Easy Rider, Bonnie & Clyde – into a lament for lost mythologies.

Similarly, Space’s essays (on “personal space”), particularly Maria Takolander’s lyrical evocation of what it means to be Finnish, cross over into the nebulous territory of fiction and the short stories are essentially essayist, where observations end up as some kind of societal critique, shot full of oblique angles that invert the personal into the political. It’s fitting, then, that the journal also includes a photographic series by Sharon Jones that channels the spirit of JG Ballard’s work, all high rises and office buildings, cold, distant and impenetrable – mirrored surfaces reflecting us back to ourselves in an endless feedback loop. On that score, Space is remarkably consistent.

Whatever your predilection (and these three publications are very diverse) it’s clear that the art of the short story, in Melbourne and Geelong at least, is alive and well; rumours of its death have been greatly exaggerated. Still, whether any of these writers get promoted to the “Premier League” is something that can’t be answered here; certainly, they deserve to be acknowledged for their initiative, encouraged for their passion, honesty and drive, and – in certain cases – nurtured. Maybe the Festival next year.

All Change Please was edited by Andrew Hunting, George Dunford, Katie Falkiner and Rose Mulready. It is published by Cardigan Press.

Going Down Swinging 21 was edited by Adam Ford, Stephen Grimwade, Anna Hedigan and alicia sometimes. It is published by Going Down Swinging Inc.

Space: New Writing was edited by Anthony Lynch. It is published by Whitmore Press.