Under Cover by Craig Munro

Author:Craig Munro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000, BIO025000, LAN022000
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd.
Published: 2015-08-26T04:00:00+00:00

Piano Man

As it turned out, the hardback edition of Bliss was the last Peter Carey title published under Frank Thompson’s management at UQP. In 1983, he and head editor Merril Yule left to take up positions at Rigby, in Adelaide. For much of that year, the university hunted for a new chief executive. John Iremonger, who had co-founded Hale & Iremonger in 1977 and was now at Allen & Unwin, was one of the publishers the university courted for this demanding job. Yet eventually Laurie Muller, formerly Lansdowne’s CEO, took over as general manager of the bookshop and press.

The business of books was changing, with publishers small and large looking for ways to reduce costs. The traditional long, boozy publishing lunch had already begun to disappear, and the number of books being supervised by each in-house editor was steadily increasing. The most popular management strategy for cutting overheads was to use more freelance copyeditors. My former colleague Roger McDonald and I stepped up our freelance work for UQP: Roger on poetry manuscripts, while I concentrated on fiction.

During the 1970s, I had witnessed at close quarters the evolution of Frank Thompson’s robust and hard-drinking persona, complete with his enthusiastic adoption of the Aussie salutation ‘mate’ — always inflected with his educated Californian accent. In my formative years as an editor, I had been influenced by Frank’s swashbuckling style as a scholarly and literary publisher. He could also be tough, irascible, and even domineering, and I shared Peter Carey’s discomfort at dealing with him — something I felt most keenly whenever asking for a modest salary rise.

Yet Frank’s record was remarkable. In his two decades at the helm, he’d built UQP into the leading poetry publisher in the country. The Press’s unrivalled fiction list now featured Kate Grenville, David Malouf, Olga Masters, Murray Bail, Elizabeth Jolley, Rodney Hall, Thea Astley, Barbara Hanrahan, Nicholas Jose, Barry Oakley, Angelo Loukakis, Trevor Shearston, and, of course, Peter Carey. Overseas novelists included John Updike, Antonio Enriquez, Nick Joaquin, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer.

The generous-spirited, gregarious, horse-riding, football-playing, golf-loving Laurie Muller had an altogether different style from Frank Thompson. A former school captain, Laurie had been conscripted during the Vietnam War, ending up as an army officer. Frank had a master’s degree in literature, whereas Laurie’s army service had put his university plans on permanent hold. Laurie’s boiler-plate bonhomie soon became legendary, and one of his most reliable conversation-starters was to ask what the difference was between a Mafioso and a French theorist, quipping, ‘The theorist will make you an offer you can’t understand.’ With his background as a Sydney publishing executive, Laurie was not adequately prepared for UQP’s cottage-industry style of publishing, nor for the parlous state of its finances, when he joined the Press.

My own career trajectory had taken me deeply into literary research at the English department. With several essays in books and scholarly journals, and my thesis under contract to Melbourne University Press, I had been offered further academic work. My passion, however, was

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