Issue 108

When I began writing books professionally in 2006, I had never heard of the Australian Lending Right Schemes. My publisher just handed me a form, which I blithely filled out and promptly forgot all about.

Then, after a hair-raising period filled with newborn children, an elephantine mortgage, and modest book sales, I got a very pleasant surprise in the form of a magical deposit in my bank account. It seems ‘that Lending Rights thing’ had kicked in. It wasn’t a huge amount, but it was enough to make my wife and I dance around the kitchen. It was like a gift from the heavens. That payment, and the annual instalments that have followed, have helped to keep us afloat and, crucially, it kept me writing. For me, and I suspect for many authors, it was a really big deal.

For a grown-up with grown-up responsibilities, becoming a professional author is a preposterous choice. It’s the kind of job title that makes in-laws lose sleep and bank managers call security. It’s not something a wholly sensible person would even consider. However, some of us just can’t help it.

Back in the 80s, I was a shy, stooped kid with glasses and a very chic, flesh-coloured eyepatch designed to correct my ‘lazy eye’. I also went to multiple primary schools in various towns, so it’s probably not a total mind-blower to discover that I spent a lot of my childhood hiding in school libraries.

I loved them. They were a sanctuary; an escape portal, housed within the walls of ordinary institutions, filled with extraordinary ideas and the promise of a bigger world. As an adult author, I’ve visited literally hundreds of them. But I still get that same frisson of possibility — however tempered by age and experience — every time I enter one.

That I now am now able to make books to help fill them is a privilege almost too great to process, and that libraries return the favour by providing a lifeline to authors through completing the Educational Lending Right School Library Survey is a situation almost too good to be true. Yet it is true, and I for one would like to say ‘thank you’.

In fact, if you open your window and listen very carefully around the end of the financial year — if the wind is blowing in the right direction — there’s a chance you’ll hear the sound of authors scattered around the country crying out in unison ‘Oh thank you, Lending Rights! What would we do without you?’

Oh, what indeed?

Image credit

Photo supplied by Aaron Blabey