For more than 80 years, Meanjin has been a quiet but powerful enabler of Australian literature. It required a mere pittance to keep it alive.

But in an age where imagination, the life of the mind, and the careful choice of words are all to be disparaged, that mere pittance is not to be found. Its closure is an occasion for nothing less than grief.

My relationship with Meanjin goes back to a meeting with Barrett Reid in 1992, when he was living in retirement on the property at Heide. At the time, Barry was the editor of Overland, but he reminisced about his friend, the soulful poet Paul Grano, who, along with C.B. Christensen, founded Meanjin in Brisbane during World War II. I was absorbed by his vivid memory of Grano’s struggles and his inability to find the poetic voice for which he longed. Reid clearly honoured that kind of quest. This has been the gift of Meanjin for generations. It fostered creative spirits, even if they were fumbling at first. A long list of them flourished as significant Australian writers. In an age of endless cliché and the tight scripting of culture, Meanjin allowed fresh air into a stuffy room.

I was fortunate to publish a number of short stories and essays in Meanjin, working with several editors including Christine Thompson, Ian Britain, Jonathan Green and, most recently, Esther Anatolitis. They were a mixed bunch, to be sure, but shared something vital. They were passionate. They all gave more to this publication than they could ever be paid for.

For five years, in the early 2000s, I was the fiction editor. For this I was paid $500 a year which, even then, wasn’t much. We were living up the bush at the time and $500 was the insurance excess for just one collision with an unfortunate kangaroo. It was a job you did for love, not money. Ian Britain, the editor, was a considerate ally. We saw the world through radically different eyes, but we never disagreed about the quality of writing, which was always our main criterion. I remember Ian saying that if every person who submitted work to Meanjin bought the magazine, there would be no financial worries.

For $500, I would read literally hundreds of short pieces of fiction that writers offered to the journal. I spent several hours a week on the task, sometimes more, but never minded. It is important to appreciate the goodwill and generosity that keeps literature alive in Australia. I have judged a long list of literary competitions over the years. If the pay worked out as much as three or four dollars an hour, I’d be surprised. But writers know that the culture survives only because people are prepared to row below decks.

I recall one editor of Meanjin telling me that she had worked up to Christmas Eve, alone in the office, to finish an edition. As a result, she had no time for Christmas shopping. So she gave all her relatives copies of Meanjin. When they were cleaning up after lunch and putting wrapping paper in the bin, some of the copies had been left behind. I guess this meant her relatives were not as passionate about the journal as she was. Here is a window on another issue. Just because it sold fewer copies than That’s Life, it doesn’t mean that the journal didn’t pack a punch. A thousand copies of Meanjin put more air in the tyres of our culture than 100,000 copies of Who Weekly.

My greatest joy in those years was discovering the work of Jacob Rosenberg, a survivor of Auschwitz and a writer whose simple mysticism channelled the light of the Talmud into the darkest corners of human experience. My greatest bemusement was the number of aspiring writers who sent us work that had already been submitted in creative writing courses. Often enough, they would send the comments of their teacher along with the story. These comments were sometimes better works of fiction than the stories themselves. I scratched my head when they were completely blind to the mediocre and predictable quality of the stories themselves. I assumed that the teachers were trying to encourage young people, which is admirable. Every teacher wants to give their students a boost. Yet sometimes they provided false hope, and I wondered if some teachers were unable to speak honestly.

There were so many stories that it was impossible to comment on them all, even though writers often asked for feedback. Usually, they were returned with a slip saying thanks, but no thanks. It was brutal but there was no realistic alternative. One writer replied by telling us of a rejection slip which was used in a country where it was important to save face for the writer. It said something like, “Your essay is far and away the most brilliant piece of writing ever offered to this magazine, and possibly to any magazine in the history of print. Unfortunately, we cannot publish it, as that would humiliate all our other contributors, who could never aspire to work of such genius.” Another person shared the story of a rejection card which said, “Your work is both good and original. Sadly, the good parts are not original, and the original parts are not good.”

I never had any time for such dire and destructive witticisms. Our notes were courteous but bland, partly because authentic feedback would have been such a major undertaking. I remember one time when my wife, Jenny, and I were holidaying on the far south coast of NSW. We went into a café and enjoyed reading about all sorts of local activities on the community notice board. You could do anything in that area from straw baling to organic pest removal. Then we found a notice that caught us by surprise. Somebody was starting a support group for “emerging writers who had suffered the experience of having their work summarily rejected by prestigious publications, such as Meanjin”.

I was aghast. It seemed that a group was needed just to deal with the impact of what I was doing. If only they knew that the cultural monolith they had found so affronting was just me sitting in a hot and dusty town, picking through piles of stories. Meanjin deserved its considerable reputation. But it wasn’t the edifice the notice implied.

After that, I always reminded myself that every story carried with it the hopes of a fragile writing career. I started adding a few extra words to the rejection slips, something as lame as “good luck” or “best wishes”. Maybe it personalised the experience to some extent. I don’t know.

I wonder where all those stories land now. In a time of AI and podcasts, do people even bother to spend hours crafting a story? It’s a huge loss to us all if they don’t. We are losing Meanjin at the very moment we need it most. We can’t rely on robots to give voice to the spirit. I think it was the novelist Thomas Mann who said, “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” Despite what your laptop may want you to believe, the words that matter don’t come easy.

Republished from Eureka Street, 8 September 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.