Founded in 1940, Meanjin is one of Australia’s oldest literary journals. The University of Queensland library has copies back to 1977, as well as an anthology of selected works from the first fifty years, Temperament of Generations. What a pleasure, on a chill afternoon in August, to pull down the boxes and sit on the floor between the stacks. For a certain, determinedly unfashionable type of person – the same type of person who reads literary periodicals – the age of digital content has only increased the book’s appeal as a physical object. Most editions of Meanjin are well over 200 pages, and in the library they’re bound in hardcover, four to a volume. The boxes are heavy, you have to be careful pulling them down from the high shelves. You smell the dusty pages and examine the split binding and, weighing the book in your hands, feel a residual stirring of what Walter Benjamin called art’s “aura.”
Such an afternoon may seem the height of ivory tower indulgence, but it’s also a journey into some of the most hotly contested cultural terrain in Australia. Meanjin’s founding editor Clem Christesen wanted to reflect ‘the connection between literature and politics’ (2). Skimming the archives it’s striking just how intimate this connection has often been, from suspicions of Communist bias in the early days, through the Ern Malley affair, and a later emphasis on Indigenous issues. I expect to find more politics and less literature as the years go by, but erratic indexes mean it’s hard to tell whether the level of topical material has increased. What is readily observable is a new emphasis on the visual, as text-heavy covers give way to photos of artists and politicians. Ian Britain’s arrival in 2001 brings a new emphasis on Life-writing and other forms of creative non-fiction. In the 2000s, for the first time, we also see fiction, poetry, essays, memoirs and reviews, broken into discrete sections and labeled on the contents page.
Meanjin’s eighth editor Sophie Cunningham has kept the sections, but abandoned themes for each issue. Like her predecessors, she took over pledging to stay true to the magazine’s heritage, but also make some changes. The ability to take risks, to publish challenging new material, is often said to be small magazines’ greatest asset. ‘The ideal reader of a literary journal,’ John Freedman wrote recently in The Australian ‘is one who yearns for the lash of the new, the way a boxer needs to be hit’ (18). In Meanjin’s case, however, novelty needed to balanced with a sensitivity to tradition, innovation with continuity. Since Cunningham took over in 2008, Meanjin has published a series of essays on arts funding in Australia. The journal has replaced cover photos with “a more illustrative look,”(2) and begun to include serialised work, while maintaining the traditional arts/politics focus.
The winter editorial draws Leonard Cohen’s recent Australian tour against the backdrop of the Victorian bushfires, the economic crisis, and changes to Australian copyright law. Cunningham interweaves these strands with considerable skill; the only problem is the bright blue text which is hard on the eyes. Thankfully, this soon gives way to plain black in the “newsreel” section, where Tom Davis discusses Barack Obama and Kevin Rudd’s use of social networking sites. While conscious this may be ‘a simple oiling of wheels of political campaigning,’ Davis hopes Web 2.0 might ‘tentatively hold out promise of a reformed democracy’ (21). Anson Cameron emphatically debunks the myth that booze and drugs fuel literary inspiration: ‘It’s a room and a desk and a keyboard and a screen and the fear and the desperation’ (14). The endangered apostrophe, literary rejections, and digitisation of content at the National Library also feature. All this is fine, but no more rigorous than the writing you find in Australian broadsheet supplements each weekend. Serious long form reportage of the kind found in Granta or The Guardian is nowhere to be seen.
The brief “In Colour” section combines images and the written word to good effect. Rachel Buchanan gives us an illustrated account of the work of New Zealand avant-garde artist Len Lye, while Toni Jordan’s photos and essay reveal how Obamamania has spread to Kenya. Few would argue with her conclusion that Kenyans, like Americans, ‘deserve better leaders’ (33), but it’s a rather pat note on which to finish.
