David Malouf’s literary world

For David Malouf it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between the experiences a lifetime’s worth of reading has given him and those that happened in the flesh. But, to him, the former was almost always far more important. “You read something and, in reading it, it becomes an experience. You take it on like other forms of experience. So sometimes when you look back and ask, ‘where did I experience that?’ it’s hard to tell whether you experienced it in the flesh or experienced it in another skin while you were reading,” said the acclaimed Australian author and poet. Next Wednesday, September 2, David Malouf will be enthralling the crowd at the Powerhouse Museum about what reading means to him as one of the ambassadors of Indigenous Literacy Day. To Malouf the skill of reading equates to true power in the ‘first world’. “If you are illiterate inside our society you are living in a first world which is fast moving, and where people are empowered by the fact that they can read. “We feed our curiosity with reading and all of that is invaluable to us. We take it for granted, because reading has been given to us as a tool and after a time we come to think of it not as something outside us, but something that belongs to us, like a motor skill. It’s as close to us as that,” said the winner of the Australia-Asia Literary Award. Malouf is just one of several figureheads of the Indigenous Literacy Project, an organisation that feeds resources into remote Australian communities to address the literary crisis faced by Indigenous Australians. By the age of 15, more than one-third of Australia’s Indigenous students do not have the adequate skills and knowledge in reading literacy. In the Northern Territory, only one in five children living in very remote Indigenous communities can read at the accepted minimum standard. Children’s author Andy Griffiths and Man Booker prize finalist Kate Grenville are also ambassadors for the cause. To raise money for the project, a Great Book Swap will be held at the Powerhouse Museum on Wednesday, and attendees will be invited to donate money and trade their books. Asked what piece of reading he’d like to get his hands on, Malouf said he had most of them in his bookcase at home. “I’d be a better trader than a buyer on this occasion,” he said.