Colin Roderick Memorial Lecture

Ivor Indyk presents the 2026 Colin Roderick Memorial Lecture in Cairns.

Publishing at the Frontier

Publishing in Australia is always in a sense publishing at the frontier, if you think of London, New York and the European capitals as somehow more central to the publication of books than we are. Literary publishing constitutes a further frontier, at the edges of commercial publishing in this country, leading an often tenuous and little-known existence. It points us, in turn, to an even more distant frontier, that of writing that is unfamiliar, unexpected, beyond the reach or the resilience of many readers – this is the challenging writing that is, properly speaking, called literary. I would like to talk about what life looks like when viewed from this remote outpost, and in particular, about the writing of Alexis Wright, whose novel Carpentaria, though set in the northern Australian frontier of the Gulf country, has established a centrality for itself which owes everything to its provincial origins.

Ivor Indyk is director of Giramondo Publishing, and Emeritus Professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University. He was the founding editor of HEAT magazine and co-founder of the Sydney Review of Books. A critic, teacher and publisher, he has written on many aspects of Australian literature, art, architecture and literary publishing, including a monograph on David Malouf. Giramondo publishes poetry, fiction and non-fiction by Australian and overseas writers, and its titles have won many literary awards.