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Tilting at Windmills: the Literary Magazine in Australia, 1968-2012

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Tilting at Windmills: the Literary Magazine in Australia, 1968-2012 Phillip Edmonds Phillip Edmonds lectures in Australian Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide. He has also taught at the Victorian College of the Arts and Griffith University. His PhD, from Deakin University in 1997, is a study of the short story in Australia during the 1970s and 80s. In the 1970s he edited Contempa, and more recently, Wet Ink: The Magazine of New Writing between 2005 and 2012. Phillip is also the author of eight books, including the novella Leaving Home with Henry (2010) and a collection of short stories Don’t Let me Fall (1989). The high-quality paperback edition of this book is available for purchase online: https://shop.adelaide.edu.au/ Contents Graph of literary magazines in Australia from 1880 to 2012 viii 1 Introduction 1 2 Setting out 9 3 Definitions 13 4 Some background 25 5 The sixties and all that 33 6 A major expansion 39 7 Academic developments and other problems 83 8 A more ‘realistic' decade 103 9 New editors 119 10 Changes among the established magazines 139 11 A magazine apart 149 12 Whither the universities 153 13 A brave new world 155 14 Everything that is solid melts 157 15 New magazines 165 16 The problem of poetry again 181 17 A new demographic? 189 v Phillip Edmonds 18 Away from Sydney and Melbourne 203 19 Some of the same old problems 209 20 A case in point — Heat 219 21 Anti-democratic tendencies 227 22 An unreliable commodity 237 23 Complications and conclusions 253 Postscript 275 Works cited 279 vi Graph of literary magazines in Australia from 1880 to 2012 1. Introduction Up until the late 1960s the story of Australian literary magazines was one of continuing struggle against the odds, and of the efforts of individuals, such as Clem Christesen, Stephen Murray-Smith and Max Harris. During that time, the magazines played the role of ‘enfant terrible’, creating a space where unpopular opinions and writers were allowed a voice. The magazines have very often been ahead of their time and some of the agendas they have pursued have become central to representations, where once they were marginal. Broadly, ‘little’ magazines have often been more influential than their small circulations would first indicate, and my argument here is that they have played a valuable role in the promotion of Australian literature. After I completed this study, Robyn Annear, writing in the Monthly, suggested that the conventional wisdom is that journals are a hatchery for new talent. That partly explains the rationale for government support, as does the view that the genre is a ‘worthy’ one, in the sense of being non-commercial. (n.p.) But after examining ten magazines, she was not convinced of the argument, and concluded: My hunch is that the absence of … literary magazines, full stop[,] would discommode contributors, and potential contributors, far more than it would readers … Are they really all that stands between us and philistinism? In a word, no. (n.p.) 1 Phillip Edmonds While raising good points such as a lack of readers and uneven quality, she misses the central point that hatcheries are necessary — something I will demonstrate here. So as to make this as multifaceted as possible, I intend a history informed by political economy because often discussions of cultural moments and movements have been marked by a largely individualistic story. This, I believe, has at times prepared the very ground for the eventual fragility of the literary magazines I will be discussing. By this I mean that the scholarly and public reaction to the journals has tended to float across a fault line of ideological difference in the cases ofMeanjin and Overland (a Left perspective), and Quadrant (a Right oppositional stance). Of the remaining magazines, reactions have largely consisted of responses to individual pieces of creative writing and articles, and have been, as has been the way in Australia, generally insular and self-perpetuating. As far back as 1975, Thomas Shapcott prefigured as much in a review of several new poetry anthologies by wondering whether anyone could step outside their ‘coteries’ in Melbourne to provide an informed survey of events (‘Poetry’ 78). Because many of the little magazines have been, and are, springboards for self-promotion, writers have often been contrary in their support in that the reputation of particular publications has been all about perception and, as we will see, the ability to mythologise. In other words, the history of literary magazines is broader than anecdotal evidence and needs to be framed in social ways that are larger than individualised agendas. It is simplistic, then, to discuss such a complex range of cultural activity without taking into account the multifarious nature of all factors in cultural creation, including the economic variables of publication and therefore the ways in which idealism mediates its own determinants. Although I am detailing the efforts of many individuals between 1968 and 2012, I do not dwell on conflicts and disputes, because that kind of discussion is, as I have suggested, insular and ultimately parochial. 2 tilting at windmills A new study of the journals is required because they are intricate micro- evidence of social and cultural change and can be better understood in a framing informed by the very nature of their commodification over time. Issues surrounding commodification, I argue, have impacted on the marketability and longevity of journals, and on their public reception. This study offers new insights as a history because there has been little overview discussion of the journals other than a fistful of articles and Michael Denholm’s pioneering and largely bibliographical work, which details the journals of the 1970s and early 1980s. I have endeavoured to place much of the journal activity during the late 1960s and 1970s, plus the subsequent decades, within an economic and cultural framework. My first consideration has been to define my terms. Therefore in the next chapter, Chapter Two, ‘Setting out’, and in Chapter Three, ‘Definitions’, I discuss the ways in which the literary magazine has been framed historically in Australia and overseas, and my subsequent usage of the terms ‘literary’ and ‘little’ magazines. As the body of the book is basically a history of the magazines arranged chronologically, I follow this with several chapters giving a brief history of the magazines in Australia prior to the 1960s, after which Chapter Six, ‘A major expansion’, details the extensive developments during the 1970s. After such a definitive decade, I then move on to explore the changing social and cultural landscape of the more pragmatic decade of the 1980s in Chapter Eight. In this chapter, entitled ‘A more “realistic” decade’, I discuss the fact that there were fewer magazines and more hierarchical expectations among writers and readers. By the 1990s, the editorial personnel were beginning to change and the magazines largely reflected seismic shifts in the social landscape, which I discuss in Chapters Nine (‘New editors’), Ten (‘Changes among the established magazines’), Eleven (‘A magazine apart’) and Twelve (‘Whither the universities’). The year 2000 marked the onset of the internet’s deconstruction of print, and I have therefore devoted a number of chapters to this topic. Chapters Thirteen (‘A brave new world’), Fourteen (‘Everything that is solid melts’) and Seventeen (‘A new demographic?’) 3 Phillip Edmonds explore the massive change that the internet has had on the means of production, the subsequent birth of new magazines, the contradictory role of the universities in cultural production, the continuing marginalisation of poetry in publishing terms and the generational changes impacting on the magazines. A central point that I hope to demonstrate is the cyclical nature of many of the problems of publishing in a small country: distribution (even with the internet) and visibility in the broader culture. I discuss this issue in particular in Chapter Nineteen, ‘Some of the same old problems’ and Chapter Twenty, ‘A case in point — Heat’, as well as in other chapters. I return to my central point that the literary magazine is a slippery commodity in Chapter Twenty-Two, ‘An unreliable commodity’, and I conclude the study with consideration of the period 2010 to 2012, in which some magazines survived in print form, and others ceased to exist. The ‘Postscript’ gestures towards possible shapes for the literary magazine. Broadly, I am informed by the question: ‘To what extent and in what ways is the literary imagination conditioned by its social contexts?’ (Reid 1). I am further informed by Raymond Williams’s statements that ‘a lived hegemony is always a process’ (112) and that in cultural analysis in complex societies ‘works of art, by their substantial and general character, are often especially important as sources of this complex evidence’ (113). Furthermore, as Gelder and Salzman have put it, (paraphrasing Williams), the freedom to write freely can only be ‘guaranteed’ by providing a material (some would say institutional) base; and for readings to be possible after this, further material conditions must also be created. Producing a text ‘freely’ is one thing, entering that text into the marketplace is quite another. And the ways in which a text enters that marketplace influence its reception — the readings it is given — in the first place. (1, emphasis in original) In a sense, then, I hope I have written a social and cultural history in microcosm of the four decades in Australia from 1968 until 2012. I have been inspired to write this story because, in the 2000s, we seem to me to be in stasis, overpowered by a past that it is too big and a present 4 tilting at windmills that is too quick.
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