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Literary Journal

Meanjin, Vol. 66, No. 4 & Vol. 67, No. 1 edited by Ian Britain & Griffith Review 20 edited by Julianne Schultz

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June 2008, no. 302

Robert Drewe, one of Australia’s most absorbing fiction writers, has prime position in the opening pages of the latest Meanjin. ‘The Aquarium at Night’ is so deft and engaging it draws me in, almost despite myself. It is a story about boys, surfing, prison life and ‘easygoing’ Australian masculinity. These topics may not immediately appeal, but the story stirs with the rhythms of memory, desire, the slow burn of maturing manhood, and the role that writing plays in coming to confront one’s self. Drewe’s prose seduces and convinces: a man remembering his childhood self is ‘A skinny, mop-headed grommet leaning out the window to check the morning’s wind and weather for the day’s surf potential and dreaming of legendary breaks. By 6.15 he’d be over the ridge and in the ocean.’ An incidental character in the prison Creative Writing class is ‘[a] twenty-stone Christian who’d decapitated his son-in-law with an axe for infidelity’. This is what draws me in, the sagacity of the prose, its grounded eloquence, its lack of mere aesthetics.

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Westerly vol. 50, November 2005 edited by Delys Bird and Dennis Haskell & Australian Literary Studies vol. 22, no. 2, 2005 edited by Anne Pender and Leigh Dale

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March 2006, no. 279

As an academic teaching in literary studies, I regularly feel compelled to justify my job, particularly in the light of dwindling enrolments. Literary journals and the writers who feature in them, judging by the latest issue of Westerly, also feel pressure to defend their relevance, primarily due to their small audiences. Delys Bird and Dennis Haskell, in an editorial commemorating fifty years of Westerly, pay tribute to the ‘creative and intellectual enthusiasm’ that drives the journal and celebrate its survival in a culture they believe is becoming increasingly visually, rather than verbally, literate. Tracy Ryan, one of the contributors, alludes to a different obstacle: public resentment. Her poem ‘Curriculum Vitae’ summarises public attitudes to writers: ‘Narcissism, egotism, think the world owes you a living, / God’s gift.’ What to do in the face of such indifference and even dislike?

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Agenda edited by Patricia McCarthy & Jacket 28, October 2005 edited by John Tranter

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February 2006, no. 278

William Cookson was eighteen. He had been writing to Ezra Pound for three years. At last he spent a week in Italy with the great man. ‘Does he ever speak?’ Pound asked his mother. Nonetheless, or as a consequence, Pound encouraged Cookson to start a literary magazine. Cookson founded Agenda in 1959 and edited it until his death in 2003.

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Griffith Review 8 edited by Julianne Schultz & Heat 9 edited by Ivor Indyk

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September 2005, no. 274

Hands up if you subscribe to an Australian journal. Keep them up if you subscribe to more than one. More than two? If you read them? Cover to cover? Half? More than two articles an issue? Hands up if you look forward to them. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something that makes me terribly tired when faced with the prospect of Australia’s literary and political journals. I stand in front of the (small) shelf made available for them in my local bookshop and try to muster up the enthusiasm I might feel when faced with a shelf of new books; try to feel excited at the prospect of reading them. I have a couple of subscriptions, and when they arrive, I make a point of tearing the envelope open immediately to have a look. And yet I still have to push past a barrier of resistance to sit and actually read them.

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This year for the third year in a row, Black Inc. is reprinting writing from HEAT in one of its ‘Best Australian’ anthologies, without seeking my permission as the magazine’s editor and publisher. They can do this because there is a legal loophole in Australia’s literary culture – literary magazines in this country do not normally have contracts with their authors. It is conventional to ask magazine editors for their permission before reprinting work that has appeared in their pages; but the fact is, if the author’s permission can be won it is entirely irrelevant, from a legal point of view what the magazine editor thinks.

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