For decades the Bulletin had lurched from one prediction to another of its decline or demise. ‘The Bulletin is a clever youth,’ its co-founder, J.F. Archibald, famously predicted. ‘It will become a dull old man.’ In 1946 a ‘Letter to Tom Collins: Demise of the Bulletin’, by the philologist Sidney J. Baker, appeared in Meanjin. In 1961 the Bulletin unknowingly published Gwen Harwood’s sonnets which contained an acrostic, ‘so long bulletin’.

The execution, when it finally came, was swift. On 24 January 2008, staff were told the magazine would cease publication immediately. A bloodless press release followed. There was no poetry, no clever literary hoax, not even the dignity of one more issue to farewell the readers.