The Australian ----- the only national broadsheet, which publishes the nationwide Higher Education supplement--- recently had an article by Rosemary Neill entitled Lost for Words, which charts the decline of Oz Lit. The argument is this:

Three decades after we shook off the colonial hangover, Pierce [Peter Pierce, the inaugural professor of Australian literature at James Cook University] and others claim a new cultural cringe is infesting our halls of higher learning, encouraging the neglect of Australian literature...The decline of Australian literature is also blamed on funding cuts and the inexorable rise of postmodern theory, a charge that supporters of that theory deny strenuously. [Pierce]He says the rot set in when academics who "abased" themselves before the altar of literary theory acquired institutional power and "captured literature departments in the '80s". Postmodern literary theory - and its near-relation, cultural studies - do not accord canonical works, Australian or otherwise, a privileged place. Such theories hold that everything from Big Brother to Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Peter Carey's Bliss is a text, thus diminishing the role of serious literature as a defining cultural force. The bitter divisions provoked by the rise of theory are well known. Yale University professor Harold Bloom has attacked cultural studies as an enemy of reading and part of the "lunatic destruction of literary studies". In Australia, what remains largely unexplored is the role imported, voguish theories have played in the destruction of our literature.

As Prof Graeme Turner points out

Australian literature, however, is not alone. There is a widespread decline in the number of chairs in humanities disciplines where most of us would accept the need to maintain a national capacity. Among those it has affected are Australian Studies, English literature, Classics and a raft of European and Asian languages such as Russian and Indonesian. This cannot be sheeted home to the usual suspects - cultural studies or postmodernism. Rather, this is what you get when you allow the market too much influence over the content and structure of higher education.

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