Nourishing Labourist Culture: a report on a new left-wing writing and reading festival and a discussion of its antecedents

In early 1998, Graeme Sparkes put a proposal to the New International Bookshop (NIB) in Melbourne, that a committee be formed to investigate the possibilities of holding a broadly left-wing festival for readers and writers. Sparkes, a teacher of English as a second language at the Northern Metropolitan College of TAFE in Collingwood, was a shareholder in the NIB. That bookshop, which replaced the old CPA International Bookshop in Elizabeth Street, was underwritten by a large number of small 'shareholders' and though housed in the Melbourne Trades Hall, remains a somewhat precarious financial venture. Sparkes' initial desire to base the event around the bookshop and the Trades Hall, as centres oflabourist and left-wing culture, remained important in the subsequent development and identity of this festival.