There are various reasons to be thinking about Australia at the moment. Some are tragically serious; others, being cricket-related, are simply absurd. Lost in the background, for most people, will be the horror of the modern Australian attitude to literature and learning – or the attitude in Melbourne, at least.
The quarterly journal Meanjin was established in Brisbane by Clem Christesen in 1940; it moved to the University of Melbourne five years later, and Christesen edited it until 1974. In the subsequent half-century, by contrast, Meanjin has got through eleven editors, the latest being Esther Anatolitis. It can count J. M. Coetzee, Helen Garner, A. D. Hope, Patrick White and Judith Wright among its past contributors, and certainly didn’t seem to be fading into irrelevance in recent years, if some of the past two years’ salvoes are anything to go by. (Consider some essay titles: “Women, Whitlam and the ‘gender card’: 50 years of women in parliament”, “A university, not a corporation”, “Culture is not ‘publicly available content’”.) Copies stopped turning up here in London, though; and circulation has apparently not gone in a direction acceptable to Melbourne University Publishing, to which Meanjin has belonged for the past seventeen years. The publisher decided to close the magazine last September, “on purely financial grounds”.
Antipodean eyebrows were raised. Catriona Menzies-Pike, the former editor of the Sydney Review of Books, pointed out that Melbourne University reported a $273 million surplus in 2024, “on an operating income of $3.2 billion”. Meanjin had only two members of staff, including Anatolitis – both of whom were immediately made redundant, and who had endured “sustained pressure from the Melbourne University Council board”. Could that pressure have had anything to do with the publication of pieces such as “No time for elegy: To write in a time of genocide” by Sara Saleh? (“The stakes of speaking about Palestine, and speaking still, are felt and collectively carried …”) Our friends down under really couldn’t say.
Money is also tight down the road at State Library Victoria, or so the librarians were told last month. Thirty-nine of them were to lose their jobs, according to a “Strategic Reorganisation Change Proposal” with an emphasis on creating a “Compelling Digital Experience”. The journalist Gideon Haigh has described the proposal as a “bonfire of banalities, of platitudes and jargon better suited to the prospectus of an IT start-up than a library”, “a crude self-lobotomy” and “corporate bullshit bingo”. Others agreed. The proposal has been withdrawn. How long, however, before the library’s board comes again for the experts under their control? Neither here nor at Melbourne University Publishing, it seems, does enlightened thinking hold sway.
Jean Bleakney, John Burnside and Tom Paulin are among the poets recently featured in the TLS’s Poem of the Week – an online series drawn from the paper’s archives. Readers familiar with these regular blasts of verse from the back issues may like to know that the man who selects and introduces them, Andrew McCulloch, not long ago published a new volume of his own: The Train of Orpheus (Melos, £6).
We like a pamphlet – and have sometimes wondered if this isn’t the form of publication that suits poetry best. There can be something venturesome about such livrets – or something modest. Whatever else it is, Mr McCulloch’s Train of Orpheus is bold enough to open with the mythic musician (“His voice is distilled from light, / his seven strings split the silence”), before proceeding to a reworking of Apollinaire’s bestiary and more. The train terminates with twelve lines for Alfred Brendel, who died last summer: “Listen. Each member of the audience / is part of an electric tension …”.
Our copy of Mr McCulloch’s Orphean pamphlet came to us with two companions: White Collar Observations by N. S. Thompson and The Exploding Library by Michèle Roberts (same publisher, same price). Three distinct voices; only seventy-one pages in total; and, for us, collective confirmation of the virtues of the format. Add another forty pages and you can take in recent works as different as The Culture Man (Rack, £6) – Nicholas Murray’s satire in a Pushkinesque stanza, in which unthinking cultural snobbery meets its match – and Snagged on Red Thread (Monitor, £11), Jazmine Linklater’s long poem about power and complicity (“I thought I’d spend the war on terror / in a red brick suburb …”). Both were published last autumn; we believe that their quite different distillations of the light will appear just as admirable in the spring.
“He makes you feel that each object matters immensely … and he wants quite desperately to show you what it is really like.” So the art of Eric Ravilious appeared to the critic Eric Newton in 1939. Can you discern in Ravilious’s “Salt Marsh”, the watercolour and pencil landscape reproduced above, the “helplessness of a derelict boat” that so struck Newton? In any case, readers of Eric Ravilious: Through the eyes of his contemporaries (Mainstone, £30), in which Newton’s review is reprinted, will find here many ways to see the artist’s work afresh. This is a book that brings together scattered recollections to great effect, aided by an abundance of illustration: engravings, watercolours and photographs. While an introduction by Alan Powers sets the scene, fellow artists such as Peggy Angus, Osbert Lancaster, Enid Marx and John Piper supply the fond particularities. Ravilious’s own zodiacal “Preface by the Engraver” for the Lanston Monotype Almanack of 1929 is also here reprinted for the first time “from the exceedingly rare slim volume in which it appeared”.
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