The little magazine blossomed in Australia during the 1970s. In the checklist of the special 1977 issue of Australian Literary Studies entitled ‘New Writing in Australia’, there were over forty magazines of one variety or another. Peter Pierce has noted of the period that ‘[one of] many of the magazine's reasons for being is the notion that they are part of a decisive moment of change within Australian literature and publishing’ (219); and he identified that much of the upsurge was driven by a militant attitude among poets towards recognition. But poetry was only a part of a larger story of increasing cultural confidence and experimentation. The early 1970s, in particular, were a period where the belief in an effective ‘avant-garde’ became evident.

Despite such idealism and passion, it needs to be said that the elements already existed to make the upsurge a bubble rather than a long-term tangential shift, in that (unlike the established magazines) the great majority of the forty publications were initially under-resourced and lacked sustainable organisational structures. To establish a new magazine of ambition requires waiting for receipts from the distributor for ninety days (in the first instance), and setting up a subscriber base from scratch, let alone dealing with the realisation that advertisers generally do not see promotional potential because of low circulation. It has always been difficult placing such products before potential readers, unlike pop culture publications which have been (since then) increasingly backed by large media organisations.

In contrast, little magazines have traditionally been the idealistic passions of key individuals, and in the 1970s many considered themselves as part of an ‘alternative’ scene, where marketing was seen as capitalist. Furthermore, as Debray suggested of the changing nature of publishing in France after the ‘revolution’ of the 1960s (in a situation which became relatively typical of other Western countries such as Australia), one inheritance was the growth of a mass market for cultural products where ‘the distributors of thought become separated from the producers, [and] the distributors now determined not only the volume but the nature of production’ (91).