Around the end of the financial year, I like to do a little audit of my spreadsheets, look at my income for the year and see where I am putting my energy; it’s a good time to reflect and I think it’s important to be transparent about the realities of freelancing. In the past I have done this as a Twitter thread but I abandoned ship when Space Karen took over, so I’m sharing here instead (yep, macroblogging is back).

Before I go into the $ stuff, I want to share some new publications and projects. I’ve been lucky enough to have spent a good chunk of the last several weeks speaking to artists and thinking about art – really one of the best things about my job.

I had a review of the Ramsay prize exhibition in The Saturday Paper – AGSA’s biennial prize for artists under 40 provides a great sample of younger contemporary artists and their preoccupations. It’s a fantastic, eclectic exhibition, though it felt a little cramped (maybe due to the Frida Kahlo blockbuster being installed downstairs). I managed to work a little nudge about fossil fuel sponsorship into this piece, chipping away!

I’ve also written an essay about ANAT’s latest project, A Partnership for Uncertain Times, which is now up at Artlink magazine. It’s a fascinating exhibition and longer project with a focus on collaboration and creative research. Four artists who think deeply about their practice, how they work and how they connect – a real pleasure to write this one.

Next up, I am involved with an exciting project looking at the early years of Vitalstatistix: The Art of Work is a Work of Art. I’ve been having a fun and dusty time digging around in the archives and reading through old play scripts from the 1980s. There are showings on July 14/15, so please come along and see the work as it develops!

Finally, there is my latest essay for Meanjin, ‘My Year as a Salaried Artist.’ [$] This is a reflective piece about the experiment of my residency at Vitalstatistix, precarious labour in the arts, and how a salaried artist model might address these issues. As a long term freelancer (16 years!) I was really surprised by the emotional dimensions of secure work, to be honest. It’s made me understand the links between burnout and precarity more clearly, and strengthened my faith in solidarity. I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to test the model and I’m glad to be able to share the experience; I hope the essay is useful to others working in the arts.

Which brings me to the $ stuff…

Freelancing audit for 2022-23

I had 39 different jobs this financial year. It’s a lot, more than the usual load. Two major differences were the residency salary, which was 24% of my income, and the fact that I didn’t sell a book or get paid for any fiction. I am working on fiction plenty, but it wasn’t a source of income for this year.

Copyright payments and public lending rights, which will soon include Digital Lending Rights (yay!) accounted for about 8% of my income. The other 68% was from freelance work. My non-fiction writing – essays, articles, book reviews and so on – made up over half that, or 37% of my total income. The rest was an even split between teaching/mentoring, judging/peer assessing/manuscript assessments, festivals/events/public speaking, and private work (writing a grant for someone, copyediting a report, that sort of thing).

SUPER

This is only the second year I’ve been consistent about charging superannuation – it’s a real focus for us at MEAA, and a key demand of the Freelance Charter. This year I made 70% of the super I was entitled to, but that was largely because of the salaried work I had at Vitalstatistix. Only half of my freelance gigs paid any super – this is a substantial improvement on last year, when it was a third. There’s a cultural shift, with many small arts orgs understanding the need to pay super to independent contractors. In my experience this hasn’t trickled up to bigger institutions yet – most of my lost super is where I have worked for a university or major media outlet.

$/WORD

I earned $17989 for all my non-fiction writing for the year, and I published 34,214 words. If I’d been paid the MEAA rate of $1/word, I would have another $16,225 in my pocket. Instead, I was paid an average per word rate of 53c, with a high of $1.20 (a first, writing for The Monthly) and a low of 30c/word (at Meanjin). It’s appalling that literary journals are not funded to pay their contributors fairly. I’m really hoping for some improvement in this space, with new arts money coming through in the budget and what seems to be a genuine proposal to make arts funding conditional on fair pay. Being active in the union and the ASA is very satisfying; I do think we are starting to see some real structural change here, but it’s VERY slow.

Although my income is still significantly lower than the median wage (after expenses, it is lower than minimum wage), I don’t lead an expensive life and I find my role fulfilling in numerous other ways. My work feels meaningful and collective; being part of a creative community is one of the great joys of my existence. It’s varied and interesting – no two weeks are the same. Because freelancing is such a low-income job, I am often doing too many things at once to make ends meet. This makes it hard to “buy time” to work on the fiction writing I want to be doing. That will be my aim over the next few months. Like many creatives, I work to keep working.

If you’re a freelancer, please join the union and fill out this survey about your rates and working conditions. It’s important for us to have numbers behind us – lots of people, and hard data – as we continue to push for a better deal.

And if you’re an author, you should be a member of the ASA – we are working hard to improve things for everyone. We’re stronger together!