Rare books? The divided field of reading and book culture in contemporary Australia

Abstract

This paper investigates Australians’ reading tastes and engagement with books and book culture. We examine data from the Australian Cultural Fields survey for evidence of a ‘reading class’ in contemporary Australia. The space of Australian reading as illustrated by multiple correspondence analysis shows demarcated spaces of reading engagement and disengagement, zones of consuming fiction and non-fiction and varying levels of involvement with book culture that map onto socio-economic variables of gender, age, level of education and occupational class. Using cluster analysis, we delineate five groups in Australia in relation to books and reading: non-readers/non-participants, restricted reading, young readers, popular readers and invested readers. These findings largely support the argument that there is an Australian reading class – invested readers – which is rich in cultural capital as it is defined in large part by level of education and occupational class status. There is also evidence of reading ‘interest groups’ – young readers and popular readers. The discrete tastes and practices of these sectioned-off cohorts suggest that cultural capital is not as strong a rationale for the involvement of these groups in books and reading as it is for the reading class.

Acknowledgements

This chapter is a product of the ‘Australian Cultural Fields: National and Transnational Dynamics’ project supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council (DP140101970). The project was awarded to Tony Bennett (Project Director, Western Sydney University), to Chief Investigators Greg Noble, David Rowe, Tim Rowse, Deborah Stevenson and Emma Waterton (Western Sydney University), David Carter and Graeme Turner (University of Queensland) and to Partner Investigators Modesto Gayo (Universidad Diego Portales) and Fred Myers (New York University). Michelle Kelly (Western Sydney University) was appointed as a project manager and a senior research officer. The project has additionally benefited from inputs from Ien Ang, Ben Dibley, Liam Magee, Anna Pertierra and Megan Watkins (Western Sydney University).

Notes

1. Australian Libraries and Information Association website, accessed 24 September 2017.

2. The methodology of the survey is outlined in the introduction to this themed section.

3. The ACF survey asked about 12 book types (cf Tables 1–5). In Figure 1, abbreviations for each book type are shown, followed by ‘(book)’. A preceding ‘No’ relates to not reading that book type. The survey further asked about 10 Australian (Matthew Reilly, Kate Grenville, Tim Winton, Sally Morgan, Sara Douglass, Kim Scott, Belinda Alexandra, Elizabeth Harrower, David Malouf, Bryce Courtenay) and 10 international authors (Amy Tan, Don DeLillo, Dave Eggers, Stephen King, Ian Rankin, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Jodi Picoult, Haruki Murakami, Margaret Atwood). A plus (‘+’) indicates the author was read and liked; a minus (‘−’) indicates read and not liked, or recognized but not read. In order to produce statistically meaningful samples, results were combined for Eggers and Murakami (two of the more experimental among the international authors), Tan and DeLillo (both recorded lower levels of recognition than several of their compatriots) and Scott and Morgan. Obviously, this procedure elides important differences between the paired writers: for example, between Noongar author Scott, and Morgan’s somewhat controversial status as reflected by debates around her key work My Place (AustLit, 2017), or Tan and DeLillo’s very different positions in the literary field.

4. A different iteration of MCA and cluster analysis using the ACF literary data is published in Carter, Gayo and Kelly (forthcoming). In contrast to the present paper, reading tastes and practices were the active variables used to construct the space. Both analyses are valid, but emphasize different processes at work in the field.

5. Trajectories marked on Figure 1 appear as visual guides to the space, not because they are more significant than the other trajectories we describe.

6. Data on the number of Australian books read are derived from the question ‘how many books by Australian authors have you read for your own interest or pleasure over the past year?’.

7. The 65+ group is strongly attached to certain genres – Australian history (where it is highest among all age cohorts), Biographies and Crime/mystery. The point is not that the group as a whole are non-readers, only that there is a correlation between this age group and the other factors listed.

8. These genres are very popular with 18–24-year olds – in the ACF survey 65% indicated they read Science fiction/fantasy, far and away the highest result among the different age groups. However, this result should not be taken to infer that young people only read Science fiction/fantasy: they read Thriller/adventure at a slightly higher rate (68%) and Crime/mystery at a slightly lower rate (63%). The MCA indicates that as a category Science fiction/fantasy is most associated with young people, while the other books 18–24-year olds enjoy are also enjoyed by other age groups.

9. Throsby, Zwar, and Morgan report that young Australians do read Australian titles, but ‘don’t pay much attention to the Australian dimensions … of the books they choose to read’ (2017, 24, 32–33). For further details of engagement with Australian content according to age, see Carter and Kelly (2017, 172–174).