UQ Press destroys 5,000 children's books, insists it's about governance
A Brisbane university publisher has pulped an entire print run of an Indigenous author's picture book, citing board tensions rather than the actual story.
CULTURE · INVESTIGATION
A Brisbane university publisher has pulped an entire print run of an Indigenous author's picture book, citing board tensions rather than the actual story.
The University of Queensland Press confirmed yesterday that it had destroyed approximately 5,000 copies of *Bila*, a children's picture book by an Indigenous author, in what staff members have described as a "governance decision" rather than an editorial one.
The pulping, which occurred over a period of weeks at a warehouse in the inner-north, was reportedly signed off by the press's board after what sources close to the matter described as "tension between oversight and creative autonomy"—a phrase that, in publishing circles, is generally understood to mean "somebody with a spreadsheet overruled somebody with a manuscript".
A spokesperson for the university press stated that the decision "had nothing to do with the contents of the book or the standing of the author," a formulation that typically precedes an explanation of precisely why the contents of the book and the standing of the author became suddenly irrelevant to the institution that had commissioned and printed them.
Industry observers have noted that the incident raises what they are diplomatically calling "a pointed question" about how university presses are governed in Australia—which is to say, nobody quite understands who is meant to make decisions, or why those decisions sometimes involve destroying thousands of bound pages rather than simply not printing them in the first place.
At press time, the University of Queensland had not returned requests for comment, a silence that sources familiar with institutional crisis management describe as "letting the story breathe a bit before we issue a statement nobody will read."
Somebody with a spreadsheet overruled somebody with a manuscript, as is tradition.— Publishing insider, condition of anonymity
Filed by Vicki Derwent — The Brainrot Desk