[1] In 1939, the Fund, which had increased incrementally to £1500 (equivalent to $148,000 in 2022), was trebled by the Menzies government in response to agitation by the Fellowship of Australian Writers and ex-Prime Minister Jim Scullin.
The scope of the Fund was broadened to grant fellowships to writers, and to provide guarantees against loss to Australian publishers of works approved by the Committee.
[2] Membership of the Advisory Board was generally confined to older (mostly) male writers of long-established reputations: Grenfell Price, Vance Palmer, T. Inglis Moore, Douglas Stewart, Geoffrey Blainey, Kenneth Slessor, Flora Eldershaw and Kylie Tennant.
Maurice Dunlevy, in his article for the Canberra Times, echoed Grenfell Price in saying that the Fund may have enabled works to be published which otherwise would not have been written, or would have been of lesser quality, and helped in the careers of a few great writers (Les A. Murray, David Ireland, Alex Buzo, William Marshall, H. M. Green, and Judith Wright), but much of the work produced was of mediocre quality, and no book sponsored by the Fund could be called a work of genius.
[2] In 1973, by which time its budget had grown to $300,000 (equivalent to $3,182,000 in 2022), the functions of the CLF were taken over by the Literature Board, an arm of the Australia Council for the Arts.