Australian literature: magazines that shaped our culture

Australia’s literary magazines have long charted the nation’s cultural evolution.

JF Archibald, left, co-founder of The Bulletin, with Henry Lawson.

When George Brandis was recently caught reading an anthology of bush poetry during a Senate estimates meeting — surely a reasonable response to a mind-numbing few hours of low-impact Q&A — our reaction said as much about us as it did about him. A more circumspect media would have cheered rather than jeered (for one thing, here was irrefutable evidence of an arts minister who read — and not any tosh but ­poetry — Australian poetry!).

Instead there was a sense that his decision to read and his choice of reading matter only reinforced negative impressions of the man: that he was an elitist, a dilettante and, worse still, an aesthetic conservative. But while others wondered why he wasn’t discreetly slicing digital fruit like any other self-respecting idler, I quietly celebrated the man’s taste. By steeping himself in the ballads of Banjo Paterson, the melancholy wit of Henry Lawson, the cadenced patriotism of Dorothea Mackellar, the senator was not only acknowledging some solid, old-school poetic formalism, he was acknowledging a mighty debt.

Because without the poetry of Mackellar, no seat of Mackellar. Without the fine and vigorous efforts of that circle of writers corralled by AG Stephens at The Bulletin, no narratives of national independence for a political movement towards Federation to coalesce around.

What Brandis was acknowledging, I thought, was how significant the stories we tell about ourselves have been to our formation as a culture: how important these writers remain and how important the journals and little magazines in which they appeared have been to the ­creation and maintenance of our democratic temper, our bias towards national self-determination, over the past century and more.

Regrettably, this view has subsequently needed revision. In the Abbott government’s 2015 budget, significant cuts to the Australia Council had the effect of reducing its discretionary funds by a third, or $23 million a year. Since marquee performing arts companies were ring-fenced from these, the loss fell hardest on individual artists, writers and literary organisations that have long relied on basic government funding for their existence.

More stinging still was the creation — using more than $100 million of Australia Council funds — of a parallel funding body, the National Program for Excellence in the Arts, to be run out of Brandis’s office. Its draft guidelines make no mention of funding for literature and are framed in such a way apparently to preclude individual writers or literary organisations from applying.

In an appalled yet forensically detailed submission to the Senate committee responsible for investigating the effects of these changes, theatre critic and author Alison Croggon argued they ‘‘will have a catastrophic effect on almost every aspect of Australian contemporary culture’’, but she was particularly concerned about the future of Australian literary magazines, which were crucial in ‘‘nourishing the work of new and established Australian writers”.

Croggon argues for the necessary place of literary magazines in our larger cultural ecology. Since the founding of The Bulletin in 1880, scores of journals have sprung up in Australia to publish poetry, essays, short stories and political critique. Many have lasted only a short time — think of them as wattles, nitrogen-fixers that prepare the ground for more established trees — while others, such as Meanjin, Overland, Quadrant and Australian Book Review have become permanent fixtures in the landscape, idiosyncratically shaped by editorial personality and place of residence.

Some of these preceded the development of a local publishing industry, but all of them were central to its development: without them, the Peter Careys, the Les Murrays, the Wintons and Garners would not have had a place to test and refine their talents. They didn’t earn money — literary journals are by their nature financial sinks — but they provided a huge return on meagre investment by creating the conditions on which more established players could profit and build.

Phillip Edmond’s Tilting at Windmills: The Literary Magazine in Australia 1968-2012, arrives, then, at in interesting moment. Edmonds is a lecturer at the University of Adelaide and a former editor of literary magazines, including Adelaide’s Wet Ink. He is a thoughtful partisan for Australian journals, and if his scholarly rigour sometimes obscures the wilder shores of the little magazine scene in recent decades, there is enough drollery and anecdote left to indicate just how dynamic and plain good fun Ozlit culture has been over time.

The first point emerging from Edmonds’s overview is an awareness that it is hopeless to extricate literary journals from the broader landscape of literary production in Australia. Almost every Australian writer of note has made their start or gained career ground through association with litmags — and not just creative writers. Many editors, public intellectuals, academics and critics also established themselves through literary magazine association. The second point is that such literary production is enmeshed in the larger world. The period covered by Edmonds is one shaped and reshaped by social, economic and technological forces, from conflict in Vietnam to the rise of the digital. Indeed, his chronological history continually returns to Raymond Williams’s question: ‘‘To what extent and in what ways is the literary imagination conditioned by its social contexts?’’

