In any case, the early years of the new millennium, unpredictably, witnessed the birth of a number of new magazines — partly, it appears, as a response to a publishing crisis for new writers. It was also apparent that non-fiction (as a broad definition) was outselling fiction in the marketplace. Most of the new magazines would then heavily promote essays and creative non-fiction in such an environment.

In 2003, Griffith University decided to upgrade its intellectual profile (at a time when most universities were leaving the difficult business of supporting such unpredictable ventures) by creating the Griffith Review under the editorship of Julianne Schultz, a professor at Griffith University. The Griffith Review was offered financial and in-kind support from the university, in an interesting move from an institution that was not a part of the Group of Eight. The charter for Schultz was to make the Griffith Review largely a nonfiction journal that would participate and prefigure national debate. This was during a time when the conventional wisdom in publishing continually stressed that literary fiction did not sell but that non-fiction in its various guises did well. Unknown authors, though, were rarely published in its pages.

Thus the Griffith Review has successfully anticipated republican debates, for example, and initiated themed issues such as ‘Re-imagining Australia’. Schultz was a public intellectual during a time when university-employed academics were withdrawing from public space into specialised enclaves. In a sense, she shrewdly anticipated developments in the zeitgeist, publishing articles, for instance, by Marcia Langton, Noel Pearson and Peter Sutton, whose views were contrary to the established wisdom on Indigenous policy after the 1970s. In its early years, the Griffith Review was designed like a book, consisted of over 200 pages, and consolidated the general move, over three decades, away from magazine formats to chunkier, more ‘serious’ constructions.

The creation of the Griffith Review was the most serious incursion undertaken by a university into publishing a literary magazine in decades. The University of Melbourne had supported Meanjin for many years after Clem Christesen moved it to Melbourne from Brisbane; the University of Sydney had consistently helped out Southerly; and more recently, Victoria University has been giving Overland in-kind and facility support. But overall, the universities had retreated from involvement.