Where is Writing Now?: Australian University Creative Writing Programs at the End of the Millennium

Abstract

In the early 1990s, creative writing programs in Australia were ‘thrust’ into the university domain by the Dawkins amalgamations. Prior to that, there was no established national focus: no national peak body, no discipline-based research agenda, no political or academic networking, and no statistical analysis to portray the nature of the activity advancing apace on isolated campuses. Compared with the visual and performing arts disciplines, creative writing programs were unorganised and separatist, but they were aware of their potential for the future. This article reviews advances made by Australian university creative writing programs to date and considers some aspects of the situation after 2000 related to teaching and research.

The “living humanities”: Creative arts and academic humanities in tension

“…(Whether these segregations have been broken down by the expansion of creative writing within higher education is a matter of ongoing debate.) According to Paul Dawson (2001), splits between the two fields can be traced to traditions within a British literary education, with which Australian English departments were strongly aligned, whereby the "production within the academy [that is, the university] of writing which purported to be literature was looked down upon as improper and presumptuous" (p. 2) (see also Krauth, 2000).…”

“…During the 1960s and 1970s the Academy had no widely agreed upon intention to bridge such long-standing divisions between the production of "crafted artefacts" and their analysis and criticism (White, 1998, p. 103) or, as Nigel Krauth (2000) puts it, between "reading and criticising texts, as opposed to producing them" (p. 4) -in other words, between the "living humanities" and the academic humanities. This applied not only to local literature but to other creative fields.…”

“…While fields such as music and the visual arts trace their history of education back to schools, colleges and conservatoria established during the 19 th century, the CAEs and a small number of (non-sandstone) universities pioneered creative writing in Australia during the 1970s. The field expanded and became widespread within the university system during the 1990s alongside broader challenges to traditional English studies posed by the "new humanities" (Dawson, 2001;Krauth, 2000;Ruthven, 1992;White, 1998). The "new humanities" included such fields as communication and media studies, cultural studies, gender studies and postcolonial studies, among others.…”

“…Honorary Fellows are not entitled to play an active role in the electoral life of the Academy or to become members of the disciplinary Sections. [7] Krauth (2000) notes that creative writing wasn't included in the Strand report or invited to participate in the study or follow-up meetings "for one simple reason. Until late 1996, creative writing in tertiary institutions had no peak body" (p. 2).…”

“…While the history of creative writing as a discipline in Australian universities both does and does not follow this broader trajectory (Dawson, 2001;Krauth, 2000) [2], it too has been profoundly impacted -along with the other creative arts -by the Dawkins reforms. The reforms have had a lasting if unintended influence on the way creative arts education is delivered (Webb & Gibson, 2019) [3] and on expectations placed on creative arts academics.…”