Dr Jeremy Fisher, a senior lecturer in Writing with UNE’s School of Arts, was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to “literature, to education, and to professional organisations”.

Dr Fisher has a long history with the publishing industry, as a publisher, advocate and writer. His affiliations include roles as Executive Director of the Australian Society of Authors, 2004-2009 (and a Board member); Director of the Australian Copyright Council, 2004-2009; Director of the Copyright Agency Ltd, 2010-2016; Judge of The Walkley Awards non-fiction book category, 2006, 2007 and 2008, and Board Member, Australian Publishers Association, 1998-2000.

As a writer, Dr Fisher’s published works include ‘Perfect Timing’ (translated into Vietnamese), 1993; ‘Music from Another Country’, 2009; ‘How to Tell Your Father to Drop Dead’, 2013 and ‘The Dirty Little Dog’, 2016.

He told Pulse that he regards literature (in all its forms, including screenplays and scripts) as “helping form the core of our identity”.

That Australian identity is under grave threat of dissolution, he believes, as governments place more emphasis on financial and trade transactions than the different but still essential transactions between cultures.

On recent study tours to Vietnam, China and the Scandinavian countries, he was impressed by efforts to shore up cultural identity in an age of globalisation. Those efforts are absent in Australia, Dr Fisher said, and in their absence we risk losing a sense of ourselves as Australian.