Go Hobbits! Go Wozzies!

You've heard by now that Australia's Favourite Book is Lord of the Rings, pipping both Pride & Prejudice and the Bible. Clearly, this is a country that likes its books dense, meandering, and desperately in need of a brutal editor.

Don't get me wrong. The Bible's probably the best example of an ongoing collaborative work by mostly anonymous writers, but it needs some serious editing. And Jane Austen... I've been traumatised by her ever since my father decided that at age 11 I was too old for Enid Blyton and pushed me onto "real books" ie, a stack of Jane Austens. I still can't read her. Thank gods for the BBC drama department and Colin Firth.

What really surprised me though was that, as one of the panellists on the show, Edmund Campion, observed, the only two Australian books in the top 10 were both written by Wozzies - A Fortunate Life by A.B. Facey, and Cloud Street by Tim Winton.

Only two of the top 10 were Australian, you gasp? Remember that this is out of the entire lot of books ever published in English, and it's actually an astoundingly high percentage. Tolstoy didn't make it, nor Dumas. 20% Australian, and 100% Western Australian.

It puts me in mind of something I heard recently about Western Australian artists: that unlike our Eastern States counterparts, we tend to aim for the overseas market and international showings. We are so isolated, so far removed from the centres of Sydney and Melboure, that we look even further afield for recognition. We are subsequently more cosmopolitan in our outlook, and not as inward-looking as our Eastern States peers.

I think there's certainly something in that sentiment. Being on the fringes, we are better aware than most that Sydney and Melbourne are not the centre of the universe - we don't have to write/sculpt/paint/film to please them, even if they seem to hold the funding pursestrings. We tell our own stories our way, subconsciously or otherwise, and somehow, we end up speaking to everyone.