Peter Rose (photograph by Brent Lukey)

ABR readers will be aware of my intention to leave the magazine. ABR has begun advertising for a new Editor and CEO, with a closing date of January 20. (There is a full job description on our website). Christopher Menz will also step down as Development Consultant, a role he has performed for more than a decade.

A panel led by Professor Sarah Holland-Batt (Chair of ABR) will appoint the seventh Editor in the second half of February. I will stay at the magazine until the new Editor has been appointed in February or March. There will be a transition period of several weeks. In our remaining time at the magazine, Christopher Menz and I will do everything we can to support the staff, the board, and the incoming Editor.

The new Editor will inherit an organisation in robust health. So much has been done in recent years to consolidate and improve the magazine. I have always felt that ABR should be different from other Australian magazines – not just in its extensive coverage of Australian literature, but distinctive in tone, range, programs, and ambition. In so many ways, ABR is barely recognisable from the small, valiant organisation I joined in 2001. Here are some of the initiatives: the website, the online edition, political commentary, ABR Arts, the digital archive going back to 1978, three international prizes (one of them featured in this issue), the creative partnership with Monash University, fellowships and cadetships, popular tours, etc.

Next year will be my twenty-fifth at ABR and my forty-ninth since I started my first day job, at the St Kilda Public Library. Coincidentally, my title was Periodicals Officer. (Once a Periodicals Officer, always a Periodicals Officer?) I think that’s long enough. Now it’s time for me to do other things: travel, ease up a bit, enjoy life in the country, write some more books and articles, work with my absurdist troupe The Highly Strung Players, and pursue some other options.

It’s also time for someone else to have the pleasure of editing ABR. Here, inevitably, I think of Emerson’s quip on agreeing to succeed Margaret Fuller as Editor of Dial magazine in 1842: ‘Let there be rotation in martyrdom.’ But I also think of Cyril Connolly’s sage line: ‘Little magazines are the pollinators of works of art: literary movements and eventually literature itself could not exist without them.’ It would be impossible to imagine Australia literature without ABR, that bold creation of Max Harris, Rosemary Wighton, and Geoffrey Dutton back in 1961.

Editing ABR has been the highlight of my professional life. By the time I leave ABR I will have edited close to 250 issues. Doing first edits of every word in all those issues has been my principal pleasure and responsibility. Working with more than 1,500 writers of all kinds and at different stages of their careers – from brilliant young critics and scholars to the elders of Australian letters and academe – has been a privilege. They are the ones who sustain and dignify this magazine.

During my time at ABR I have kept my editorials to a minimum in the belief that it’s much more important – and edifying – for you to hear from our writers rather than from me. But when I do communicate with our readers – socially, at ABR events, via email or telephone, or when an issue or irritant prompts me to editorialise – I am consistently impressed by your keen interest in ABR’s work, its health, and its future. Collectively, you are our raison d’être.

Producing a magazine like this, with its diverse programs and platforms (and with a staff of four, let’s not forget), is hard work. Your loyalty and generosity vivify the magazine and inspire everyone associated with it. I thank you all.

Now I look forward to reading and supporting the magazine for years to come.

Peter Rose