Then it’s back to basics with 90 pages of solid text. Marcus Westbury’s CAL/Meanjin essay is highly critical of the art’s funding status quo in Australia. He argues convincingly that our cultural agencies have fallen behind the culture itself. Funding bodies favour large organisations involved with traditional elite arts over smaller more innovative projects, he says, not because orchestras, opera and galleries are popular with audiences, but because such money is easier for bureaucrats to administer. The irony that Meanjin relies on many of the organisations Westbury criticises for financial support is not lost on the author, and in no way detracts from his argument that Australia needs a coherent cultural policy at the national level (38).
Ross Gibson’s piece on William Dawes is the other highlight among the essays. Dawes, a surveyor and astronomer with the first fleet, was the first European to learn an Indigenous Australian language. Since his notebooks were discovered in the early 70s, he has fascinated novelists and documentary makers, most recently Kate Grenville. Gibson doesn’t want to ban novelists from re-imagining history, but believes ‘a well-made novel must obscure the most puzzling and provocative elements in the notebooks’ (92). The essay form, in contrast, allows him to speculate about the nature of the relationship between Dawes and Patyegarang, the Indigenous woman who taught him her language, without cleaving to a specific historical interpretation. His account of the complex “event grammar” that structures Eora language is both sophisticated and readable, his call for a national conversation about what Dawes learned, timely and important.
Kate Fielding and Ben Foxes’s graphic novel “Their Hooks Find Hold Deep in Our Flesh” is a less successful and more didactic meditation on the European invasion of Australia.
After an interesting extended discussion of “The Slap” with Christos Tsiolkas, we finally arrive at the fiction and poetry. Occupying only 73 of this month’s 229 pages, it feels like something of an afterthought. More worrying is the relatively narrow range of fiction on offer. All of these pieces are less than fifteen pages in length, set in contemporary Australia and, aside from Caroline Lee’s serialised novel, “Stripped,” sit more or less comfortably within the genre of the modern short story. It’s great to hear vernacular Australian voices in fiction: ‘he looked like shit that was still sliding down the side of a dunny bowl’ (191), but not to the exclusion of other registers of language. Although the stories by Bruce Pascoe, Chris Womersley, Mark O’Flynn, and Paul Mitchell are competently written there’s a sameness to the fiction collected here that underestimates readers. What about flash fiction, fictocriticism, or the novella? What about cosmopolitan writing that reflects Australia’s connection with other places and cultures? Writing that like the fiction of Christina Stead, or Peter Carey, or Nam Le refuses to accept that an author’s place of birth should dictate their material? Here, perhaps, is the downside to Meanjin’s long history, a lingering trace of the old cultural nationalism. When it comes to fiction, Ivor Indyk’s Heat – a newer journal, carrying no nation building baggage – is more innovative and less insular.
No such problem in the selection of poetry, which boldly crosses historical periods, geographic locations, and literary styles. Jean Kent writes of old Paris crumbling, but her work speaks eloquently to an Australian audience. Indeed, it distils a problem facing Meanjin itself, that of how to modernise and maintain tradition simultaneously. With the rise of Ebooks and the Internet, will little magazines like this one continue to be printed? One of Sophie Cunningham’s key reforms as editor has been to revamp the magazine’s website so that it includes more digital content and greater interactivity. Nevertheless, it’s to be hoped paper editions do not disappear any time soon. The boxes of back issues in the university library are precious. Hard copies not only preserve the sensuous experience of reading, they also ensure work published together stays together. This makes it easier for later researchers to locate trends, and common concerns linked to a particular era, and so to trace our nation’s intellectual life back across the decades. Unlike digital journals, which all too often feel as if they exist outside of time, these old volumes carry a sense history in their dog-eared pages and marginalia. Computer monitors will never replicate the stealthy pleasure of running a hand over sixty years of aged spines and encountering the latest slim blue edition of Meanjin.
Meanjin Volume 68 Number 2
(2009)
Sophie Cunningham (ed)
Melbourne University Press
ISBN 978-0-522-85626
229pp
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
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