Hunter Publishers is an independent publisher located in Melbourne, Australia. We are interested in literary and commercial fiction and quality non-fiction, including humour, pop culture, memoir, politics, and sport. We like writing that sounds strange and new or very, very old. Basically, we're trying to re-invent the toe-tapper.

There’s a scene in the movie Annie Hall where Woody Allen describes his feelings about love using an old joke. A guy goes to see a psychiatrist and says, 'Doc, my brother's crazy, he thinks he's a chicken.' To which the doctor replies, 'Well, why don't you have him committed?' So the guy says, 'Well, I would, but … we need the eggs.'

Sometimes, even when things seem totally irrational and crazy and absurd, we stick with it for reasons that we never really understand.

I think of that joke when I try and explain what attracts me to being a small independent publisher. I’ve worked in Australian publishing for about ten years, for companies like Scribe, Pan Macmillan, and John Kerr Publishing, so I know how difficult it is. Independent publishing is a strange kind of madness — financially, it's crazy; it seems irrational, but something about it is worthwhile.

A spirit of energy and optimism has swept into Australian culture in the last few months. A sense that we’re over the creeping conservatism of the last decade — a feeling that we’ve finally taken our eye off the rear-vision mirror and are starting to think about the road ahead. And it’s in this spirit that I invite you to read the first two novels that we will be publishing in 2008: the hilarious Oink, Oink, Oink by Eric Yoshiaki Dando — a savage modern fable about science, family, television, and love gone wrong — and Parliament of Sims by Jill Sparrow and Paul Voermans — a political adventure story that brilliantly imagines the history of Australia’s next forty years.

I hope you enjoy reading them and that they will act as a good introduction to our publishing programme: creative new writing that takes a few risks—that is original and engaged and keen to have a bit of fun along the way. Much of it written by young Australian writers you’ve never heard of, but should have.

John Hunter