There is some loss in this approach. Individual creators and their works are employed as evidence for cultural analysis and critique rather than appreciated or damned in their own lights. Yet it is enormously helpful for us, now, to understand the place of literary magazines in a broader framework. They have, in Edmonds’s words, ‘‘represented and reflected the mediating role culture has performed in the evolution of contemporary Australia’’. Which is another way of saying that the story of our literary magazine culture is the story in miniature of our evolution as a nation over the past four decades.

And, as Edmonds explains, that story ‘‘is one of persistence, obsession and — at times — cultural opportunity’’. Unlike the US, where historically a large population of readers made the establishment of a ‘‘literary’’ magazine culture viable, Australia, a nation of pragmatists and sport lovers, developed a mass media constitutionally wary of the arts.

As newspapers and magazines became more professional, more strictly targeted towards their respective demographics in the period after World War II, this aversion only became more clear cut. It was in reaction to such institutional philistinism that Clem Christesen launched Meanjin Papers at Christmas 1940 in Brisbane, a city then under existential threat. Over his next 34 years as editor, Christesen sought to embrace those art forms not served by the mainstream, and in doing so built a small but devout readership.

While Meanjin and others like it may have identified themselves in opposition to the status quo, there was a strong dose of cultural nationalism in these undertakings. University-associated journals such as Southerly, begun at the University of Sydney in the early 1930s, or politically engaged magazines such as the defiantly left-of-centre Overland in the 50s, each sought in its way to weld discussion and expression of the arts to questions of politics and nationhood. The idea that Australian literature might be a subject worthy of study was founded on Southerly’s efforts. The idea that Ozlit might also be a subject fit for study by miners and shearers, and not a hereditary or technocratic elite, grew out of arguments mounted in Overland’s pages.

By the time Edmonds’s study proper opens, however, time had turned these radical journals into venerable pillars of the establishment — at least in the eyes of the young turks set on remaking the Australian literary magazine. The war in Vietnam, the emergence of the US as the pre-eminent soft power, the coming of age of the baby boomers: all these developments and more contributed to an efflorescence in journal-making. The aesthetic was handmade, with copies roneoed or published in cheap offset formats, and publishing timetables were suitably lax: many of the magazines published in the late 60s appeared in three, two, or even single-issue runs. For Edmonds, they were objects of earnest caprice, valuable precisely to the degree of their nonconformism.

And yet we can now see how the period prefigured enduring intellectual contests. The infamous poetry conflict whose most visible opponents were Murray and John Tranter burned hot during these years. Even today, Tranter (who ran his own online magazine, Jacket, for many years) is a part-creation of Overland — a journal that became interested in and supportive of experimental verse — while Murray has long reigned as literary editor of Quadrant, the conservative house magazine. Likewise, Michael Wilding and Stephen Knight’s Balcony was a little magazine much devoted to attacks on the takeover by followers of FR Leavis of the Sydney University English department, in what Edmonds describes as ‘‘an early salvo in what was to lead to the onset of cultural studies, deconstruction and postmodernism’’.

Edmonds similarly finds in litmags of the 70s, 80s and 90s numerous small-bore iterations of wider wars. He praises the punkish, anarchic mood of the 70s while acknowledging the central paradox of the era: that much of the rebellion was middle-class, and much of the transgression restricted to a small coterie of sophisticated, like-minded poets and provocateurs. Again and again the historian notes how magazines filled with writers of talent collapsed because they could not find a large enough readership, or could not access sufficient funds, or could not survive changes in staffing when such magazines were powered by the pockets and the drive of a single individual. It was a rare journal that, independent of academic or government support, had enough readers, dollars and distribution assistance to achieve escape velocity.

The commodification of dissent and social change which Edmonds sees beginning in the 70s gathers pace as the decade turns. The 80s are a period of consolidation and fiscal responsibility; they are also years of timidity. Just as editors became more savvy in the way they designed, marketed and distributed literary magazines, an older notion of shared cultural endeavour leached away. This was the decade of isms, when affiliations based on, say, sexual orientation, ethnicity or gender began to supersede collective literary activity based on geography. As a reaction to the same straight, middle-class, white men running the cultural show, this was a fair response. But, as Edmonds also argues, once you have ceded any appeal to shared cultural identity, it is hard to justify the funding of a national literary infrastructure for writers to trumpet their disillusion with cultural nationalism.

