A passionately written and shrewdly marketed new book is an unexpected publishing success

By ELIZABETH FEIZKHAH

t almost walked off the shelves. At Dymocks bookstore in the Sydney suburb of Ryde, the white paperback with the burning eucalypt leaf on its cover and the boast THIS IS THE STORY THE MEDIA WILL NOT TELL on the back "took off straight away," says salesman David Lynton. "It sold very fast in the first two weeks, up to 30 or 40 copies a day. I can't think of any book that's sold that fast before --except maybe [U.S. relationships guru John Gray's] Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus."

In Australia, where books qualify as bestsellers if they manage to move 15,000 copies in a year, Among the Barbarians is already a bestseller three times over. Five weeks after its May 22 launch it had more than 50,000 copies in print and was topping bestseller lists in Sydney and Melbourne. Soon, says author Paul Sheehan, it will be reprinted for the fifth time, with new cover lines calling it THE PHENOMENAL NO. 1 BESTSELLER "and some quotes: 'bold,' 'brave,' 'brilliant'--that sort of stuff." Having received only the typical novice author's advance of $A5,000, Sheehan seems mildly surprised to have what he calls "one of the big blockbusters of Australia" so suddenly on his hands. He may have to get used to the burden. Says Deborah Callaghan, his publisher at Random House: "The success is starting to feed off itself. People feel they need to know what's in the book because it's selling so well."

The contents may surprise. Sheehan--an investigative journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald--has written neither a murder mystery nor a diary of exotic travel. Among the Barbarians' subtitle, and theme, is "The Dividing of Australia." Built around six stories the media did tell--feature articles that appeared in the Herald in 1996--the book argues that Australia is accepting too many migrants; that Asian immigration is dividing the nation along racial lines (the barbarians of the title are Australians, as purportedly seen by the Chinese); that Asians are overrepresented in unemployment statistics, organized crime, and welfare and immigration rackets; and that to shore up its power base the previous federal Labor government cynically pursued divisive multiculturalist policies without heed to their economic or social cost.

For Sheehan, "these are all the things you can't say in Australia anymore" for fear of retribution--or at the very least cries of "racism"--from what he calls "the thought police": universities, the news media, publishing, the bureaucracy and the Labor Party. The only place left to speak heresy, he says, is talkback radio--and that, he decided, was the best place to market his book.

Smart move. Alan Jones, whose top-rating Sydney talkback program on 2UE has more than 500,000 listeners a week, "liked my work," the author says, and agreed to launch the book on air. Sheehan spoke, Jones read out extracts--and the phones started ringing in support. Three days later, Barbarians had sold out in Sydney and was rushed into a second printing. Recalls bookseller Lynton: "People were coming into the store saying they'd heard about it on Alan Jones. A couple of them said, 'This country needs to change and this is the book that's going to do it.'" A week later, the phenomenon was repeated in Melbourne, with Neil Mitchell's talkback show on 3AW.

But even before the book's sales had begun to climb, Sheehan was also welcomed in the territory of the "thought police". His employer, the Herald, and the Melbourne Age, published long extracts from the book; broadsheets and tabloids alike gave it affable reviews: "elegantly written," "eloquent," "first-rate." Even the ABC--where Sheehan says "bias is beyond bias, it's a world view"--wanted to hear what he had to say. Despite chidings by reviewer Ramona Koval (who said the book made her feel uneasy) and cultural commentator Robert Manne (who said its approach was intemperate and inflammatory), "There has been no substantive criticism of the book," Sheehan says. "I certainly haven't seen a single thing that's worried me."

Which leads some to question his claim that the debate on race and immigration was stifled at all. Says pro-immigration Liberal M.P. Chris Pyne: "The number of times that people like Mr. Sheehan, Pauline Hanson and Graeme Campbell [respectively leaders of the anti-immigration, anti-multiculturalism parties One Nation and Australia First] and others are given air time and space in print to ventilate their views completely refutes the suggestion that there is a pall of censorship over the immigration debate." Sydney Morning Herald columnist P.P. McGuinness disagrees: "There is a lot of truth in Sheehan's claim that Labor suppressed dissent about immigration. The instant denigration of historian Geoffrey Blainey [who was accused of racism and disowned by many academic colleagues after he suggested in 1984 that Australia should reduce its intake of Asian migrants] is the classic example."

Sheehan too has been denigrated for his views in the past. The book's first chapter is studded with angry responses to his 1996 Herald story "The Multicultural Myth," which attacked "the industry of tax-fed lawyers, political operatives and racial axe-grinders that has grown like an enormous parasite out of Australia's heroic commitment to cultural diversity." But Australian Financial Review columnist Imre Saluszinsky says the author "seems to mistake criticism for repression." The angry letters, he notes, did not prevent Sheehan from expressing his own views.

And his article stirred sympathy as well as rage. When ABC-TV journalist Jennifer Byrne, then a publisher, read it, she says, "I felt it was a big fat slap in the face to the official version of politics and race. He was lifting the lid off suppression of information. And I thought that was more important than a single article." Excited, and thinking, "Heck, this could sell a lot of books," she telephoned Sheehan and commissioned him to write what became Among the Barbarians.

While Sheehan is still waiting to be attacked over the book--though "anyone who's going to try and call me [a racist] is going to have to be ready to rumble"--he has also shielded himself (and his publisher) from potential arrows. "The book has been through the lawyers three times," he says. "It's boilerplated. It's absolutely untouchable on the issue of discrimination or race."

Some readers think such caution diminishes the book. Sheehan's polemical intent sits uneasily with his efforts to maintain a detached reporter's standpoint. Koval noted in the Australian that Barbarians "is long on having a bet each way and short on plain speech." Says McGuinness: "Every abuse Sheehan reports is more or less true, but he doesn't go further than that. You can complain about abuses, but the real issue is how to do it better." Says John Iremonger, nonfiction publisher at Allen & Unwin, "I think the book is actually quite timid. [Sheehan] leaves the reader with a sense of unease and prejudices confirmed, but he's careful not to suggest any policy prescriptions, because once he does that he's going to lose some of his readers." That ambiguity, as well as making the author a shifting target, leaves him seeming to support incompatible views.

Which Sheehan fully expected to happen. "I think right-wingers read the book thinking, Ah, here's a guy that's going to back us up," he says. "I think left-wingers read the book and think, Here's the thinking man's Pauline Hanson. And neither of them get what they expect." McGuinness, who has called Barbarians "the book that Hanson and her friends did not have the ability to write," thinks readers who oppose immigration and multiculturalism will use it as their bible. "Every Hansonite candidate will be able to point to it and say, Told you so."

Perhaps, but Lynton reports that the people he has talked to about the book feel let down: "They've said they were expecting some great revelation, but the book was just sort of OK." That reaction might disappoint the pugnacious Sheehan, who has already chosen his next target--universities, "the citadels of bigotry." Whichever quarter it comes from, the author is clearly looking forward to the next round--and so are his publishers.

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