A Post-mortem of a Pulped Book: Making Sense of the Missed Opportunities of Deadly Woman Blues

Abstract

When new books are reviewed, they are normally in circulation and available for purchase. This is not true, however, of Deadly Woman Blues: Black Women & Australian Music by Clinton Walker, which was only recently released by NewSouth Publishing, the publishing arm of UNSW Press, in February 2018, yet withdrawn from sale within weeks due to numerous complaints from the very musicians whose work and achievements it sought to celebrate. Before reaching most bookstore shelves, Deadly Woman Blues was resoundingly condemned by several of the most prominent of those musicians via their social media posts, letters to the editor, and news commentaries. Criticized for the lack of consultation and consent sought by Walker from many of the living musicians it discussed, as well as for the many factual errors and historical distortions found within its pages, NewSouth Publishing (2018) announced that Deadly Woman Blues would be pulped on 5 March 2018 with all corrections to be posted on its website. Walker (2018b) issued his own apology, citing the book’s ‘errors of fact’, that same day. Walker had conceived of Deadly Woman Blues as a generally-chronological biographical encyclopaedia aimed at recognizing the often-overlooked histories and achievements of black women in Australian music. Although not unproblematic, the book did not stop with entries on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander musicians, but also extended to expatriate musicians of the African diaspora and Indigenous communities of other countries. Even so, Deadly Woman Blues was promoted as a sequel to Walker’s earlier book, the highly-successful Buried Country: The Story of Aboriginal Country Music (Walker 2000a), which had spawned a tie-in documentary film (Nehl 2000), two double-CD albums (Walker 2000b, 2015b) and a stage show (Walker 2016). Deadly Woman Blues would not, however, be received as the triumph that Buried Country had been.