Informing and seemingly fertilising these developments was a ‘republic’ of new writers, some published in traditional terms, many of whom only frequented certain writers’ festivals. If of a certain demographic, they went to the Emerging Writers’ Festival, begun in Melbourne, and the Newcastlebased National Young Writers’ Festival. Many of them published zines — small magazines of usually only 10-20 copies at the most, which were distributed among friends and the odd stranger. Zines were retro-moments in effect, and were even less ambitious in terms of preferred circulation than the more peripatetic publications of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Even in a time of reduced and reconfigured idealism, these writers, in terms of the festival in Newcastle, were participating in revitalising public spaces. They clearly realised that much of what was being published was for a middle-class, middle-aged, largely female readership of cultural consumers. Large numbers of them had also been initiated into notions of free cultural products through widespread downloading of musical products (for example, CDs) on the internet. Such free products undermined future income for musicians and creative writers under the guise of the democratisation of culture.

These young writers did not attend mainstream literary festivals on the whole, and were conspicuous by their absence from writers’ centres and probably did not read the literary pages of the major newspapers, knowing full well that what they produced would not be noticed in those pages because as a certain kind of writer they (with a few, mainly non-fiction exceptions) had marginal potential for commodification. They participated in events other than the Newcastle Young Writers’ Festival, including Fringe Festivals even though the notion of ‘the fringe’ was increasingly problematic as Fringe events were becoming more mainstream, and in a series of launches/parties. Whether this tendency was a sign of resignation about the fact that the means of literary production were unassailable, or a realisation that there was no need for change (and therefore no need to assemble an audience of readers), would be interesting to watch.

There were some similarities with the 1970s, in that writers will always congregate together, and the decade was noted for its readings. But during the 1970s, performance poetry had an edge to it in that middle-class readers were still able to be shocked, as even the more intellectual fraction of the class was relatively homogeneous.