Melbourne University Publishing

But there is a willingness to take the risk and it depends on a certain type of publisher being willing to take the risk, of course.

Louise Adler, who was the CEO of Melbourne University Publishing for 15 years, was responsible for a very good number of the books that I've dealt with in this study.

And she was someone who was quite brave, quite willing to take those risks.

Mark Latham's diaries were famously controversial and full of slander and innuendo and defamation and probably self-incrimination as well.

The house was going fine.

Everything had sort of calmed down, and then I was i- invited to do, a just a little 10,000-word essay by Melbourne University Press, and I thought, ah-

On Bob?

No, no.

You had a stint working at the ABC.

2003, you became chief executive of Melbourne University Publishing.

What was your brief at the time when they put you in that job?

job?Hilary McPhee, the great Australian, the doyenne of Australian independent publishing, had written a review, and her editorial brief was that we should engage in the public conversation and that the task was primarily or in the first instance to find academics whose work could, with our assistance, be rendered public, be given public expression.

I'd sent him questions, which were wholly reasonable, condemned in parliament.

The pro-Israel lobby tried to pressure my publisher, which was Melbourne University Press.

Louise Adler, who was then the publisher, she was a fellow Jew like me, and we had similar worldviews about this issue.

She's now very outspoken on this issue.

For those who don't know, my first book was in 2006 called My Israel Question and it became this bestseller and it was condemned in parliament by politicians and the pro-Israel lobby tried to get it literally pulped.

...putting pressure on my publisher which was then Melbourne University Press... ...and my publisher was then Louise Adler who some people may know.

She's not with that publisher anymore but she was back then.

And look, the whole experience... ...I have written and talked a bit about this personal toll.

The stories they tell persist.

Elisa de Courcy is a curator, historian, and author of a new book, Early Photography in Colonial Australia, published by Melbourne University Press.

Elisa joins me from Canberra.

Elisa, welcome to the show.

So it's only really when those three things align and people start using photography in a purposeful way that you get a practice, um, coalescing.

On ABC Radio National, this is Late Night Live.

I'm David Marr, and I am talking to Elisa de Coursey about her book, Early Photography in Colonial St- Australia, which is published by Melbourne University Press.

Elisa, what's the earliest photograph we have taken on the Australian continent?