So it was that the academic insurgents of the Left joined forces with neoliberalism on the Right. Edmonds quotes the current professor of Australian literature at the University of Sydney to devastating effect:

Robert Dixon makes the case that there was a strong link between the rise of literary theory (largely French post-structuralism) and that of economic rationalism under the Hawke-Keating governments in the 1980s. Discussing one of the main protagonists of the theories, Meaghan Morris, Dixon notes that in Morris’s book — Ecstasy and Economics, published in 1992 — she expresses the view that forms of protectionism belong in the past: “For Morris, there is no question of protectionism, for in a postcolonial culture there is no imminent national identity to protect. Rather, the question is how to work in such a context.’’

Or, as Richard Flanagan put at the end of the 90s, at a moment where emerging desktop publishing technologies had revolutionised the making of literary magazines, only to see the nascent web further erode notions of local literary production and provide a thousand more streams of popular global culture to flow in:

The fervent nationalism that fused radicalism with cultural exploration and created both a market for Australian books and an extraordinary gallery of writers and publishers to produce them is dying. People feel betrayed by the idea of Australia, for Australia is no longer an idea with which all Australians wish to identify.

Edmonds concludes by suggesting that intellectuals of the Left essentially abandoned their role, further developing a national identity in the way that Meanjin and Overland had striven towards over the years. And in doing so they ceded that territory to the right-wing nativism of John Howard and Tony Abbott.

The author correctly locates a renaissance of the litmag movement in recent years, including Seizure in Sydney, and journals such as The Lifted Brow and Kill Your Darlings in Melbourne, which have redefined with elan the Australian literary magazine for a generation of digital natives. Poetry is far less important than it once was, and the politics of identity remains very much at the forefront of editorial interest. But they are all beautiful productions, coffee-table ready, and the intelligence and passion of earlier decades is firmly in place. In their pages a generational turn against the politics of neoliberalism has seen a dusting off of the old oppositional politics, while the globalising forces of recent decades have paradoxically turned writers’ attention to their own backyards. It is not literary nationalism, not quite. But it is a return of interest in questions of place under an ecological or politically conscious guise.

Edmonds’s monograph is quietly passionate about the enduring worth of literary magazines. It is also, as is appropriate for a man who has devoted many years to their production and dissemination, a rolling elegy. He knows that our national circumstances have hamstrung the possibility of a more established literary culture. Of all the variables he isolates, only one has remained the bedrock of what little intergenerational stability has existed for literary magazines — and that is the Australia Council.

Which returns us to Senate estimates, and that anthology. The writers contained within Brandis’s book emerged from a moment before the state saw any responsibility for funding the arts. In such contexts, artistic, musical and literary practice was mainly the preserve of the leisured classes. Andrew Barton Paterson was a grazier’s son; Isobel Dorothea Mackellar the daughter of the industrious and wealthy Sir Charles Mackellar. Henry Lawson was not so fortunate in birth. He spent many years in precarious financial circumstances before dying a broken alcoholic. But the darkest fate belonged to Barcroft Boake, the Balmain-born son of an Irish bankrupt. Boake’s constitutional melancholy was exacerbated by financial pressures and artistic frustration. He notoriously hanged himself with a stockwhip by Sydney’s Middle Harbour in 1892.

Lawson and his jet-black humour, Boake and his gothic terrors. Edmonds’s history reminds us to again ask the question: ‘‘To what extent and in what ways is the literary imagination conditioned by its social contexts?’’ It is fair to say both figures describe a world of extreme inequality and harsh working conditions for most — a society in which the creative artist has little in the way of professional community and few outlets for their work. Lawson, in an bitter article for The Bulletin in 1899, estimated that over the dozen years he had been working as a writer in Australia he had only earned a total of £700.

That £53 a year has the purchasing power of just over $7000 — which, according to the Australia Council’s most recent data, is almost twice the current median income of writers (exclusively for their writing) in Australia today.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.

Tilting at Windmills: The Literary Magazine in Australia 1968-2012

By Phillip Edmonds

University of Adelaide Press, 304pp, $44