My working definition of ‘literary magazine’, then, for this study, is a publication that devotes a significant proportion of its pages to original fiction, poetry, essays, creative non-fiction, interviews and reviews, and is a periodical that publishes up to six times a year. I have not included little magazines that only publish socio-political content, commentary and articles, of which there were many in Australia between 1968-2012. In saying that, I am aware that some magazines — in particular Meanjin, the Griffith Review and Overland — have, and have had, a good proportion of their pages devoted to political issues. Even so, they have been constructed as literary publications in cultural discourse and have published a considerable amount of original creative writing over that period.

The story of the literary magazine in Australia, in particular, is one of persistence, obsession and — at times — cultural opportunity. Unlike in Europe or the United States, the potential for mass distribution is limited by a smallish population, and there has been little tradition of serious publications of substantial circulation, such as the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, Esquire, or indeed the lesser circulations of the Paris Review or Granta, to nourish endangered literary genres such as poetry, the short story or the lengthy essay.

Unlike in the United States, journalism in Australia has not been sufficiently diversified and resourced to support the early careers of fiction writers. Laurenson has suggested that in the United States, ‘throughout the nineteenth century the consolidation of the reading public by journals slowly enabled the writer to become more self-supporting’ (162). As she has further suggested,

In the United States, she claims, ‘there was little leisure time for book-reading and so the periodical press became dominant, supplemented by the public library’. The magazine became ‘the characteristic expression of American Democracy’ (162). Australia has had few examples of such active commercial support in the literary arts, apart from the brief flowering of the Bulletin in Sydney during the 1890s, which made household names of Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson.