The intellectual wars prior to the 1950s were to be intensified and complicated by social and cultural changes of the 1960s while Australia had become a close military partner of the United States of America in Southeast Asia; sections of its population were calling for an independent foreign policy. An antidisciplinary New Left was rejecting both state control in the USSR and US imperialism in the Third World. In the cultural sphere of the little magazine, roneoed broadsheets appeared, such as Our Glass in 1969, edited by Kris Hemensley in Melbourne, who began organising poetry readings around the city. McLaren claims that Hemensley's editorial rationale was to ‘create a free area around himself which he could fill with new talent outside the control of the established media and the academies’ (180).

As I have already suggested, the journals that were to survive the timeframe of this study relied on the support of outside organisations. The 1960s highlighted what McKernan later characterised in 1991 as an acceptance of literary journals as unquestioned ‘good things’, which were created outside existing ideological and publishing structures, and which were evidence of

One of the first little magazines in the 1960s (which flourished for a time) was Michael Dugan's Crosscurrents Magazine, an ultra-thin journal of poetry of less than twenty pages: evidence of a nascent reading culture around the La Mama Theatre in Carlton. Dugan was an organiser and facilitator of other such magazines well into the 1970s, as he encouraged other writers and anyone interested in starting a new magazine. Through family connections at the Age he also linked up the small-press activity into wider networks.