In 1982 Jim Davidson resigned as editor of Meanjin, and he wrote to Clem Christesen on 31 March expressing his gratitude for the opportunity of taking over during the 1970s, but spoke of rising cost pressures and cost cutting. ‘There is now half the office staff we had in 1974’, he wrote, but there had been in his estimation ‘the cultivation of the concept of a cluster of constituencies’ (qtd. in Lee, Mead & Murnane 295). The new editor became Judith Brett, previously a Lecturer in Politics at the University of Melbourne. According to Lee, Mead and Murnane, she ‘was committed to maintaining the magazine as a broad review of ideas with a strong contemporary focus — as a journal of Australian writing rather than a literary magazine in the narrowest sense’ (298). A feature of Brett's editorship was the publication of an emerging group of women and migrant writers. In 1983, there was a special issue on immigration and culture reflecting the kind of diversification during the 1980s; and, ‘there was a strong sense that the centre of gravity was shifting as new, heterogeneous creative movements rose to challenge the earlier nationalist project, with its promotion of a unitary, “mainstream” Australian culture’ (298).

The academic Sneja Gunew was one such promoter of difference and multiculturalism in her essay published in 1983, ‘Migrant Women Writers — Who's on Whose Margins’. This offered an argument about alternative canons and a reformation of critical language from a Deleuzian perspective (invoking Said, Foucault et al.), privileging authors such as Zeny Giles, Antigone Kefala, Ania Walwicz and Anna Couani. Brett articulated as much: ‘Meanjin is now concerned with cultural politics and with what can be called the politics of representation, and both these challenge the possibility of keeping political and literary questions apart just as surely as did the earlier conjunction’ (Brett 320). In a joist at the past, she added: ‘until recently in Australia, the domain of the “literary” has been predominately the domain of middle-class white Anglo-Celtic men’. The challenge then for ‘the other’ had been sent out.

Implicit in such changes was the reassessment of the legacy of Australian radical nationalism. Such a deconstructive fermentation would inadvertently ally itself with the forces of economic rationalism and globalisation and would be played out over the 1990s and the early years of the new millennium.