Some years ago, I wrote about the terrible repercussions that would follow if the literary magazine Island were forced to close following its defunding by the Tasmanian state government\u2019s arts funding body. I argued that there would be significant impacts for readers and writers throughout the nation. In the end, the magazine survived, but only because of a lengthy period of seriously hard work by the magazine\u2019s staff and board that raised enough support to keep it off the chopping block and get it back on its feet.<\/p>\n
This appears to be in embarrassing contrast to the efforts at Meanjin, where the board of Melbourne University Publishing has announced<\/a> that after 85 years the magazine will simply close, making its two part-time staff (who were not involved in the decision) redundant and shutting the doors on what has long been regarded as Australia\u2019s most prestigious literary magazine. Where is any sort of similar commitment to keep the magazine going in some form? As author Jennifer Mills wrote on social media: \u201cThe loss of Meanjin is devastating news for Australian writers and readers \u2026 An entirely avoidable disaster.\u201d<\/p>\n The MUP chair, Warren Bebbington, has said the decision was \u201cmade on purely financial grounds, the board having found it no longer viable to produce the magazine\u201d \u2013 which immediately makes one wonder if the board even understood the publication they were sending to its death. Of course it struggled to be viable \u2013 it\u2019s a literary magazine. Almost no literary magazines around the world are financially viable; that\u2019s not their purpose. The point is their cultural value, the role they serve as a platform for ideas and creativity, for writers to hone their craft, and for readers to encounter something that doesn\u2019t relate purely to the 24-hour news cycle. It might be supposed that institutions with big pockets that are purportedly devoted to the exchange of ideas might see the value of spending what represents a rounding error to their budgets on an established and respected periodical like this \u2013 MUP\u2019s most recent annual report notes that the University of Melbourne<\/a> chipped in only $220,000 last year, while Meanjin subscriptions contributed $112,790 to keep the magazine going \u2013 but apparently not in this case.<\/p>\n The literary sector is inherently challenging, and running periodicals tends to be a precarious business; internationally, significant magazines such as Tin House and Glimmer Train in the US and Ambit in the UK have ceased publication in recent years. Countless Australian magazines have published a few issues before folding \u2013 I can think of Regime, Mary, Harvest and The Canary Press just off the top of my head \u2013 while others have a good run for a few years before closing their doors. This makes protecting those with a little institutional heft even more important; it can be so challenging to get a new magazine up and running, and more crucially, to keep it going. The writer Claire Coleman noted on social media that Meanjin is older than the Sydney Opera House, and that closing it \u201cis cultural vandalism of the highest order, roughly equivalent to demolishing the above mentioned opera house\u201d.<\/p>\n Inevitably, doubters will wonder how many subscribers these magazines have, and how many copies actually sell. The numbers are low. They are nearly always low for periodicals of this type all over the world. Ploughshares, one of America\u2019s most prestigious literary magazines, reports a circulation of just a few thousand copies. But it\u2019s a mistake to conflate volume with value; \u201clittle magazines\u201d, as they\u2019ve historically been called, are a space for ideas that are unlikely to get a hearing elsewhere.<\/p>\n The number of venues left for fiction, poetry and longer form essays in Australia is vanishingly small. It\u2019s likely that avenues for serious literary writing will continue to shrink as magazines close and as independent publishers slow down, close their doors or sell up to multinational corporations. The federal government has recently launched Writing Australia, a new body dedicated to the nation\u2019s literature; while this represents an important step to help underwrite the practices of a much-neglected sector, it would be tragic if writers are being funded to produce work for which there is no longer a home. We may begin seeing Australian writers send more of their work to periodicals overseas, leading to the absurd scenario where Australian ideas and stories are less likely to be encountered by Australian readers than American ones.<\/p>\n In the end, we\u2019re forced to wonder what we even value in our culture when a significant literary institution like Meanjin can be destroyed over a trivial amount of money by a publishing house owned entirely by a major Australian university. Do we still believe in ideas and innovative writing? Do we still want to encounter the ideas of our finest minds? Or do we go along with MUP, expressing our \u201cdeep regret\u201d while calmly flicking the switch and turning out the light?<\/p>\n Ben Walter is an author and essayist who has been published in Meanjin<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Some years ago, I wrote about the terrible repercussions that would follow if the literary magazine Island were…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":122677,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-122676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122676"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122676\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/122677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}