A Place and Time to Write and Publish
Creating Books in Regional Australia
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21635064 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kim Wilkins (0000-0001-7783-8248, The University of Queensland, corresponding author), Beth Driscoll (0000-0002-2725-5682, The University of Melbourne), Alexandra Dane (0000-0002-1798-171X, The University of Melbourne) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 42 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Publication date | 2026-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Publishing Research Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1053-8801 • E-ISSN: 1936-4792 |
| Publisher | Springer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1007/s12109-026-10075-7 |
| OpenAlex | W7167462827 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 17 |
Community publishing in regional Australia operates by temporal frameworks shaped by place that differ from those shaped by the commercial imperatives that govern mainstream publishing. This paper draws on Rita Felski’s tripartite feminist heuristic of everyday time, life time, and large-scale time, alongside Mary Graham’s Indigenous epistemology of place, to analyse interview data from writers, publishers, booksellers, and community connectors in four regional Australian communities: the Burdekin region, Winton, Broken Hill, and Alice Springs/Mparntwe. We argue that regional community publishing bears the impression of its placed temporalities, for example, agricultural cycles, community rhythms, life stages, and the urgency of preserving fragile histories; and that while regional community publishing shares some temporal touchpoints with mainstream publishing (for example, Christmas gift-giving, festivals, life stages) it is also shaped by distinctive placed temporalities that commercial publishing does not experience. Everyday time in regional communities connects book-making to local routines and annual cycles; life time drives a significant proportion of regional publishing, with life transitions providing both the catalyst and the opportunity to write; and large-scale time reveals the urgent cultural work these books perform in preserving regional histories before they disappear with ageing storytellers. Understanding these distinctive temporalities challenges assumptions about how book culture operates when commercial imperatives are not as readily present, and illuminates the ways in which all publishing, whether metropolitan or regional, proceeds from particular places and times
Everyday life · Indigenous · Mainstream · Metropolitan area · Publishing · Temporalities · Australian History and Society · Library Science and Administration · Publishing and Scholarly Communication
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |