Janet Flanner is not a familiar name today, but by any measure her career is worth knowing about. Born in Indianapolis in 1892, she saw in her hometown’s endless tabletop of corn fields a life of excruciating boredom. At age twenty, she reacted to her father’s suicide by choosing to live wildly, careering out of her university studies and into a succession of journalism jobs she swiftly made her own. Unwisely married, she escaped to New York and then into a relationship with actress and writer Solita Solano, with whom she decided to emigrate to Paris in 1922.

Like so many other young Americans, Flanner was intent on writing about “beauty with a capital B” in the City of Light. With aspirations on a level with Henry James, Laurence Sterne and “any of the Brontës,” she picked up the odd bit of journalism while pouring her early energies into a novel. Cubicle City (1926) was the result. Though it has since been grouped with landmark works of queer literature including Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) and Djuna Barnes’s The Ladies Almanac (1928), its lack of contemporary success tempered Flanner’s willingness to persevere with fiction. As a friend said, her desire to write fiction exceeded her talent at it.

But Flanner’s ability with the real was something else. Her letters about life in Paris to family and friends back in the United States sparkled. Whether she described the people strolling through the Tuileries Gardens, what was being said around the nightclubs and galleries, or the dramas and scandals of the American expatriates who increasingly crowded the cafes and bistros, she had a talent. As friend Jane Grant said, Flanner’s letters were “so gay and attractive.”

Moreover, in Grant’s view, such letters would fill a vital gap in the new, weekly magazine her husband had recently founded. “The New Yorker,” Harold Ross famously declared, “will be a reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life. It will be human. Its general tenor will be one of gaiety, wit and satire, but it will be more than a jester. It will not be what is commonly called highbrow or radical. It will be what is commonly called sophisticated, in that it will assume a reasonable degree of enlightenment on the part of its readers.”

Finding a Paris correspondent was part and parcel of such a pitch: Ross expected his readers to be versed in all things French and regard Paris as the world’s centre of art and fashion. For them, Flanner’s letters — as Grant soon wrote to her — were “just the thing.” Thus, for $40 a pop, she should commence sending to the magazine 1000-word letters containing “anecdotal and incidental stuff familiar to Americans… Dope on fields of the arts and a little on fashion, perhaps… There should be lots of chat about people seem [sic] about and in it all he [Ross] wants a definite personality injected.”

Flanner swiftly realised that tone and voice were more important than subject matter. Ross was an editor obsessed with finding the precise word, with prose that was direct and as tight as a drum. Thus, Flanner’s voice became cultivated but detached, wry and often pithy. It resulted in letters that were endlessly amusing. Ulysses, she wrote, was the book “the civilised half of a half-civilised world has long been humbly waiting.” The dadaist writer Tristan Tzara was “a great man of small stature.” A book by Jean Cocteau provided “an hour’s delight” and a memorial to the inventor of camembert cheese unfortunately resembled “a slice of gruyere.” “There is no justice,” she added.

Signed “Genêt,” Flanner’s letters began appearing in September 1925. She would continue filing them — albeit with breaks — for another fifty years. And the magazine she likened at this time to an “oversized minnow learning how to swim” soon became the blue whale of the literary and publishing world.

Mark Braude’s Typewriter and the Guillotine tells the story of that evolution through Flanner’s experiences and work. It is the most notable and most interesting thread of his book, and if it is a story told before — in Brenda Wineapple’s fine biography of Flanner (1989) and in Ben Yagoda’s comprehensive history of the New Yorker, About Town (2000) — it gets a welcome retelling here.

Perhaps most refreshing is Braude’s focus on the women in that “Lost Generation” of artists in Paris. While Hemingway, Joyce and the others make their due appearances, Braude pays more attention to the innovative women also working at their craft and enjoying life on the continent. Cameo appearances by Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas, Nancy Cunard, Collette, Edith Wharton and more are enlivened by striking details: Djuna Barnes’s preference for nude suntanning, for example, or Toklas’s single-minded interest in herbs.

A central conceit of the book is that the New Yorker’s evolution paralleled an evolution in Flanner’s work. At first, Braude writes, Flanner wrote in a “casual, loose style,” conversational and reminiscent of the cafes in which she gathered information, and left it to editors to refine her prose. Soon, however, she was doing that herself.

The context of her work also evolved. If the Paris she initially wrote of was simultaneously elegant and rough, glittering and squalid, it was also an old-world metropolis in a period of sustained change, where iconic cafes were unceremoniously shuttered and new fashions and ideas in art were constantly swirling. But Flanner rarely wrote about the “lingering sense of mourning” that abided in Paris. Exacerbated by Europe’s economic uncertainty and social unrest, the trauma of the first world war arguably lay at the root of the hedonism and pursuit of abandon charted by Flanner’s letters.

This was not a subject Flanner was prepared to probe: as Wineapple wrote, she believed her Genêt persona was “a high-class gossip columnist.” It couldn’t do that kind of work. Nor was the New Yorker pushing Flanner to do so. As magazine colleague E.B. White once joked, the only strong political stance the New Yorker took in the 1930s was on a proposal to relocate the information booth at Pennsylvania Station. It simply was not part of the magazine’s outlook to be overtly political or so engaged.

This began to change in the 1930s, when Flanner started regularly visiting Germany. At first, her attention to the darkness amid the glitter was fleeting: writing in 1931, she acknowledged that Germany had produced “workers without work and capitalists without capital,” that there was “terrible want in certain quarters.” But, as Braude notes, Flanner then “moved quickly from that gloomy material” to the giddy decadence of the Weimar Republic’s restaurants and cabarets and general party atmosphere.

Two years later — by which time Adolf Hitler had been sworn in as Germany’s chancellor — the darker facets of the country were clear. Signs outside towns announced that Jews were not welcome, Nazi flags were everywhere, and the harassment of foreigners and Jews was not even disguised. During one trip, Flanner saw a Jewish boy “being marched down the street with a placard around his neck, confessing to the sin of kissing a non-Jewish girl.” And yet still her despatches shied away. As she wrote lightly, “All over Europe, 1933 has been a worrying kind of year.”

The New Yorker didn’t want her to look closer. “AVOID DANGER TAKE NO CHANCES,” the magazine telegrammed when news of riots in Paris reached American shores. The magazine needn’t have bothered: when she realised she couldn’t get through the crowded streets to see the action, Flanner left to have a beer at a brasserie with friends.

As time went on, though, that detachment, that deliberate inattention, became untenable. Flanner’s friends and social circles increasingly acknowledged there might be another war in Europe, and the social unrest evident in those riots continued to swell. By the second half of 1934, convinced Germany was going to “come and gobble France as sure as we sit here,” Flanner was pitching to Harold Ross a profile of the German chancellor. She was second-guessing herself, conscious of her limits and uncertain whether she could transcend them to write about such an important subject. Ross, meanwhile, was reluctant: he had earlier vetoed an interview with Mussolini as “out of bounds for us” and thought serious current affairs material was ill-suited for what he persisted in calling a “humour magazine.”

When it went ahead, the resulting three-part profile didn’t entirely vindicate either Flanner or Ross. Flanner had been fascinated by Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and aroused by the magnitude and precision of the German military she saw at the Nuremberg rally in 1935. But conversations with everyday Germans and a prolonged period of reading Hitler’s speeches and writings, including Mein Kampf, convinced Flanner that Hitler was a fanatic, that Germans were crazy, that war was likely, and that she shared all anti-Nazi attitudes. And yet she feared a profile saying as much would be used as crude anti-Nazi propaganda. As Braude writes, keenly, “She was a writer, not a publicist. She was certainly no diplomat.”

And so Flanner decided to write that profile in the style she would use for anybody, writing of Hitler’s life without any mention of whether people might agree with his views. She included a considerable amount of information about Nazi dogma, the number of bodies Hitler had climbed over in his scramble for power, and the violent outlook at the heart of the Nazi regime. Yet there was also a measure of detachment and wryness that seemed incongruous. As it began: “Dictator of a nation devoted to splendid sausages, cigars, beer and babies, Adolf Hitler is a vegetarian, teetotaller, non-smoker and celibate.”

It marked a change nonetheless. In 1936, when he asked Flanner to cover the Berlin Olympics, Ross added a new request — that she “get something of the [German] political and economic situation” into her work. And, particularly once the Spanish civil war broke out, Flanner focused more and more on political and military developments in Europe. Over the next three years, the tone of detachment faded and a sense of immediacy and presence took root. “It’s melancholic to see,” she wrote in May 1938, “how quickly humanity, if left free after its initial success, deserts the early, earnest union that gave its cause strength and squabbles itself to bits.”

Within two years, recognising the Genêt persona and style was now fundamentally wrong for the moment, Flanner began signing her columns with her own name. She would not return to Genêt until after Paris had been liberated.

Braude tells this story well, with evocative prose and a sharp eye for the tangible detail: readers will encounter many smells and tastes in this book. Less successfully, he also tries to graft another story onto Flanner’s life — that of German serial killer Eugen Weidmann.

In short, fragmentary chapters spliced between chapters about Flanner, creating an ominous drum beat through the book’s first two-thirds, Braude tells of how this social outcast and misfit turned criminal. Imprisoned in Germany for theft, Weidmann and several accomplices escaped to Paris with a plan to enrich themselves by kidnapping and ransoming rich foreigners.

The men were inept, and soon turned to murder. Weidmann killed six people, including a young American woman, Jean De Koven, unleashing a short and dramatic police hunt in the latter half of 1937 that ended with a shoot-out at a villa just outside Paris. Tried and convicted — a task made easier by his willingness to confess — Weidmann was executed, in public, by guillotine, in June 1939.

Given the geopolitical tensions and anxieties as well as the American press attention engendered by De Koven’s murder, it was no surprise that the trial took on a broader significance than its senseless and squalid crimes deserved. The prosecution and defence, for example, tried to claim Weidmann was representative of a broader German outlook and nature — of violence, bloodthirstiness and depravity. Told in hasty and cluttered chapters, the story of Weidmann’s trial is profoundly anti-climactic, not the least because of Braude’s decision to open the book with the scene of Weidmann’s execution.

According to Braude, strong parallels in Flanner and Weidmann’s lives warrant their stories being told together. But the parallels are generic and strained: “Both were foreigners in France… Both adapted quickly to their new surroundings… Both longed for beauty.” The intersection of their lives, meanwhile, is momentary. While Flanner reported on Weidmann’s trial and execution, nothing suggests it left a deep impression on her.

As a mark of her evolution, the fact she covered the trial is telling. As Braude writes, “She hadn’t come [to Paris] to write about decapitated murderers.” But the more important mark is surely that of her engagement with the looming Nazi shadow in the lead-up to the second world war.

Flanner certainly saw that. Her coverage of war crimes perpetrated by the Nazis, her reportage of the Nuremberg trials and her work on the Nazi looting of priceless cultural artefacts were indefatigable. And they inflected the New Yorker’s style and outlook thereafter.

As Ross wrote to her, in June 1946, “I think our transition to peace, art, amusement, frivolity, etc, will be gradual, and probably the magazine will never get back to where it was.” •

The Typewriter and the Guillotine: An American Journalist, a German Serial Killer, and Paris on the Eve of WWII
By Mark Braude | Grand Central Publishing | $65.99 | 421 pages

The post Just the thing appeared first on Inside Story.

The current State Library of NSW exhibition “PIX: The Magazine that Changed Everything (1938–1972)” also forms the basis of a splendid book about the phenomenon, PIX: The Magazine that Told Australia’s Story. The change in subtitle during the journey from exhibition to book — from “the magazine that changed everything” to “the magazine that told Australia’s story” — subtle though it is, reflects a growing institutional awareness of the importance of photographs as historical documents.

State librarian Caroline Butler-Bowdon highlights this awareness in her preface to the book, drawing particular attention to the library’s role in collecting photographs, specifically those that document “life in New South Wales and across the nation.” It is part, she says, of an “ongoing institutional commitment to photography,” to expanding the collection and increasing its accessibility. As part of that commitment, all 167,000 photographs in the PIX archive have been digitised and are viewable online.

The rapid digitisation of its photography collections — and specifically of collections of documentary photography — being undertaken by the State Library is matched by similar initiatives in other public institutions in Australia and elsewhere. It is part of a renewed recognition of the value of visual history and the contribution it can make to our understanding of the past. (A recent study day offered by the State Library, “PIX Magazine in Research,” is typical of broader institutional encouragement of the public to explore and make use of photographic collections.)

Ray Olson’s photo of fellow press photographers sheltering from the rain at a football match in 1940. State Library of NSW

It can’t be accidental that this renewed institutional emphasis on photography as an historical resource — involving in many cases significant financial commitment — comes at a time when the practice of photography is pulling away from a direct relationship with history and from the status it has enjoyed as a medium of record.

From generative or AI-assisted photography to deep-fakes, our faith in photography to record something that happened is being rapidly eroded. PIX photographs, and others like them, thus exert a double appeal to nostalgia — not only for the events and the lives that they capture, but for the broader fact that they belong to a time when a photograph could, more or less, be trusted.

Some will argue that photography could never be trusted, that it has always been subject to instances of manipulation and falsification. True, but not so true that it undermines photography’s hugely significant role as a medium of record, a role that, according to the pessimists, is under threat. In the words of photographer and theoretician Joan Fontcuberta, there is a widespread fear that “photorealistic images made with AI will destroy the credibility of documentary photography.”

The renewed institutional commitment to photographic collections represents a response to that fear. It is an expression of confidence in the continuing value of past photography as a documentary record, however much uncertainty there may be over the direction being taken into the post-photographic future.

Notwithstanding their documentary status, PIX photographs don’t always present themselves simply as unmediated records of events — rather they capture scenes that have clearly been plotted and prepared, or to some extent re-enacted. PIX photography was by its own lights in the business of representation as well as documentation. Representation in the form of youth, energy, fortitude, effort, resilience — in short, of a particular idea of Australianness.

Accordingly, there is a deliberateness to many of these photographs, with the preparation that went into the making of the image visible in the final result. The voice of the cameraman as director can be imagined, rehearsing the scene, placing the essential components. Pose, lighting, camera angle all work together to dramatise the subject, and the evident discomfort or self-consciousness of the people being photographed will often contrast with the sophistication of the camerawork.

PIX photographer Alec Iverson photographed in 1944. State Library of NSW

This deliberateness of composition leant the camera operator a certain implied visibility. But photographers also appear directly, as subjects. Many pictures in the archive of these glamorous and relatively novel professionals — instructing models, checking lighting, peering into viewfinders and lining up shots — also appear in the archives.

To show the workings of photography in this way served to further glamourise rather than demystify. From time to time, readers of the magazine were invited to submit their own photographs, though it is not clear how many ended up crossing the barrier from viewer to contributor. Photography as a profession offered the promise of an exciting world, full of potential subjects waiting to be photographed.

Many young photographers who entered the profession during the forties and fifties would have felt much as the celebrated Indigenous photographer Mervyn Bishop — himself the subject of an exhibition currently at the State Library of NSW and an accompanying biography, Black, White and Colour, by Tim Dobbyn. “I loved the smell of the dark room and watching the image come up in the developer,” recalled Bishop. “It was magical.”

From the beginning, in what must have seemed like a risky marketing strategy at the time, PIX pitched itself as a more satisfying alternative to film. While film (the film of life, to be grand about it) rushes by in a continuous flow, the photograph pauses that flow and allows for a much deeper, reflective experience. “PIX’s first advertising tagline,” the book’s editor Margot Riley notes, “compared the magazine’s visual impact to the cinematic newsreel,” a comparison that was soon refined to emphasise the differences rather than similarities between photography and film. A PIX photograph, it was claimed, “stops the action so you can study, examine, learn every detail and return again and again to these fascinating subjects.”

This high-minded appeal to the human impulse to study, examine and learn would have been interpreted by many subscribers to refer to the signature images of women sunbathing, or caught mid pirouette or plié, that were an essential component of every issue of the magazine. A splendidly staged photograph of the editor of PIX, taken in 1959, makes the deliberateness of this more down-to-earth appeal very clear. The editor, positioned importantly behind his desk, is himself caught mid-flight, in the act of signing an important-looking document, while fixed to the wall behind him are two larger than life collages of young women staring invitingly at the camera.

PIX editor O.A. Guth photographed in his office by Cec Lynch in November 1959. State Library of NSW

But glamour and glamourisation were only part of the story. Indeed, it is remarkable, scrolling through the digitised collection, to see how varied the subject matter of PIX photography could be, and in many cases how strikingly unglamorous. A photograph of a cane-cutter and his wife and young daughter, seated on packing crates to eat what seems to be their evening meal, has much of the art-directed quality that is a familiar hallmark of the magazine without detracting from the naturalness of the subjects and the unforced dignity they display in such basic conditions. Another image, of the same cane-cutter squeezed into a tin bath at the end of a working day, succeeds in capturing his essential dignity in less than dignified circumstances.

Ivan Ive’s photograph of the van Deest family in the Queensland canefields. State Library of NSW

The photographs of the cane-cutter and his family are part of a large series of images made on the Queensland canefields by the most prolific of PIX photographers, Ivan Ive, son of the pioneering Australian cinematographer Bert Ive. The curators of the PIX archive rightly single out the younger Ive not only for the quantity of his output but for its range and quality. He was both remarkably productive and impressively inventive.

One reason perhaps why Ive is not better known is that, partly by virtue of this flexibility, his work doesn’t display an easily identifiable photographic eye. His images can appear highly staged, almost to the point of manipulation, but he is also capable of a more frankly direct gaze, where his own implied role as stage designer is effaced rather than highlighted. He can be showily inventive and a bit cold, but also discreetly sympathetic, sometimes foregrounding technique and at other times subsuming it to the subject.

Ive, along with other PIX photographers, was quite willing to share some of his professional secrets. In a feature published in the magazine in February 1948 he shows how “photography can enter the realm of art,” demonstrating by means of a sequence of images how he gives an “ordinary photograph” of a model dressed in Renaissance style clothing the patina of “an Old Master.”

Ive is shown making another photograph, this time of a stippled screen he has borrowed from a newspaper blockmaker. He describes how he puts the two negatives together to create, from scratch, a painterly artefact. We see him (top photo) holding the stippled screen up to his eye to examine it more closely. The screen forms a frame around his head, a frame that also contains, in the background, a PIX pinup posted on the wall behind.

One of Ivan Ive’s “Old Master” photographs, published in PIX in 1947. State Library of NSW

In his wonderfully evocative series of seventeen photographs of a Greek Orthodox baptismal ceremony, taken in 1946, Ive displays his talent for capturing the human aspect of ceremonial occasions, in which formality combines smoothly with spontaneity. The image from this series reproduced in PIX: The Magazine that Told Australia’s Story, showing eleven-month-old Alexandra Cassimatis on the point of immersion, offers a deeply satisfying sense of composition without appearing, as PIX photographs can sometimes do, all too deliberately composed.

The image appears here as it did in the October 1946 issue of the magazine, where it has been cropped from the original. The original version of the photograph, which is viewable in its more expanded form in the digitised archive, takes in other members of the congregation, drawing the eye in several directions. The effect of the cropping is to tighten the sense of composition and to focus on the relationships among the principal figures — the priest, the godmother, the mother and baby, with a child, who we infer to be baby Alexandra’s brother, completing the quintet by resting his hand against his mother’s side and reaching up into the centre of the image.

Alexandra Cassimati’s baptism, photographed by Ivan Ive, as it appeared in PIX in September 1946. State Library of NSW

These figures, their hands combining with or gesturing towards one another in a complicated balletic pattern, frame the faces of the two women in the background, drawing these secondary figures into the overarching pattern and rendering them as participants rather than mere extras. The emphatic deliberateness of the cropping is one example of how the PIX archive repeatedly homes in on communal relationships, often by lining its human subjects up in rows or queues or semi-circles and thus making patterns out of people — rows of water-skiers or cyclists, of miners completing a shift or airline passengers waiting to board.

People are also linked to one another by their hats (prompting, in passing, the question of where mid-century portrait photography would have been without hats). Not only can the hat act as a frame or a defining characteristic, but it can also add humour or dignity or pathos to the face underneath. In group photographs, the hats can sometimes seem to be conducting a conversation of their own, mirroring and reinforcing the relationship between the wearers and adding a tongue in cheek element to an otherwise conventional composition.

“Girls knitting,” part of a series of photos of war workers published in 21 April 1941. State Library of NSW

A hat can also complicate and render more satisfying an individual portrait that might otherwise be more one dimensional in its impact. A PIX series on the Korean war includes individual portraits of diggers wearing a variety of military headgear, a hat or cap or helmet that seems in each case to act as an extension of an individual personality or suggest a refinement of mood. In one particularly effective image from this series, the jauntiness of the hat’s angle contrasts with the expression of shy vulnerability on the face of the soldier wearing it.

This combination of formality and humour, deliberateness and spontaneity, is characteristic of the PIX photo archive and reflects the way in which the magazine chose to “tell Australia’s story” as one of people from different backgrounds coming together with mutual goodwill, underpinned by a commitment to rules and order as a way of building social harmony. That idea of social order, perhaps unsurprisingly, involved fairly rigid notions of the respective roles of men and women in the national project.

Women were frequently portrayed as pinups or glamour models, or just as often in traditional domestic roles. But there are also, as Riley points out, pictures of women “exercising agency” in the workplace or in leisure pursuits, no doubt reflecting a certain confusion on the part of the photographers and the commissioning editors, almost exclusively male, as to quite where things were heading.

This confusion is reflected in images that play with the notion of role reversal. One photograph from the archive, taken on a beach in 1955, shows a woman in bathing costume riding a man with a very large turtle shell on his back. This image of a woman holding the reins, in what was presumably intended as an amusing representation of the absurdity of female empowerment, now has a distinctly unfunny air about it.

Another image, by frequent PIX contributor Cec Lynch, in a series from 1958 about equal pay for women, shows a family of three at breakfast time, the mother sitting at table and absorbed in what we assume to be the financial pages, while the father, standing by the kitchen bench and sporting an apron, bends over to wipe the remains of breakfast from his son’s chin. All three models look profoundly awkward, as if uncertain whether they have been cast in a straight drama or a comedy.

One of Cec Lynch’s “equal pay for women” photos published in April 1958. State Library of NSW

Kate Evans, in an essay that places this collection of PIX images in context, raises the question of what we can learn of the past through photographs, and of how far we can enter the world they represent. “You can see the cracked paint on exterior walls,” Evans remarks of a 1940s image of an inner-city street, “almost feel the texture of the hessian bags the people are leaning on.” “Almost” is the operative word here, signalling the built-in frustration that comes with looking, and with it the knowledge that looking may be as far as we can get.

Meanwhile, as institutions speed up the process of cataloguing and digitising the photographic past, an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao by the generative artist and post-photographer Refik Anadol has just closed after breaking all attendance records. The exhibition, we are told, “reimagined the work of the museum’s architect, Frank Gehry” by creating huge, dynamic wall installations out of masses of visual data, using a “custom generative AI model constructed by Anadol from a dataset of over 32,147,692 images.”

In the two exhibitions, one a precisely focused exploration of photographs from a mid-century magazine archive, the other a flamboyant hoovering up of unimaginably large numbers of images to create something new, we see the two poles of how to approach and to understand the past by way of photographs. It remains to be seen whether these two approaches can ever be satisfyingly reconciled. •

PIX: The Magazine that Changed Everything
Curated by Margot Riley | State Library of NSW until 16 August 2026

PIX: The Magazine that Told Australia’s Story
Edited by Margot Riley | NewSouth | $50.99 | 336 pages

The post A particular idea of Australianness appeared first on Inside Story.

The present wave began with Scott Morrison’s Job-ready Graduates scheme of 2021. The aim was to encourage students to enrol in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths), since these fields would progress Australia in the world of the internet and AI. It also enabled the Libs to give the humanities a sock in the eye. (Many of them are allergic to the very name “union,” applied to student bodies.) So while fees for a maths course were dropped by 59 per cent, those for journalism, communications and media studies  were raised by 117 per cent. Tellingly, the impact on enrolments was minimal: it has been estimated that only 1.5 per cent of students swapped fields in response. STEM enrolments had been self-sifted. People know their own aptitudes.

Some of these lie in music. In Canberra, ever since the freestanding School of Music was absorbed by the ANU some years ago, there has been increasing tension between the two. Now, as part of the ANU’s plans to scale down operations in view of budgetary considerations, the school is being squelched into a new School of Creative and Cultural Practice. No more traditional one-to-one teaching, essential for advanced instrumentalists; just a gutted Bachelor of Music.

(It’s worth adding that the school has had much closer links with the Canberra community than university departments generally: children are sent there for lessons, adults attend concerts. Fears are being expressed that with the staff reductions, the Canberra Symphony Orchestra may be forced to close.)

Turning to the ANU more generally, we learned a few months ago of additional plans to retrench staff, abolish the Humanities Research Centre, downsize the Australian Dictionary of Biography, and effectively close the Australian National Dictionary. All of these are flagship projects of the ANU. The Humanities Research Centre enjoys a high reputation from the way it brings international and Australian scholars together. The ADB, now in its sixtieth year, continues to record lives great and small — from premiers to postmistresses — and is first port of call for anybody seeking reliable information on figures from the past. (Women and Indigenous people have recently received close attention, after earlier neglect.)

Similarly the Australian National Dictionary, most recently issued in an impressive two-volume edition, provides a national service in recording the English spoken here, soon after it appears, while also recuperating words that have been discarded. Our national self-respect, and endorsement of the language we have come speak, requires the project to continue.

It tends to be forgotten now, but the ANU began as an intentionally elite university. People were conscious of the “brain drain”: in part the project was designed to stem that. Not that bright students would be discouraged from essential research visits overseas: the difference now was that they could often be supervised from Australia. Indeed the ANU was entirely a postgraduate university to begin with: undergraduates were catered for by a branch of Melbourne University (Canberra University College). It was not until 1960 that the two institutions were amalgamated, a bipartite structure lingering for a good while longer.

Given the high purpose of the original project — not least to encourage research in Australia — it comes as no surprise that parliament makes an annual National Institution Grant Allocation, worth $193.5 million (2024 figures) to the ANU. One is left gasping at the way the university has turned its back on the specificity of this allocation, proceeding to wipe out, or substantially reduce, the effectiveness of important national  institutions. For the managers, it’s a simple case of their not being sufficiently aligned with the university’s strategic aims.

And now the University of Melbourne, or rather its subsidiary Melbourne University Press, has pulled the plug on Meanjin. (Until very recently, the magazine was the way by which the Indigenous name for Brisbane was best known.) Under its founding editor, Clem Christesen — the great helmsman for thirty-four years — it gained an international reputation, publishing work by leading writers and intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertolt Brecht, Ezra Pound  (a premiere) and Anaïs Nin. These were interleaved with work from Australian writers — the list is as long as your arm — and, importantly, think pieces about where the country was headed.

In Clem’s view a literary magazine should not be exclusively literary: the important thing was the quality of the writing. Fiction and non-fiction were placed side by side, to take the temperature of the times. (Those particularly interested might look at my recent book, Emperors in Lilliput.)

Succeeding editors (there have been eleven) took up the challenge in various ways. I put out an “Aboriginal” Issue in 1977, highlighted women’s writing, and wanted to have a Greek issue and an Italian issue. But it was then a little too soon: there was a lack of sufficient suitable material. Other editors left their imprint on the magazine in various ways. For despite the changes in management (Meanjin was ultimately placed under the umbrella of MUP), the principle of editorial independence was scrupulously maintained.

Hence we may believe Warren Bebbington, the chair of the MUP board, when he says that Meanjin has been shut down for financial reasons. My reading of the situation is that Esther Anatolitis probably moved too quickly in changing the magazine: it is important to maintain existing subscribers until there is a cohort of new ones.

So, a dismal triad: Morrison’s punitive fees for non-science subjects, the ANU’s attack on the arts and humanities, and Melbourne University terminating Meanjin. In fact the universities have been in retreat since Dawkins. I said at the time that the colleges were being called universities so that the universities could be treated like colleges. But it’s worse than that: they’ve become un-versities, riddled with manereal disease.

There is an alternative. Noel Pearson has spoken of Australia’s three strands: the Indigenous, with its ancient knowledge of this land; the British, which bestowed our institutions and much of our culture, and “the multicultural achievement: a triumph of immigration that brought together the gift of peoples and cultures from all over the globe…” Increasingly we  need a greater understanding of our country, elaborating Pearson’s synthesising vision. Instead, the un-versities are busy hollowing out the humanities, key contributors to our developing culture. No nation (that’s right — we’re a nation, not an economy) can survive without encouraging humane self-knowledge.

The triumph of technology has given history a hysterectomy. But a people totally engrossed in  the present — effectively abolishing the past — will not have the ballast, or the balance, necessary in facing  the future.

An immediate step in the right direction would be for the University of Melbourne to restore Meanjin. Or hand it over to someone else. •

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But then something changed: people stopped paying attention to the news, or decided that they didn’t believe it anymore. They got distracted by cable TV, Facebook and TikTok. They became ill-informed, and started to make decisions that went against their best interests. The media decayed and fragmented, along with the nation. Opinion and news became indistinguishable, misinformation ran amok, and that is how we came to live in the post-truth world.

This story is not unsupported. Polls have long shown declining levels of trust in the media. Trust in many other institutions has fallen too, but in journalism it has plummeted. Since 1972, Gallup has been asking people in the United States, “How much trust and confidence do you have in the mass media?” The numbers used to be highly favourable, but in 2024 (and previously only in 2016 and 2023), more people said they had none (36 per cent) than said they had a lot (31 per cent). At the same time, a survey of how highly Americans rated the ethics of various professions found that only a fifth believed journalists’ ethical standards were “high or very high”: a better ranking than car salespeople and senators, but worse than bankers and chiropractors. Almost half said that journalists’ standards were “low or very low.”

Increasing numbers of Americans say they do not follow the news, and when they do, it is increasingly via factually unreliable social or alternative media. In some places, the picture looks rosier — the Nordic states, outliers as ever, have far higher levels of media trust — but one recent survey showed the balance of media trust and distrust across twenty-eight countries to be neutral at best, and negative among the most developed.

At the same time, large swathes of the news business have been on the retreat, stricken by dwindling advertising revenue, hostile governments and declining audiences. In the United States, the number of working journalists dropped by more than a quarter between 2008 and 2020. Meanwhile, in 2022–23, the Committee to Protect Journalists recorded more journalists jailed worldwide than ever before.

Technological change — most recently and acutely the mainstreaming of generative artificial intelligence — and political polarisation present their own challenges. In the United States, for example, the fall in trust of journalists has been sharper and more consistent among Republican voters, and the conclusion that many people turn to the news more for affirmation than for information can be hard to resist. What passes for truth often depends on where one falls on the political spectrum: it’s no coincidence that Donald Trump’s venture into social media has “truth” in its name.

It’s a grim picture, but buried in the statistics is another story. People still worry about misinformation, even if they can’t agree on what to call it. “Fake news,” aptly defined as “information divorced from reality,” is not a new concept, but more Americans than used to now register displeasure with inaccurate or unverified information on social media, and a majority now think that somebody, perhaps even the federal government, should do something about it. There seems to be widespread recognition that bad facts are bad news — globally, fears of an “information war” are rising — and, despite endemic scepticism and distraction, there is an enduring thirst for reliable information. The question is, where can it be found, and how can its purveyors make themselves heard amid the noise?

One answer has been to lionise accuracy. For some, this represents a business opportunity. NBC, CBS and the BBC have all launched fact-checking units, and for the first presidential debate of 2024, the New York Times tasked twenty-nine staffers with fact-checking the candidates’ statements in real time. Not every entrant in the emergent accuracy economy is as large or well resourced: over the past decade, hundreds of small fact-checking websites have sprung up around the world, including many in countries, such as India, where press freedom is far from a guarantee.

Whether rooted in service or aimed towards revenue, though, this sort of “political fact-checking,” which spotlights specific claims and seeks to prove or disprove them, is not as neutral as some might like to imagine. Setting out to counter and correct inaccuracies, it often takes the form of rebuttal, and necessarily entails editorial decisions over what to cover (no outfit can scrutinise every statement by every politician, and none of them wants to). Its reach is limited, and it is unclear whether it is always helpful: as one journalism professor puts it, “Disinformation itself has become kind of a toxic term for a lot of people.”

An insistent focus on misinformation or disinformation may even inflate the scale of the problem, to the benefit of what the writer Joseph Bernstein has labelled “Big Disinfo,” and to the detriment of a publication’s appeal to uncommitted readers. The provision of accurate facts does not, in itself, necessarily engender trust: “notions of news and truth are linked to what people do with information rather than what journalism unilaterally decides are accurate portrayals of reality,” says media studies researcher Silvio Waisbord.

What is more certain is that from time to time every journalist, no matter how well meaning, gets something wrong, or misses the point. If journalists want to be trusted, they need to not only police the accuracy of others, but also to ensure that their own work is careful and considered. One way to achieve this is to practise the traditional (or “primary”) variety of fact-checking, which, whether carried out by someone called a fact checker or by reporters themselves, aims at verification in advance of publication.

Today, anyone who wants it can find reporting that is, as Michael Schudson puts it, “deeper, more analytical… less fully focused on what happened in the past twenty-four hours, more investigative, and more likely to take “holding government accountable” or “speaking truth to power” as an essential goal” than was the case fifty years ago. If there ever was a golden age of journalism, we may still be living in it. The trouble is, much of the public — turned off, bored, or riled into disbelief — has ceased to listen. Pointing out the mistakes of others is not enough. If people are to trust journalists, we need to earn it.

The New Yorker, where  I work, has a reputation for accuracy. At least, that’s what the magazine tells itself. In reality, whether or not it is to be believed depends on whom you ask.

A prospectus announcing the first issue of The New Yorker in 1925 promised that,

As compared to the newspaper, the New Yorker will be interpretative rather than stenographic. It will print facts that it will have to go behind the scenes to get, but it will not deal in scandal for the sake of scandal nor sensation for the sake of sensation. Its integrity will be above suspicion.

(The same document was also where Harold Ross, the founding editor, was first rude enough to say that his new publication would “not be edited for the old lady in Dubuque.” The past hundred years have brought remarkably little change to some aspects of the magazine’s attitude, which remains equal parts tongue-in-cheek, earnest and supercilious. But today, such subscribers are highly desirable.)

True to Ross’s mandate, the New Yorker maintains an obsessive interest in facts, one that can sometimes seem to go beyond any obvious practical advantage. It didn’t take long for the early editors to recognise the usefulness of at least basic stenography. In 1927, the magazine published a profile of the poet Edna St Vincent Millay, “America’s first starlet,” claiming, among other fanciful details, that her father had been a stevedore (he was a schoolteacher). The embarrassment inspired Ross to install a fact-checking department, and since then, checkers have left their marks all over the magazine. John McPhee, in an essay published in 2009, depicted fact-checking as a pursuit bordering on mania. To shore up one important but rickety anecdote of his concerning wartime nuclear reactors, a checker placed calls that “ricocheted all over the United States: from Brookhaven to Bethesda, from La Jolla to Los Alamos.” The chase culminated, moments before the press deadline, in a call to a Florida police department, which the checker enlisted to track down a crucial witness. (He turned out to have gone to a mall.)

Not many pieces require such heroics: the reality is that fact-checkers are busy people, who traffic only infrequently in the dark arts of deep research. Most facts can be checked far more easily, especially with the benefit of the internet, and since there are so many, a checker has to prioritise. When a particular fact turns out to be especially sticky, persistence and attention, rather than any kind of special knowledge, are generally what’s needed. Checkers, of course, are not infallible, and their successes are mostly attributable to hard work and creativity. What is truly extraordinary about having a fact-checking department is that it exists at all. At the time of writing, thirty people work in fact-checking at the New Yorker, almost all of them full-time. It is labour, at scale, that produces accuracy.

Today, with a few pragmatic exceptions, fact-checkers go over everything published by the New Yorker, editing for accuracy, balance, fairness and context. Writers are asked to share their sourcing; checkers review both research materials (books, articles, emails, documents) and original reporting. For complex topics, and as needed for corroboration, they do their own independent research, perhaps conferring with relevant experts. And unless there’s a good reason not to, they get in touch with every person and entity mentioned in the story, and comb through what’s attributed to or said about them.

This fulfills a few functions. If the person cooperates, as they typically do, the checker can verify factual details, including those that appear within quotes. If they disagree with something, they get a chance to comment or correct the record. And if they are angry, well, it’s better to know. (This step is also important in libel-proofing a piece: under US law, a good-faith and thorough effort to discover the truth is a solid defence should you accidentally publish an actionable inaccuracy. No matter how solid your standards are, it doesn’t look great if you didn’t bother trying to contact the person involved.)

Checkers may discover hidden holes in a story, or garner perspectives that ought to be included. Most importantly, perhaps, this process, which is a kind of re-reporting, gives a fact-checker an opportunity to find out the basis of each statement of fact or opinion: is it personal experience, the pages of a half-remembered book, a third-hand rumour, or years of study? The value of a source, whether a person or a document, comes down mostly to their access to information, and to its quality.

Depending on the stakes — are we talking about what I ate for breakfast, or where I saw the crime occur? — and on what other sources are available, a checker may then need to seek corroboration or to do some reporting of their own. Finally, based on all this, they can decide what to say, and how: after a fashion, they decide what the magazine believes to be true.

Truth, in this sense, is sought and rendered, something produced by rigorous inquiry and informed consideration rather than something discovered. Many points, tweaked where necessary, can be stated as fact, but often a checker will want to insert a citation (‘according to…”) or present conflicting accounts. Tone matters, and may be used to indicate the level of confidence: a well-judged assertion may be one that leaves room for doubt. Falsehoods which reveal something about the speaker may have enough value to keep, so long as they are rebutted, but statements that are truly unverifiable, or clearly and unfixably specious, will typically be cut: deciding what not to publish is sometimes just as important as deciding what to keep in. In the landscape of a story, fact-checkers’ trails can often be followed along a path of hedges and denials, but an elegant fix may render the footwork behind it invisible. (Dispiritingly, checking tends to be at its most visible when it goes wrong, as when, despite Der Spiegel’s dozens-strong research department, a star reporter there recently turned out to have fabricated many of his stories.)

Subscribers to the New Yorker, of whom there were roughly 1.3 million at last count, seem to place a good deal of trust in this process. We know that they do because they’re so upset when we get something wrong. (Letter writers’ snide tendency to complain about failures of “the New Yorker’s vaunted fact-checking department” is surely a form of flattery.) Because the New Yorker, like many other publications, trades on its reputation for accuracy, readers can easily feel cheated, even betrayed, when an error slips in. This is not simply a commercial problem. “Trust,” as the philosopher Annette Baier once wrote, “is a fragile plant,” one that can easily be damaged by the kind of increased scrutiny or scepticism that a flaw, once noticed, tends to induce. Once the roots have withered, they can be hard to restore.

Trust is something that journalists ask for. It’s also something that they give. Just as readers learn about the world from the news, so journalists learn from their sources. Another philosopher, Neil Levy, points out that “much — perhaps most — of what we know, we know on the basis of testimony, and (except in some unusual cases) we acquire knowledge through testimony only when we trust speakers.” Most information comes to us from other people, whom we choose, deliberately or without thinking, to believe. As journalists, how and why we make those choices is particularly important. In the same essay, Levy writes that “trust makes us vulnerable,” and if this is the case for a writer, it’s doubly so for their reader. No reporter can avoid that vulnerability, but mediating it is essential to earning and keeping the trust of a reader. Journalists choose whom to trust on their readers’ behalf.

For journalists, as for anyone, there are certain shortcuts to trustworthiness, including reputation, expertise and transparency — the sharing of sources, for example, or the prompt correction of errors. Some of these shortcuts are more perilous than others. Various outfits, positioning themselves as neutral guides to the marketplace of ideas, now tout evaluations of news organisations’ trustworthiness, but relying on these requires trusting in the quality and objectivity of the evaluation. Official data is often taken at face value, but numbers can conceal motives: think of the disputes over how to count casualties in recent conflicts. Governments, meanwhile, may use their powers over information to suppress unfavourable narratives: in Hong Kong, “fake news” laws ostensibly aimed at misinformation threaten free expression; some see the same spectre in America.

While certain categories of information may come to be considered inherently trustworthy, these, too, are in flux. For decades, the technical difficulty of editing photographs and videos allowed them to be treated, by most people, as essentially incontrovertible. With the advent of AI-based editing tools, footage and imagery have swiftly become much harder to credit. Similar tools are already being used to spoof voices based on only seconds of recorded audio. For the average person, this might manifest in scams, but for a journalist, it puts source calls in question.

Technologies of deception tend to be accompanied by ones of detection or verification — cryptographic keys, for example, have long been used to verify identity online, and a battery of companies already promise that they can spot AI-manipulated imagery — but especially at a moment of rapid change, these remain deeply fallible. Though chatbots and AI-enabled search engines promise to help us with research (when a colleague at the New Yorker “interviewed” ChatGPT, it told him “I aim to provide information that is as neutral and unbiased as possible”), their inability to provide sourcing, and their tendency to hallucinate, look more like a shortcut to nowhere, at least for now.

The consequent problems extend far beyond journalism: election campaigns, where subtle impressions can lead to big differences in voting behaviour, seem increasingly vulnerable to deepfakes and inscrutable algorithms. Like everyone else, fact-checkers have only just begun to grapple with the consequences.

In such a landscape, it becomes difficult to know what is true, and, consequently, to make decisions. Trust and naivety can feel uncomfortably close. We live in complex societies, where the media often functions as “the expert system helping people navigate the social and political world.” If this system fails, and nothing takes its place, the consequences look dire. But failure — the endpoint of the story of generational decay, of gold exchanged for dross — is not inevitable. Fact-checking of the sort practised at the New Yorker is only one potential, highly specific and resource-intensive solution, but its relationship to the basic tenets of editorial good practice make it worth examining. It acknowledges the messiness of truth, the requirements of attention, the way we squint to see more clearly. It tells you to say what you mean, and know that you mean it. •

This essay appears in Age of Doubt: Building Trust in a World of Misinformation, edited by Tracey Kirkland and Gavin Fang, published this month by Monash University Publishing.

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“Oh. Tip Truck Cake,” she says. “Bitch of a cake. Don’t make it. Unless you are really desperate.”

Clark was speaking to the ABC in 2018 about the Weekly’s most famous cookbook, The Australian Women’s Weekly’s Children’s Birthday Cake Book. I’ve not heard the audio but I assume there was laughter inside her comment. A sense of humour is surely an essential ingredient in baking, especially when it’s for children. For the non-bakers out there: the birthday cake book has been reprinted at least twenty-five times since it was first published in 1980 and has cult status online.

Clark’s advice is lost on me because when my kids were little I was about as likely to make a Tip Truck Cake as I was to acquire an actual tip truck and fly it to the moon and back. Instead I settled for that 1970s classic, the chocolate ripple cake, which is a no-bake, no-shame, never-fail gift to the exhausted single parent. I still reprise it occasionally at Christmas for my grown-up kids. Never had a complaint.

Women’s magazines: my mother never bought them. It wasn’t just that money was always tight, it was because of Mum’s silent rejection of the unattainable ideals dangled about in them. I therefore bring some detachment to my reading of Samuelsson’s book and also to Sue Walker’s biography of her grandfather, The Untold Story of William Shum, published earlier this year. Shum was founding editor of New Idea and Australian Home Beautiful.

Samuelsson makes a convincing case for the ubiquity of the Australian Women’s Weekly, its “omnipresence” in Australian households in its heyday from the 1930s to the 1980s. Circulation peaked in the 1970s at a million a week, with an average of 850,000. Between 1933 and 1982 the magazine published thirty-one cookbooks, and Samuelsson quotes with approval its own claim, made in 1982, that “most families would have sat down to a meal prepared from a Women’s Weekly recipe.”

Not my family. When you work full time, as Mum did, and also have to get dinner for a family of five on the table seven days a week (we never ate out or had takeaway), how can cooking be anything but a chore? At some point in the 1980s, though, Mum found in an op-shop a tatty old copy of a book called The I Hate to Cookbook by the American humourist Peg Bracken, first published in 1960, and fell upon it gleefully.

The book was the result of Bracken and some of her friends having “pooled their ignorance” and tossed together the recipes they “swore by instead of at.” I don’t think we ever cooked from it but Mum and I used to giggle together over recipes for “Stayabed Stew,” “Skid Road Stroganoff” and “Hurry Curry.”

In 1960, when home-making was still thought to be the height of any woman’s ambition (although times were about to change), Bracken’s book was transgressive, and its message a magnificent gift from mother to daughter: that it is perfectly okay not to enjoy cooking. As it happens I do, but if not, so what? Naturally it was Mum who taught me that chocolate ripple cake will do just fine.

I am saddened though that she couldn’t relax and enjoy herself a little with what the Weekly had to offer. Women’s participation in the workforce was rising swiftly in the 1960s and, as Samuelsson notes, the Weekly responded with practical advice. In 1972 it published The Busy Woman’s Cookbook; I wish we’d had a copy of that.

Foundational to the Weekly’s success with food was its famous test kitchen, established in 1934 and enlarged in 1962. The aim was to inspire readers’ trust by triple-testing its recipes before publication. Little knowledge was assumed, so home cooks knew the recipes would work. Samuelsson conducted a survey of 161 Weekly readers and was told by one of them that she “didn’t enjoy cooking” but “wanted to be good at it.”

The magazine’s cookery pages and books were well-produced and illustrated, and the food editors highly trained. I greatly enjoyed reading about these respected professional women, beginning with Margaret Shepherd, appointed in 1933. She was trained in domestic science and nutrition, and her approach, carried on by her successors, was to offer readers practical, nutritious and economical recipes based on the “science” of cooking. From the 1950s the role became more glamourous and there was a shift, as Samuelsson puts it, “away from nutrition towards exhibition” — and to cosmopolitanism and consumerism.

Acknowledging the traditional narrative that the food eaten by Australians before postwar migrants arrived was “boring,” Samuelsson makes a case for the Weekly having promoted “foreign food” to its readers from the 1930s. In reality many of us will remember family food remaining boring until well into the 1970s, but by then interest in many different cuisines, Chinese in particular, was strong. The Weekly’s Chinese Cooking Class Cookbook, published in 1978, has been reprinted fifteen times.

Samuelsson devotes a chapter to the magazine’s obsession with dieting, which began once memories of wartime shortages and rationing had faded in the 1950s. Henceforth, food pages abounded with diet plans, dieting contests, weight charts and real-life weight-loss stories from housewives and celebrities asserting that being slim — attaining the “ideal figure”— would lead to happiness.

Men should consider dieting too, readers were told in 1962. But they were “complete imbeciles” about their health, so it was up to women to keep them at a healthy weight. For men, apparently, weight-loss was about health, but for women it was about appearance.

In her chapter on dinner parties and barbecues, Samuelsson reveals the magazine’s ruminations on male cooking, which amounted to this: Australian men rarely cook. If they do, it’s as a hobby, and they prefer it to involve meat. But when they put their minds to it, they will inevitably be better cooks than women.

Readers might be left seething, but Samuelsson remains calm. She holds her subject in affectionate regard and knows that many of her readers will too. She balances nostalgia with a clear-eyed analysis of the double-standards espoused by the Weekly, and wears her scholarship lightly. The book is beautifully written and illustrated.

Although it is amply referenced, reflecting its origins as a PhD thesis, A Matter of Taste has otherwise been forced on a crash diet and lost much of the contextual discussion I assume it once had concerning other cookery publications in twentieth-century Australia. Margaret Fulton’s bestselling cookbooks, for instance, once jostled for space on the same kitchen benches as the Weekly, but Fulton is mentioned by Samuelsson only in the acknowledgments.

What of the decades-old tradition of community and fund-raising cookbooks that carried on (and still does) despite the Weekly’s “omnipresence” in Australian homes? Samuelsson ignores them. Yet all through this period, stalwarts from countless community organisations, notably the Country Women’s Association, kept churning out their little spiral-bound collections of reader-contributed recipes. If the Weekly can be held responsible for the decline of local culinary traditions, we are not to know.

And then there were rival magazines. Samuelsson mostly avoids them, but New Idea had always been there, established back in 1902 by publisher T. Shaw Fitchett (son of the famous Methodist preacher and writer W.H. Fitchett). New Idea’s first editor, William Shum, spent twenty-three years on the magazine before shifting to another new venture, the Keith Murdoch-owned Australian Home Beautiful, for a further twenty years until his retirement in 1945 (or 1946; two dates are given). Thus, his magazines came into people’s homes every month for forty-three years at a time when, his biographer Sue Walker tells us, “magazines were the most powerful influence on the way people lived.”

Shum was born in Bendigo in 1875, son of a prosperous storekeeper of English and German stock (Schum, originally). Orphaned at fourteen, he and his older sister Ada were taken in by a local family, John and Jennie Harcourt. John was a newspaper proprietor, and after he gave William a job in his business it was clear that the young man had found his métier. He never looked back.

Harcourt sold his business in 1896 and moved with his family, and the young Shums, to Melbourne. Through connections with the Methodist church, William found a job with the Fitchett family publishing business, and in 1905 married Edith Moore, daughter of a prominent Bendigo family. Edith’s brother William Moore became a well-known journalist and art critic, a lifelong friend to William Shum and a regular contributor to Shum’s magazines.

“Home, garden and way of life”: Frank Hedley Sanders’s cover illustration for the September 1927 edition of the Australian Home Beautiful.

Walker devotes about a third of her book to Shum’s antecedents and early years but amid digressions and diversions tends to lose sight of her biographical subject. But she does clearly establish the talents and characteristics that made him a successful editor: his energy, sociability, curiosity and interest in new technologies. He had a wide circle of friends in Melbourne’s literary and artistic circles and was himself a talented amateur photographer.

At home in Brighton Shum would potter about developing his photographs, building furniture and working in his garden. His ideal reader was probably a version of himself, a happy home-maker and family man. He was lucky in his marriage to Edith and was close to his sister Ada, who lived with the Shums all her life. His respect for strong, talented women is reflected in his editorship of New Idea and the staunch support he offered female writers, designers and artists.

By the time we get to Shum’s editorship of Australian Home Beautiful we are well acquainted with the man who would spend twenty glorious years celebrating what Walker describes as “our national spirit and the truly Australian qualities of home, garden and way of life.”

Lovers of interwar architecture and design, like those eager bakers reading Lauren Samuelsson’s book, will likely skip the entrée and mains and go straight to the dessert. Walker (or more precisely, her publisher, The Beagle Press) rewards them with four sumptuously illustrated chapters featuring page after page of reproductions from the magazine, including some heart-meltingly beautiful cover illustrations by artist Frank Hedley Sanders, who contributed to the magazine for fifteen years.

I’m always intrigued, as here, when a publisher spends big on illustrations, design and production but pinches the pennies on copy editing. Hence, Mary “Gilmour” instead of Gilmore, and — even worse — Ruth “Poole Lane” for Ruth Lane Poole.

The book ends abruptly with Shum’s retirement. His life is wrapped up in less than two pages and we learn nothing of his declining years or his death, or anything more about Edith and their children. Nor does Walker deal with the professional struggles and setbacks any editor must face, such as importuning or unreliable authors, tussles with publishers, declining sales, or incursions in the market by rival magazines.

Were magazines the most powerful influence on people’s lives, as Walker claims? What about family, work, healthcare, education, spirituality, politics, the economy? If both authors, Walker and Samuelsson, are inclined to exaggerate the impact of the magazines they write about, there is no denying that magazines did (once) profoundly shape middle-class tastes and aspirations. •

A Matter of Taste: The Australian Women’s Weekly and Its Influence on Australian Food Culture
By Lauren Samuelsson | Monash University Publishing | $39.99 | 240 pages

The Untold Story of William Shum
By Sue Walker | The Beagle Press | $59.95 | 224 pages

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Most importantly, though, you should have deep pockets. You don’t start a little magazine to make money. Unlike the bigger, glossier titles on newsstands, these barely read journals of literature and criticism operate in an environment of almost perpetual scarcity. Printing costs are high. Circulation is low. There are rarely enough good contributors to fill the pages, nor money enough to pay them. The next grant or subsidy is always in jeopardy, the future always doubtful. Prestige is mostly retrospective. Volunteerism is essential.

Clem Christesen and Stephen Murray-Smith, the parallel subjects of Jim Davidson’s new “dual biography,” Emperors in Lilliput, were just such figures. Both launched an influential little magazine — Meanjin and Overland respectively — and both kept at it for exactly thirty-four years. Both had a deep love of literature and a belief that its cultivation in Australia was a matter of profound national consequence. And both saw it as their duty to help to foster a distinctively Australian literary culture, to bring some life to the “vast cultural Simpson Desert” in which they found themselves in the years after the second world war.

In pursuit of this noble goal, these two enterprising literary missionaries took slightly different approaches. Christesen was an unapologetic elitist. His magazine’s curious title — an Indigenous word meaning “prod” or “spike” derived from the area around Brisbane — was a well-chosen metaphor for his commitment to creating a distinctively Australian literary avant-garde. From its beginnings as an obscure poetry brochure in Brisbane in 1940 to its mature years as an eclectic journal of verse, short fiction and critical essays in postwar Melbourne, this fertile mixture of literary modernism and cultural nationalism was Meanjin’s guiding spirit.

Overland, by contrast, was launched more than a decade later as a kind of literary appendage of the Communist Party of Australia. Many of its early contributors believed that literary modernism was intolerably bourgeois. Instead, they favoured a style of writing called “socialist realism,” one that drew on depictions of working-class experience as a means of advancing the class struggle. Though the magazine eventually broke with the party, freeing its writers to embrace different styles and themes, it always retained this overarching commitment to the promotion of underrepresented voices. At a different time, it might have been called “literature from below.”

Politically, both approaches proved troublesome for their editors. In the 1950s, as the world was slowly divided into competing ideological camps, art and culture emerged as one of the most important battlegrounds for cold war conflict. Across the Western hemisphere, literary production became unavoidably intertwined with political commitment. In Australia — a largely British-derived society that had only recently begun to seriously consider the question of political and cultural independence — this ideological conflict was increasingly entangled in debates over the essential character of the nation.

Both Overland and Meanjin were partisans in this contest, at least in the sense that they were thought to be incubators of a view of Australian politics, culture and history known as “radical nationalism.” In their pages, writers like A.A. Phillips, Russel Ward, Vance Palmer and Ian Turner presented an interpretation of Australian history and culture that was nationalist in outlook and broadly socialist in nature. They fashioned an Australian “tradition,” to use Phillips’s term, that was innately sympathetic to progressive concerns. Overland, the magazine that pursued this line most overtly, even carried the Joseph Furphy-inspired motto “Temper Democratic, Bias Australian.”

Under siege: Meanjin editor Clem Christesen.

Owing to these left-wing sympathies, both Overland and Meanjin became lightning rods for debates over communist infiltration of Australian society. In 1955, Christesen and his wife Nina were called to testify at the royal commission into espionage. At different points, their support from the Commonwealth Literary Fund was either threatened or denied on political grounds. In 1956, a group of anti-communist intellectuals even launched their own journal, Quadrant, as a deliberate response to what they saw as the dangerous radicalism of these two magazines. In these years, as Susan Lever argued in her account of postwar literary culture, the question of political commitment needed to be considered even by the uncommitted.

In the cold war 1950s, this feeling of embattlement gave both magazines a sense of dynamism and relevance. In the less ideologically fraught politics of the 1960s and 1970s, however, they found this vitality harder to sustain. Neither Christesen nor Murray-Smith were fully comfortable with the political and cultural upheavals of those decades. In the 1970s, in particular, they found themselves up against a self-styled “New Left,” a younger and more diverse group of progressives who were actively hostile to the “gumnutry” and “working-class fairytales” of the Meanjin and Overland school. In some circles, Christesen’s magazine became known as “the Meanjin morgue.”

Most little magazines are principled failures, burning bright before fizzing out. All have a tendency to ossify, hanging around to fight old battles while everyone else moves on. Of the thirty-seven little magazines that were launched in Australia between 1923 and 1954, writes Davidson, just five lasted more than ten issues, and eight produced only one. That both Meanjin and Overland managed to survive was a minor miracle. Meanjin was on annual funding for the entirely of Christesen’s editorship. Overland was printed cheaply, and often held together by a desktop stapler. Murray-Smith called it “a literary magazine that tries to appear quarterly.”

Little magazines have an historical appeal that belies their almost non-existent readership, and as Davidson acknowledges, much of this story has been told before. Over the years, these publications and their illustrious contributors have spawned a small handful of critical studies and group biographies, among them Judith Armstrong’s The Christesen Romance and John McLaren’s Free Radicals of the Left in Postwar Melbourne. Emperors in Lilliput, though, is the most ambitious full-scale profile of the men at the helm of these two legendary publications.

In Davidson’s telling, Christesen emerges as the more complicated figure. He was possessed of an intense editorial zeal. He had Napoleonic ambitions, always fantasising about more pages, more frequent issues, grander contributions. The writer and editor Michael Heyward thought he had a “maniac’s tendency.” Meanjin was his life, and he did whatever he could to keep it going. His personal outlay, too, was immense: by Davidson’s calculations, close to $400,000 in today’s money. For a while he even worked part time as a gardener. All that mattered was the magazine’s continued existence.

Christesen could be difficult, sensitive and “unpleasantly emphatic.” He always seemed to be under siege and on the defensive. At one point, Davidson calls him an “inconsolable child.” He wrote between fifty and sixty complaining letters each week, relentlessly haranguing his contributors, his friends and — sometimes — his enemies about Meanjin and its finances. He was also a perfectionist, demanding impossibly high standards and exercising near total editorial control. He rarely accepted a first submission. At certain points, he rejected close to 95 per cent of manuscripts.

If Christesen was a better editor, writes Davidson, then Murray-Smith was the more interesting man. Overland’s founder was a class traitor, a Toorak-raised, Geelong Grammar–educated blue blood who became a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. He was radicalised first by his war experience in New Guinea, then by the “vast left-wing jamboree” that was the University of Melbourne Labor Club in the 1940s. After several years of loyal service to the party, however, he became one of its most prominent dissenters, resigning his membership in 1958 in protest over the oppressive reality of actually existing socialism.

In comparison with the autocratic editorial arrangements at Meanjin, Davidson calls Overland a “guided democracy.” He depicts Murray-Smith as a kind of literary grandee, an Australian Dr Johnson who seemed like he would be more at home in the eighteenth century than the twentieth. He had an encyclopaedic mind and was a prodigious collector of books (more than 30,000 all up). He was a bit of an eccentric, too, sometimes working in the nude if it was hot. To many, he gave off an impression of lordliness. On the annual Overland expedition to Erith Island in the Bass Strait, he was known as “the emperor.”

For all his radicalism, though, Murray-Smith possessed fundamentally conservative instincts. He tended to fetishise the old and the traditional. He preferred a pipe to cigarettes. He had a lifelong enthusiasm for folk culture and bush ballads, and an abiding interest in remote island communities. As Davidson writes, they were a “surviving example of his romanticised rural ideal.” In the end, this traditionalism put him out of touch with the times. In later life, he waged a bizarre campaign against the adoption of the metric system. At one point he tried writing with a quill. In 1983, he was asked to contribute to the design of a new general education curriculum. His suggestions included Latin, the Bible and “tree recognition.”

By design, a biography of two magazine editors should include some account of the publications into which they poured the majority of their creative energies (if not much of their own writing). For figures as closely associated with their magazines as Christesen and Murray-Smith, it is basically a requirement. The problem facing the biographer, though — even one of Davidson’s pedigree — is that there is no obvious formula for what to include and what to omit: put too much in and you risk obscuring the subjects at the centre of the book; leave too much out and you lose sight of the professional achievement that defined them.

Rather than attempt to resolve this biographical dilemma, Davidson chooses to lean into it. In some chapters he opts for an “all in” approach, embedding a parallel biography of Meanjin and Overland into his two broader biographical narratives. He includes compelling pen portraits of important contributors, gives detailed accounts of key issues of each magazine and discusses many of the significant articles that appeared in them: A.A. Phillips’ famous essay on the cultural cringe, for example, or Ian Turner’s on radical nationalism. The result is not simply a biography of two magazine editors, but a portrait of an entire artistic and intellectual milieu.

This slippage is an important one. Both Christesen and Murray-Smith were decent writers, but neither possessed a particular talent for poetry or prose. Christesen’s published output amounted to a catalogue of Meanjin editorials and a small handful of poetry collections. Murray-Smith, more of a collector than a writer, produced a dictionary of Australian quotations and a guide to English usage. Yet their invisible editorial hands were behind some of the best Australian writing and criticism of the mid-twentieth century. Their talent, so to speak, was to foster talent. As Christesen once joked, self-deprecatingly, he was “a kind of untutored literary midwife.”

It is these unique characteristics that necessitate the book’s rather uneven narrative. Emperors in Lilliput contains two explicitly biographical chapters, two that tell the story of the magazines themselves, a concurrent account of the 1960s and a broader, themed chapter on the difficulties of little magazine publishing. Towards the end, Davidson even switches to the first-person in order to tell the story of Christesen’s departure from Meanjin. The book closes then with a long and richly detailed portrait of Murray-Smith in his twilight years, while Christesen disappears from the narrative entirely.

This omission, I suspect, is at least in part due to Davidson’s own role in the Meanjin story, an immensely important detail which, to his credit, he describes frankly. Davidson was Christesen’s successor at Meanjin, but we learn in a fascinating late chapter that the handover was an acrimonious one, a “power struggle in the Clemlin” that left both sides permanently embittered. Davidson confesses that for many years he could not even look at the old Christesen-edited Meanjins. For him, they were “radioactive.” The whole book, he says, was in some ways an attempt to exorcise these demons, to get a sense of Christesen beyond his own personal enmity.

He has done an excellent job. Emperors in Lilliput is a detailed, colourful and highly entertaining portrait of Australian literary life in the postwar years. Reading it, it is hard not to be nostalgic for this ostensible golden age of literary fertility. For all the shortcomings of these magazines — not least their overwhelming maleness — they were reflective of a time when poetry, fiction and criticism seemed to matter, or at least to possess an exalted status. This was a period when intellectually minded Australians really believed in the literary arts, not only as a means to a fulfilling interior life, but as a crucial part of the development and vitality of the nation itself.

Not so today. As Davidson laments in a plaintive afterword, even among the artistically inclined, poetry, fiction and literary criticism are no longer held in such high esteem. Beginning in the 1970s, they were usurped by cinema, the performing arts and other forms of media. Literature, he says, has itself become performative. These days, our intellectual infrastructure includes podcasts, writers’ festivals and — God help us — Twitter. Literary magazine culture still exists, but it can feel slightly old-fashioned, like the two pipe-smoking men on the cover of Davidson’s book.

This doesn’t mean we should throw in the towel. Popularity does not necessarily equate to influence, and economic return is no proxy for value. Times change, media technology evolves, tastes shift, but the impulse to describe the world, to capture and make sense of it, remains. Meanjin and Overland, after all, are still going. HEAT, Southerly and the Sydney Review of Books march on, while serious international journals like The Baffler and n+1 are now only a click away. In the age of the smartphone, the vast cultural Simpson Desert can appear more like a rainforest.

Launching a small circulation, serious-minded journal of literature and criticism — or some online version of it — is still as crazy as it ever was, especially in this country. You will still be scrapping for money and contributors, and you will still be working long unpaid hours. There will likely be little reward in this world. Thanks to your intervention, though, literature might just survive. •

Emperors in Lilliput: Clem Christesen of Meanjin and Stephen Murray-Smith of Overland
By Jim Davidson | The Miegunyah Press | $59.99 | 480 pages

The post Literary midwifery appeared first on Inside Story.

Whenever we went to visit, I’d grab a magazine to shield myself from the pain and awkwardness in the room, flicking through the ads and fashion till I got to the stories. I might read about a civil war in Latin America or morality and manners in the Outer Hebrides or… honestly, I don’t remember most of the subjects, but I’ve never forgotten the voice. Polished, witty, literate, knowledgeable, superior. I read a lot and the Vogue voice — which other glamorous titles used too — etched itself on my brain.

A decade later, when I wrote my first stories for Vogue Australia as a freelancer in Paris, I was hoping to replicate that worldliness. My personal fashion sense was never going to pass muster — couturiers Azzedine Alaïa and Franco Moschino must have been highly amused at the appearance of the young woman sent to interview them — but I could try to sound the part.

By the time I left the magazine in 1992, having worked on several of its titles, I was disabused of the notion that writing added any value to the product. Fashion editors talked about doing a little black dress story, or a weekend away story, or maybe a leisurewear story (activewear was yet to come), and these were the stories that counted. Everything else was just text. “How will we illustrate it?” was the usual response to any idea from the features department. Over its 125-year history, though, some very fine writers have taken the Vogue coin. A roll call would include Virginia Woolf, another Wolfe (Tom), Rebecca West, Aldous Huxley, Nancy Mitford and Jeanette Winterson.

You won’t find feature writing mentioned in Glossy, Nina-Sophia Miralles’s new history of the magazine, but nor does Miralles mention models or fashion trends as such. What interests her is how the magazine evolved from a Manhattan society gazette into one of the world’s most recognised brands, and the people who drove and profited from its growth, who managed it through war and economic downturns, and who pushed through to the top of a company that demands crazy degrees of loyalty from its staff.

Thus far, Vogue — once a magazine, now a self-styled global brand — has prospered in good times and in bad. In what counts as a very bad time, quite possibly the end times for glossy magazines, Vogue is one of the few structures still standing in the ruined landscape of old media. It struts its stuff, shapeshifting with the times and technology, still recognisably Vogue, haughty, never naughty and, most importantly, with never a hint of self-doubt.

Vogue was born during the Gilded Age. Its founder, Arthur Turnure (no, not Condé Nast — he was Vogue’s second owner), came from old New York money but had an eye on the new money pouring into Manhattan. His publishing formula, which still holds good, was one part entitled to one part aspirational. Miralles describes how, from the first issue of 17 December 1892, Turnure nailed his market. “With one paper he seduced two social groups: middle class readers would buy it so they could finally see what the rich and distinguished were up to and upper class readers would buy it to feed their egos.”

Miralles’s profile describes her as a London-based fashion and arts writer who launched LONDNR, an online culture magazine, in 2015. Her style is breezy and palatable, her narrative rich in detail and anecdote, and she doesn’t ask too many hard questions. But this is not Vogue propaganda; it is a well-researched biography of the queen of fashion titles, relying heavily on the memoirs and biographies of former editors, proprietors and fashion luminaries.

The focus is on the big three — American, British and French Vogue. New York is where the power lies, and American Vogue has always had the biggest budgets, the most formidable editors, the final say. But the London and Paris offices, established in 1916 and 1922 respectively, sound like a lot more fun.

The Newhouse family, which bought Condé Nast’s company in 1959, launched Vogue Australia that same year. They asked a gregarious shoe-and-textiles salesman, Bernie Leser, to help them. Together with his editor, Sheila Scotter, this most unlikely of publishers made a huge success of the venture. Leser’s star rose in the corporation until in 1987 he was appointed president of Condé Nast in the United States. Forget Nicole and Elle. Bernie — everyone called him Bernie — was the most influential Australian in the magazine’s history.

I remember him visiting the Vogue office in Sydney with Si Newhouse Jr, maybe for the thirtieth anniversary bash in 1989. He wanted to trade memories of growing up in Auckland with me. Did I remember the Tudor cinema in Remuera? I did. Had I rolled Jaffas down the aisles? I had. He didn’t tell me that he’d arrived in New Zealand in 1939 as a fourteen-year-old refugee from Nazi Germany — and though I sensed he was an outsider, I didn’t ask. We didn’t have much else in common. I was a Vogue writer, and Vogue’s top brass, including fashion editorial, have a polite but profound indifference to the written word.

Miralles covers Vogue Australia in two scant pages dealing with Bernie, and Norman Parkinson’s first golden cover photo. Other editions of Vogue get even shorter shrift. The Condé Nast licensing strategy is described in an extended paragraph, and it’s not complicated. Emerging economy grows a middle class. Vogue — created by the smart set for the smart set — sweeps in to tempt the newly created wealth. Same formula applied in Brazil, Korea, China, Turkey and so on. It works. And until very recently it seemed immune to cultural pushback.

Of the many anecdotes Miralles recounts in Glossy, there’s one that really sticks in my mind. It features Edna Woolman Chase, editor-in-chief of American Vogue from 1914 to 1952 (you read that correctly) and the treatment she meted out to Alison Settle.

Settle was appointed editor of British Vogue in 1926, replacing Dorothy Todd, who had edited the magazine from 1922 to 1926 with her girlfriend, a wealthy Australian tearaway called Madge Garland (née McHarg). The magazines produced in those four years are now celebrated as avant-garde masterpieces, but Todd and her entourage (Bloomsbury — say no more) were too much trouble for the Americans. Chase fired her and hired Settle to steady the ship. Settle’s personal life was conventional, and she brought solid experience in journalism to the job.

Not that Vogue had much use for the latter. Little in the British edition was homegrown. Covers came from New York, pictures from Paris. Settle’s job was to see and be seen at a relentless round of dinners, parties, dress shows, performances, sporting events… It was exhausting, but then editing Vogue has never been for homebodies. It’s no surprise to read that Chase considered it Settle’s “duty” to become good friends with Helena Rubinstein (who took out double-page spreads for her beauty products). But the degree to which she micromanaged her editor’s private life is pretty horrifying.

When Chase learned that Settle, a widow with two children, lived in Hampstead and caught the tube to work, she read her the riot act. “In one of her more draconian moments,” writes Miralles, she declared that “Hampstead was essentially vulgar and Settle was forbidden from living there.” (The kiss of death for a story proposal at Vogue Living, I recall, was to be judged suburban.) Settle was ordered to find a flat with a uniformed porter and a lift. She complied, moving to Mayfair and leaving her children behind in Hampstead. On her next visit to London, Chase reportedly found the Mayfair flat unsatisfactory and told her to move again.

Settle was caught in “the Vogue vice grip,” as Miralles calls it. Some handle it better than others. Settle left Vogue under a cloud in the mid 1930s, and went back to Fleet Street. In a letter to her daughter, cited by Miralles, she said working for the Observer gave her a cleaner conscience. I cheered for Settle, but she was quickly replaced.

Condé Nast proprietors play favourites, and for those who make the cut, the lifestyle is princely. Art director Alexander Liberman was rewarded handsomely for his friendship with Si Newhouse, earning US$1 million a year in 1980. He stayed with the company for more than fifty years. Anna Wintour has been the editor-in-chief of American Vogue since 1988 and has outflanked all her rivals. Her annual salary is reportedly US$4 million, and at seventy-one she shows no sign of abdicating. Miralles is good on Nuclear Wintour, as she was known during her tenure at British Vogue.

The final few chapters of Glossy will interest those who want to know the nitty-gritty of the reign of Wintour and her generation, and to learn how the magazine is coping with the media climate since 2000. But the problem isn’t just the internet: fashion as an industry is facing serious consumer resistance right now, and Vogue’s trajectory is twinned with the industry’s.

I found more to enjoy in Miralles’s back catalogue: the twentieth-century chronicles of Vogue when it was just a magazine. I learned of editors who will never be household names again, some from surprisingly modest backgrounds, whose resourcefulness made small fortunes for Condé Nast (the man rather than the company). I didn’t know, for example, that Chase “invented” the catwalk show (it’s a great story) when the outbreak of war in 1914 choked supply from Paris ateliers.

There are some great characters in Vogue’s management too. Miralles tells of the extraordinary efforts of Harry Yoxall, the managing director of British Vogue, to get copies of the magazine out around the country during the second world war. In Paris, meanwhile, Michel de Brunhoff showed the ingenuity of a Resistance fighter in keeping Vogue Paris out of the hands of the Nazis. “Exactly what motivated everyone in this herculean effort is another question entirely,” Miralles comments in one of her few, albeit gentle, digs at the idea of a fashion magazine as a cause worth supporting.

In one of her strongest chapters, Miralles takes a close look at Colombe Pringle, who in her time at the helm of Vogue Paris (1987–94) finally managed to put a black woman on the cover (a previous editor had been fired by the Newhouses in 1966 for trying to do so). Pringle then followed up with holiday issues featuring the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela. Miralles asks whether fashion should be political, but backs away from answering the question. Vogue Paris seems to have been much less a vassal of New York than London was. But then, in 2017, it was the British edition that broke the mould most spectacularly by appointing Edward Enninful — not only a man but a gay black man — as editor-in-chief.

Vogue is a business, and you can bet that Enninful’s appointment reflected business priorities that have been clear from the outset. Condé Nast was firstly an ad man — his soulmates, says Miralles, were in the advertising department. The Nast business model, which came to be used everywhere, never saw magazine sales as the end game. They were just a number to throw at advertisers to lure them into spending money. Condé Nast’s guidelines are that 40 per cent of the “book” should be advertising. Well, that worked brilliantly for a long time, but we know now that it isn’t foolproof.

Still, Vogue has a lucrative niche on the top shelf. Some of its current advertisers (Tiffany & Co., Veuve Clicquot and Perrier Jouët) have been buying space since the first issue. Miralles finds some comfort in noting that the habits of the ultra-rich haven’t changed all that much. I can’t say that I do. •

The post Frocks, sweat and tears appeared first on Inside Story.

It was three days later, when the second atomic bomb was dropped, that the now-familiar photo of the mushroom cloud rising nearly fourteen kilometres into the air above Nagasaki was released to the media. Taken by Lieutenant Charles Levy from an observation plane accompanying the bomber, it epitomised American military might.

But not the effects of that might. Photographer Yoshito Matsushige’s images of the destruction in Hiroshima were confiscated by the American military and only published once the peacetime occupation ended in 1952. Until then, few people outside the city had seen evidence of what happened to the people inside it.

Having used great resourcefulness to get into Hiroshima, Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett provided the first eyewitness account of what he called “the atomic plague” in the London Daily Express on 5 September 1945. Blume perhaps underplays Burchett’s worldwide scoop, but her focus in Fallout is to illuminate the importance of John Hersey’s article, simply titled “Hiroshima,” published a year later in the 31 August 1946 issue of the New Yorker.

At that time, and indeed right up to 1992, the New Yorker didn’t publish photographs. Hersey’s 31,000-word article occupied an entire issue of the magazine, a first in its twenty-six-year history. That is a lot of words, and Blume argues that they, more than photographs extolling military power or showing shattered buildings, have informed views about atomic bombs because they told the stories of six survivors from the moment of the bomb’s impact to several months afterward.

Since the publication of “Hiroshima” it has been hard for anyone to pretend that the impact of nuclear weapons, instantaneously and in lingering radiation sickness, is anything but horrific. Blume uses a quote from Hersey as her book’s epigraph: “What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has been the memory of what happened at Hiroshima.”

Here’s a paragraph from “Hiroshima” that, once read, is hard to forget. It concerns the efforts of one of the survivors, Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, to save others:

Mr Tanimoto found about twenty men and women on the sandspit. He drove the boat onto the bank and urged them to get aboard. They did not move and he realized that they were too weak to lift themselves. He reached down and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glove-like pieces. He was so sickened by this that he had to sit down for a moment. Then he got out into the water and, though a small man, lifted several of the men and women, who were naked, into his boat. Their backs and breasts were clammy, and he remembered uneasily what the great burns he had seen during the day had been like: yellow at first, then red and swollen, with the skin sloughed off, and finally, in the evening, suppurated and smelly.

By now the tide has risen, making it harder for him to get across the water. Hersey continues:

On the other side, at a higher spit, he lifted the slimy living bodies out and carried them up the slope away from the tide. He had to keep consciously repeating to himself, “These are human beings.” It took him three trips to get them all across the river.

By bringing readers down from the aerial view of the city to people on the ground, Hersey opened space for them to imagine themselves in the shoes of a people whose military just a few years before had bombed Pearl Harbor, killing 2400 people and bringing the United States into the second world war.

Hersey’s decision to strip out any discussion of the debate about whether the two atomic bombings were necessary to win the war exposed him to criticism, particularly from Mary McCarthy (best known as author of the novel The Group), that he had reduced the uniqueness of the atomic bomb attack to the kind of “human interest” story that follows every natural disaster.

There is something to McCarthy’s criticism, but it’s not a big something. The fact that “Hiroshima” has little to say about the bomb’s necessity or otherwise flows from Hersey’s choice, encouraged and then patrolled in the drafting by New Yorker editor Harold Ross, to focus on “what happened not to buildings but to human beings,” as Hersey later put it. To portray the reality of their experience he needed to convey that perspective and that perspective only. It is this, though, that enables a mass audience to sympathise, even empathise, with the Japanese — something few had been able, or willing, to encourage.

No newspaper human-interest story has ever been as artfully composed as “Hiroshima,” either. Hersey drew on the structure of Thornton Wilder’s 1927 novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which he fortuitously came across while travelling to Japan. Wilder portrayed the interconnected lives of five people who were destined to die when a suspension bridge over a canyon in Peru broke with all of them on it.

Hersey uses a similar sequential narration device to tell the stories of six survivors of the Hiroshima bombing. The opening paragraph captures what each of the six was doing at the exact moment, 8.15am, when the bomb was dropped.

Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk, was “turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.” Dr Masakazu Fujii was “settling down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital.” Hatsuyo Nakamura “stood by the window of her kitchen, watching a neighbor tearing down his house.” Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge “reclined in his underwear on a cot on the top floor of his order’s three-story mission house.” Dr Terufumi Sasaki “walked along one of the hospital corridors with a blood specimen.” And the Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto “paused at the door of a rich man’s house in Koi, the city’s western suburb, and prepared to unload a handcart full of things he had evacuated from town in fear of the massive B-29 raid which everyone expected Hiroshima to suffer.”

In cutting from one person to the next, Hersey uses a cinematic effect completely familiar today but novel, in both senses of the word, in 1946.

His achievement was journalistic as well as literary. Blume lays out in detail just how much news “Hiroshima” contained. The number of deaths was 100,000, significantly higher than the US military’s official figure. Contrary to the official reason for choosing Hiroshima — that it was a military base — the overwhelming majority of the city’s population was civilian.

General Groves had consistently denied or downplayed the level of radiation sickness in the bombed cities, and told a Senate committee on atomic energy in late 1945 that doctors assured him radiation poisoning was “a very pleasant way to die.” But Hersey showed that levels of radiation poisoning were still alarmingly high in 1946 and that it wreaked terrible suffering on victims.

“Hiroshima” had an enormous impact. According to media historian Kathy Roberts Forde, all newsstand copies — priced at 15c — sold out within an hour. Within weeks, writes Blume, the magazine was selling for US$6 at secondhand bookshops. Albert Einstein, the Nobel prize–winning scientist and pacifist, requested 1000 reprints which he sent to leading scientists. The full article was read on the American Broadcasting Company radio network over four consecutive evenings.

As many as eighty newspapers and magazines around the world clamoured for rights to reprint the story, which Hersey granted with two conditions: that the proceeds go to the Red Cross and that the article run in full. It was published in book form in November 1946 and, according to Jeremy Treglown’s 2019 biography of Hersey, Mr Straight Arrow, sold more than 600,000 copies within a year.

Despite Hersey’s steering clear of the issue, or perhaps because of it, “Hiroshima” provoked the first full public debate about whether the United States was right to drop the bomb. “As I read, I had to constantly remind myself that we perpetrated this monstrous tragedy. We Americans,” one reader wrote in a letter to the New Yorker. An internal New Yorker report said Hersey’s article provoked a stronger response than any other in the magazine’s history, according to Forde. The great majority of the 400 letters were favourable, including a good number from readers who had noticed and praised Hersey’s “masterful storytelling.” A small number were critical: “Wonderful. Now write up the massacre of Nanking,” of Chinese people by Japanese soldiers in 1937, wrote one.

The response of commentators across the media was overwhelmingly positive. The New York Times editorialised:

The disasters at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were our handiwork. They were defended then, and are defended now, by the argument that they saved more lives than they took — more lives of Japanese as well as more lives of Americans. The argument may be sound or it may be unsound. One may think it sound when he recalls Tarawa, Iwo Jima, or Okinawa. One may think it unsound when he reads Mr Hersey.

What is remarkable about this editorial, writes Blume, is how at odds it is with the newspaper’s earlier, fervent support for the dropping of the atomic bomb. Not to mention the fact that one of its journalists, William Laurence, had been seconded in April 1945 from the newspaper to the Manhattan Project, where he wrote most of the press releases the media relied on in the days following the bombing.

After Burchett reported “the atomic plague” in September 1945, Laurence was among the journalists given a guided tour of the site of the original atomic bomb tests in New Mexico. His story, headlined “US Atom Bomb Site Belies Tokyo Tales,” reported that Geiger counters revealed “a minute quantity” of radiation in the ground, showing that Japanese claims of people dying from radiation sickness in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a fiction.

When Hersey’s article was published, Laurence was about to release his own book, Dawn Over Zero, in which he extols the virtues of the nuclear power he had seen in July 1945, when the first bomb was exploded at New Mexico, and on board one of the planes in the bombing run for Nagasaki:

It was as if the earth had spoken and the suddenly iridescent clouds and sky had joined in one affirmative answer. Atomic energy — yes. It was like the grand finale of a mighty symphony of the elements, fascinating and terrifying, uplifting and crushing, ominous, devastating, full of great promise and great forebodings.

Blume lays bare the deeply entwined relationship between the most respected newspaper in the United States and the top-secret Manhattan Project. That relationship might have been covered by earlier writers such as Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell in Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, but what hasn’t previously been covered — and what is one of the most extraordinary parts of this carefully researched, crisply written book — is the extent to which the New Yorker cooperated with the US military before publishing “Hiroshima” — for better and for worse.

Like the rest of the American media, the New Yorker sent stories to the War Department for clearance. The level of censorship of the magazine’s war coverage, though, had been light, according to Blume. The Office of Censorship closed down in late September 1945, but in early August the following year, just as Hersey and his editors at the New Yorker were feverishly editing “Hiroshima,” President Truman signed into law the Atomic Energy Act. The act restricted publication about “all data concerning the manufacture or utilization of atomic weapons.” Use of any such data that might harm the United States could “be punished by death or imprisonment for life.”

The magazine’s editor, Harold Ross, and his deputy, William Shawn, were worried this new restriction could kill their article. On advice from their lawyer, they felt they needed to get official clearance. They decided to send it not just to any government public relations officer but to General Groves himself.

Why? It isn’t clear. The records of the New Yorker, held at the New York Public Library, and General Groves’s papers have intriguing gaps, but Blume has pieced together the available information. She offers informed speculation about exactly what transpired in the negotiations between Groves and the magazine.

Blume points to speeches Groves had made defending the dropping of the atomic bomb. If anyone didn’t like the way the United States ended the war, his argument went, then they should “remember who started it.” She also shows that the United States’ own scientists had been to Hiroshima and discovered for themselves the extent of the damage and its lingering effects.

Groves had been the architect of the postwar information suppression campaign, but he was also concerned to protect the United States’ upper hand in the nuclear arms race, especially against the Soviet Union. Atomic bombs were now part of the world, he wrote in a memo in early 1946, and “We must have the best, the biggest and the most.”

Blume suggests that, perversely, the eyewitness accounts in “Hiroshima” could even have been “seen as an advertisement for the effectiveness of the weapon whose creation General Groves had spearheaded — and he had become increasingly concerned with receiving credit for his role in creating the war-winning weapon.” In other words, “Hiroshima” could be good PR for the general and the United States. Blume rightly describes this stance as “cynical,” and could also have described it as chillingly hypocritical.

After receiving the draft article, Groves called Shawn on 7 August 1946 and said he would approve the story. But he wanted to discuss “changing the article a little” in ways that “would not hurt the article” — words guaranteed to make any journalist’s blood run cold. But the negotiations were successful, and the article was run.

Blume shows what was lost, and what was left in or overlooked by General Groves. In the former category was a categorical statement by Hersey about Americans being wilfully kept in the dark about the exact height of the bomb’s detonation and the weight of uranium used. Gone was Hersey’s indignant line that “Trying to keep security on atomic fission is as fruitless as trying to keep a blanket of secrecy on the law of gravity.” Gone, too, was the fact that some parts of a comprehensive government report about the bomb’s effects were being kept secret.

What Groves let stand, though, was Hersey’s most disturbing revelation: in Blume’s words, that “the United States had unleashed destruction and suffering upon a largely civilian population on a scale unprecedented in human history and then tried to cover up the human cost of its new weapon.”

That the atomic bomb was not simply a more powerful bomb than any other but a qualitatively different kind of bomb was Hersey’s point — and Groves’s too. For Hersey, enabling people to see the bomb’s exact impact should prompt them to believe it should never be used again. For Groves, that should prompt readers to fear what their nation’s enemies might do and trust what their military leaders could, and would, do if necessary.

No atomic bomb has been dropped in a war since 1945. This might speak to the enduring power of “Hiroshima,” but nine countries have nuclear weapons, including North Korea and, of course, the United States, both of which have dangerously unstable and capricious leaders today. The Doomsday Clock, created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is set at one hundred seconds to midnight, the closest since the nuclear watchdog was set up in 1947.

As Albert Einstein reflected in 1949, “I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth — rocks.” With that in mind as we commemorate the anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb, read — or reread — “Hiroshima.” •

Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World
By Lesley Blume | Scribe | $35 | 288 pages

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Palmer’s key strength, and the reason she was so loved by her readers, was an ability to listen for the future in her fine critical writing. She relied on the early modernist impulse to strip to the essence and find hope, inviting her readers to think about how to take responsibility for the issues under discussion.

She wrote about the profound and the seemingly trivial, the newsworthy and the ancient, from Indigenous languages to comics, from Thomas Hardy to C.J. Dennis, and from Rebecca West to Katharine Susannah Prichard. Palmer’s significance in Australian letters has been framed by academics who emphasise her importance as a shaper of Australian literature and its canon, but she was a writer who also worked as a freelance journalist with an extremely broad range.

Janet Gertrude Higgins, born in 1885 and educated at the advanced Presbyterian Ladies’ College, was of the second generation of women in her family to attend the University of Melbourne — even before white women, let alone Indigenous women, had the vote. She was reared with high expectations of economic independence, steeped in Victoria’s colonial liberalism and feminism.

She wrote her first book as a child: The Story of My Life, Mingled with Others. While completing a Master of Arts in classics, she was influenced by the poet Bernard O’Dowd’s vision of an Australia transforming the sins of the old world. In 1910 she completed an International Diploma of Phonetics in Berlin, London and Paris, and then taught modern languages at her former school and wrote for the socialist press. In 1914 she married Vance Palmer, fellow writer and journalist, in London. With militarism stalking journalism and the labour press nearing collapse, they were forced to return to Victoria in 1915.

For nearly a decade living in the Dandenongs, east of Melbourne, Palmer edited the poetry magazine Birth, then wrote for the Herald, Stead’s Review, Spinner and the Bulletin. When the Palmers moved to Queensland, and with her daughters at school, Palmer got into her stride. From 1925 to 1935 she wrote three to four 1500-word articles each week — including a weekly column for the Illustrated Tasmanian News, often weekly pieces for the Courier and the Telegraph and unsigned Saturday leaders. She wrote regularly for the Bulletin’s Red Page, the Daily Mail and the Sunday Mail, and occasionally for the Argus, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, the London Times and the West Australian. She also wrote for many of the new commercial periodicals, including contributing a column to All About Books, and for the women’s press, most frequently for the Australian Woman’s Mirror.

The Bulletin editor thought hers was the best critical work he published. Firmin McKinnon, the editor of the Courier, asserted that he printed anything she wrote without looking at it. And she made use of her considerable freedom. Postcolonial in the broadest sense, and long before A.A. Phillips framed our “cultural cringe,” she challenged her “colonial provincial” readers about Australian philistinism and allegiance to anything British. She and her family had returned to Melbourne in late 1929.

A 1934 Argus series on the Dandenongs was published in book form. Regional writings on Green Island, the Sunshine Coast and parts of Victoria were a powerful strand of her work. Most of Palmer’s books originated in her journalism; Talking It Over was a selection of essays that were first published in various newspapers. Palmer also took on commissioned work. Her political biography of Henry Bournes Higgins was reviewed across the globe. Her editing of The Centenary Gift Book for Victoria’s centenary included a wonderfully inclusive, rigorous selection of Victorian women’s voices from across the political and class spectrum.

In 1936, caught up in the Spanish conflagration, Palmer published first-hand accounts for the Argus, then returned to Melbourne and wrote for and edited three booklets on the Spanish civil war, warning of the coming dangers. She was the Melbourne editor for Woman Today, had a column for the New Zealand journal Tomorrow, and she was involved increasingly in speaking out against fascism. During this period she also taught English to European refugees.

The later years of her life saw the consolidation of her journalism on Henry Handel Richardson into the first book-length study, and a co-authored biography of Bernard O’Dowd. In 1948 she wrote Fourteen Years: Extracts from a Private Journal 1925–1939, a story of a life among many of the foremost contemporary writers, artists and journalists, both national and international.

Through her ABC radio broadcasting, lecturing for the Commonwealth Literary Fund, and support for Australian writers and for literary journals such as Meanjin, she was a self-professed “public relations office” who saw her task as needing to “watch and listen effectively,” especially at the intersection of foreign languages and literature.

Palmer’s early analysis of housework was an important precursor to the women’s liberation movement, and many of the progressive values she espoused on the environment, multiculturalism and aesthetics sowed seeds for the future. “You are a wise — a very wise woman,” Henry Handel Richardson had told her. “Few have your critical ability.” For four decades, she and her husband were forerunners, preparing the ground for the cultural and social awakening of the 1970s and the halcyon days of publishing in Australia. ●

Nettie Palmer was this week inducted into the Melbourne Press Club’s Australian Media Hall of Fame. This is the text of Deborah Jordan’s profile accompanying the citation.

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It wasn’t that I’d gone into snooze mode over Christmas and New Year and needed a quick reboot. It had been years since I’d paid close attention to what was happening in magazine publishing. I’d taken my get-out-of-jail-free card and shot through to another life. It’s a common-enough story among journalists of my generation. In my case, I accepted a redundancy from the Bulletin in 2006, and in May 2009, after one last glorious assignment for Australian Geographic, I said I was going sailing. People say that all the time, but that’s what actually happened.

But the sailing was over and now, out of the blue, had come a commission that invited me back on my old turf to look at the woes of Bauer Media and more generally to consider the state of magazines. I doubt there has ever been a trickier time to delve into this topic but I told myself, in my Protestant way, that this would be good for me. It would force me to take a measure of myself.

I’d ride out a force eight gale any day over working in magazines again. I know my limits. But since that long summery lunch, when I engaged my friends Kathy Bail and Bobbi Mahlab to take me through a professional warm-up routine, I’ve made up a fair bit of ground, and covered some more. (It is humbling to realise how much of a habit thinking is, and how quickly you can lose it.)

What follows is far from complete, but I’ve drawn pleasure from reconstituting myself as a magazine writer. Pleasure is not incidental to this story, by the way. Magazines are a business and, under the normal rules of engagement, they need to keep turning a profit for their product to survive. Everyone knows how hard it is to get people to pay for information now. They will pay for pleasure, though, which is the most promising way for magazines to find an edge. Or it may be that the normal rules of engagement will not prevail. Who knows?

I had a few lucky breaks in journalism over the years, but the luckiest was the timing of my exit. By complete chance, I avoided the worst of the trauma that began to break over Australian Consolidated Press, or ACP, after the death of Kerry Packer in December 2005 and has not let up since.

Of course, I shouldn’t pretend that the end of my three-decade career came as a complete relief. My identity was tied up with being a journalist, and letting go wasn’t as painless as banking the redundancy payment. What helped most was getting out of town, a long way out, on a boat.

This isn’t the place for recounting tall tales about the sea. What’s relevant is how being a sea nomad for several years affected my knowledge and understanding of how magazines were facing down the perfect storm brewed by tech and telephony. By magazine, what I mean, at least to begin with, is the printed product with its distinctive heft and touch, the treat you look forward to taking on a plane or to the beach or curling up with on a couch after work.

I’d stopped writing for magazines, but I hadn’t stopped wanting to read them. On our first voyages to the tropics on our boat, my husband Alex (also a big reader) and I were on short rations in the magazine department. But in 2010 Apple launched its iPad and by early 2011, when we were preparing for our second and more ambitious voyage, magazine publishers were offering apps for tablets. We bought an iPad mainly so we could pick up our digital subscriptions to the Economist and the New Yorker while we were afloat.

In the euphoria of being back among print and paper, it took me a while to notice how much thinner the selection of magazines had become.

We spent nearly five years cruising and crossing oceans, and though we were frequently off the grid, we didn’t miss an issue of either magazine. Every time we found a free wi-fi connection, we’d download the backlog (and pick up emails, post our blog and so on). On remote atolls, where internet service is fragile, that process could take several hours and involve many beers, but so be it.

The publishers of these two magazines were among the first to adapt their print format to the tablet, and they did it well. I shifted gratefully into reading on a screen. Who doesn’t enjoy opening the New Yorker cartoons anywhere at any time, but especially after a four-week passage from Panama to the Marquesas?

In March 2016, we put the boat up for sale in New Zealand and came back to our house in Sydney. We didn’t bother downloading digital issues any longer, even though we now had cheap, fast and unlimited internet. One of the pleasures of having a fixed address was having magazines come through the letterbox again. Sometimes there’d be a long wait then a pile-up in the post, but I didn’t mind, and still don’t. I don’t read magazines for news anymore — who does? And there is still, for me at least, excitement in tearing open the wrapping… all that tactility.

In the euphoria of being back among print and paper, it took me a while to notice how much thinner the selection of magazines had become, especially in newsagencies that had always carried a decent range. Instead of aisles of titles, the magazines were pushed against a back wall. And what was there didn’t grab me as much. That was the strangest part.

If I scroll back to my working life, choosing a magazine had never been a problem. At an airport, for example, nine times out of ten I’d have reached for a glossy — Vanity Fair, American or British Vogue, or even Tatler in its heyday — and known it would hit the sweet spot. I’d get my fix.

But now, in the same situation, I floundered. More often than not, even having got down on my haunches to check the lowest shelves, I’d end up walking out empty-handed.

The first few failures to scratch my old magazine itch rattled me. From what I could see, magazines hadn’t changed that much. Must be me, I figured. My interests had drifted, of course. And I was old (well, getting older). Perhaps I was just over the glossies. It happens.

Of its time? The final edition of the Bulletin on sale in late January 2008. Shannon Morris/AAP Image

But it wasn’t just me. What I was seeing — or rather, not seeing — spoke to a profound disorientation of the culture. My own maladjustment probably didn’t help. Dazed and confused doesn’t begin to describe those early months living back in the city.

I wasn’t a complete Luddite. I’d managed to work out how to make regular blog posts even from the middle of the ocean. I was familiar, theoretically, with notions like disruption and streaming. But ironically the one word I’d failed to register the significance of was “mobility.”

The smartphone revolution had begun for real while I was preoccupied with peripherals like weather systems and sea state and how much anchor chain would keep a twenty-tonne boat from dragging in a deep Pacific anchorage. Meanwhile, back home and all over the world, people had begun carrying their lives in their pockets.

Global smartphone sales advanced fairly slowly from the launch of the iPhone in 2007 until 2009, but from 2010 sales began to pick up serious momentum, with the biggest surge between 2011 and 2013. In most advanced markets smartphone penetration is heading for between 80 and 90 per cent this year. Mobile internet use has doubled since 2011, and is expected to account for three-quarters of online use by 2019. “For most consumers and advertisers, the mobile internet is now the normal internet,” Jonathan Barnard, head of forecasting at media agency Zenith, has said.

That story is backed in Australia by the 2017 Sensis Social Media report, which found smartphone penetration above 80 per cent, and rising, while use of laptops (59 per cent), tablets (45 per cent) and desktop computers (51 per cent) was falling. Smartphones are by far the most common way that Australians access social media and, just to end this drum roll of statistics, eight out of ten Australians use social media.

It wasn’t just the internet that kneecapped traditional magazine businesses; it was the smartphone and Facebook. It’s a chicken-and-egg thing, but the huge uptake of smartphones triggered a stampede towards social media with its myriad communities. Until then, people had found and demarcated their tribes in all sorts of different ways, but magazines were an important one. People gravitated towards magazines as much to endorse their idea of themselves as for information and entertainment, as ex–British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman wrote on Business of Fashion. “You chose to be seen with Vogue instead of Cosmopolitan, with World of Interiors instead of House Beautiful, with Grazia rather than Hello. Or vice versa.” Now, through Facebook groups, Instagram, Twitter feeds and the like, there are easier and cheaper ways of achieving many of the ends that magazines once served. The consumer magazine market is “reaching an existential threshold” and publishers “face a crisis of purpose,” London-based media research group Enders Analysis warns.

Print is far from dead, but the analysts and consultants are having a field day. Data is cut every which way. There are summits and reports galore, mostly forecasting more pain ahead. You’ve heard it all before. The old business model is shot. The ads have gone elsewhere, and the expectation that everything you read online should be free is proving difficult to dislodge. Magazine circulation (where it’s still counted) and readership slide month by month, particularly among mass-market magazines that, as London-based media consultant Colin Morrison recently tweeted, “still shout the loudest, even in free fall.”

It all happened so quickly, didn’t it? One moment we were paying the extra for our airfreighted copies of Vanity Fair and the next we were mourning the passing of the golden age of magazines that Tina Brown documents in her Vanity Fair Diaries. When Condé Nast owner Si Newhouse and Playboy founder Hugh Hefner died within a week of each other last October, the Financial Times ran what was effectively an obituary for the glossy era. The balance of power between technology and media had “shifted irrevocably,” the FT pronounced, and the question was how long magazine publishers would survive the new era.

And so to the Bauer Media Group, Europe’s largest magazine publisher, which bought ACP in September 2012, and may now regret it ever set foot down under. May regret, I stress, because the Bauer family, which has managed the company for five generations, rarely makes statements about its business. The local boss of Bauer in Australia, Paul Dykzeul, doesn’t have a problem with that. “The Germans are intensely private, and so they should be,” he told me. “[The business] is theirs.”

Even when the news is good, the parent company releases results infrequently, with a minimum of detail. In September 2016 the company revealed that for the fiscal year 2015 it had posted a turnover of €2.3 billion (A$3.6 billion), the second-highest in its history. Classic (aka print) magazine sales showed a gentle downward trend over the previous two years, but in 2015 still made far and away the greatest contribution to the group’s turnover, with sales of €1.3 billion. The company is active in twenty countries and sales outside Germany that year accounted for two-thirds of total turnover. In Germany, Bauer published twenty-seven of the top one hundred magazine titles. “Print is the platform for our success,” publisher Yvonne Bauer said at the time. The group’s digital division accounted for €122 million of turnover and achieved 16.2 per cent growth. This, as far as I can establish, is the most recent public statement from Bauer Media Group on its financials.

For the sorrier story of its Australian business, I rely on reporting from the Sydney Morning Herald. In December the paper’s Colin Kruger got hold of the most recent financial accounts lodged by the local arm of Bauer Media for the financial years 2014 and 2015, and wrote that they showed reported losses of $116 million and liabilities exceeding current assets by $51.6 million. The local operation was kept afloat by a $30 million loan from its German parent, Kruger reported. Dykzeul responded by saying that the company was private, and did not comment on its financial business.

Upbeat: Bauer Media’s Australian head, Paul Dykzeul. Supplied image

In February, I got in touch with Colin Morrison, whose blog Flashes and Flames tracks the fortunes of global media companies. I recognised his name from the old days. Morrison once sat in the seat that Dykzeul now occupies. He ran ACP for Kerry Packer from 1995 to 1999 but he’s also been CEO of media companies owned by Hearst, Axel Springer, Future, EMAP and others. These days he holds no executive role, though he’s involved in various digital media and information companies. He sees the big picture.

Bauer, he tells me by email, is a rich and profitable company with a strong track record over the past thirty years in Germany, Eastern Europe, Britain and the United States. It is clearly shocked by its experience with the former ACP. “There is no doubt that Australia has been a very cold shower for a company which is simply not used to getting it so wrong,” writes Morrison. But he cautions against assuming the company is terminally lost down under. The Bauer family, he says, has built its global media business by being patient and long-term. Indeed, he says, if his old boss Kerry Packer were still alive, he wouldn’t be finding it easy either. But nor, he adds, would KP be feeling sorry for himself as some of his successors have been doing in the past twelve years. “He would be noisily in hot pursuit of a new long-term strategy without worrying too much about the short-term distractions of declining revenues. Salami-slicing costs and tweaking teams and business models is no substitute for a real plan. That’s the message for Bauer.”

The short history of how Bauer Media came to own ACP goes something like this. In 2007 James Packer sold his media interests, which included the Nine Network and the magazines, to the private-equity company CVC Asia Pacific for around $5.3 billion. A critical detail of the deal was that rights to the digital content of ACP titles would be held by Nine’s digital arm, Ninemsn. Later, when the print magazines were sold off separately, this became a significant problem for their new owner.

CVC’s investment in Nine Entertainment did not turn out well, not least because in 2008 the global financial crisis hit and advertising revenues tumbled across all media — but also, for those who could see it, because the smartphone had begun its rampage. CVC became desperate to off-load its media assets, and in September 2012 it found a buyer for ACP. Bauer Media paid approximately $500 million to enter the Australian and New Zealand markets.

At the time, some people thought they’d paid too much; others believed they’d picked up a bargain. Nobody can say, except the Bauers. There was certainly much trilling about the fact that this was a family-owned company — and “not somebody who is only intent on buying into the company to make money,” as Ita Buttrose told the Sydney Morning Herald.

But still, $500 million isn’t chickenfeed. ACP represented Bauer’s largest investment since late 2007 when it had paid more than £1.1 billion for EMAP’s radio and magazine businesses in Britain. It was also the first major roll of the dice for Yvonne Bauer who, barely twenty months earlier, had been anointed by her father Heinz (over her three sisters) as his successor. The chosen Ms Bauer, then in her mid-thirties, was jubilant about her company’s expansion, and a month after the ACP deal was clinched she launched a new slogan: WE THINK POPULAR. She came out to Australia in February 2013, gave unprecedented interviews in which she emphasised Bauer’s commitment to and love of print, and that’s where things started to get interesting.

Before Inside Story contacted me, I’d heard a little about Bauer Media from the few people I came across socially who were still involved with the company. “The Germans” (as everyone called them) weren’t easy to work for, they said. The years of private-equity ownership hadn’t been a walk in the park, but when Bauer came to town, everything changed overnight. There was a cultural mismatch between Hamburg and Sydney. Bauer had a different management style (the family is notorious for micromanagement) and didn’t understand how to sell the magazines they’d bought. Right from the start there had been pushback from the local staff, who fought for their own ideas. The Germans didn’t understand that either. They were used to their editors doing what they were told.

People weren’t happy, that much was obvious — though frankly, people were often not happy during my fourteen years of working at ACP, even when the place was buzzing and its “iconic” magazines were making money hand over fist. The culture was awash with anxiety. But things were now much grimmer. In every traditional media company people feared for their jobs, but at Bauer expressions of fear and pessimism were amplified.

The company couldn’t keep out of the news. Mumbrella, the media and marketing industry news site, has been tireless in its reporting of the “nightmare” at Park Street (as Bauer headquarters in Sydney is known). Fairfax columnists, some of them ex-Bauer themselves, have kept close tabs on the carnage too, building a dossier of the closure and sale of magazines, the sudden resignations of popular editors and unexpected departures of executives, the forming and dissolving of divisions and partnerships and, most diligently collected of all, the churn at the top. Five CEOs in the past six years. That’s a company in shock, as Morrison says.

And then there is the trouble with Rebel. Last year’s $4.5 million defamation win by actor Rebel Wilson was a huge story. On 8 March she announced she wanted Bauer Media to pay a further $1.3 million to cover her legal costs. (Bauer’s appeal against the amount of the damages is due to be heard in April in the Court of Appeal.)

It’s a humid and grey Tuesday afternoon when I go in to Park Street to meet Paul Dykzeul. The front foyer, which I remember as a thoroughfare for loudmouth sexy young women and big-swinging-dick types, is deserted. I wondered how many of those women have moved over to Surry Hills to work for Mia Freedman, who was the epitome of the company It Girl when she became the youngest-ever editor of Cosmopolitan in 1996. Freedman’s immensely popular digital women’s network Mamamia, which evolved out of a blog she began in 2004, is something Paul Dykzeul frankly envies. “It’s bloody brilliant,” he tells me. “I just wish I’d thought of it.” I believe him. Bauer’s own digital network, Now to Love, is a work in progress, to put it kindly.

Dykzeul (Mr Dykzeul to his German colleagues, who prefer formality in both dress and form of address) sees me in his office on the third floor. That’s the floor where Kerry Packer held court, and it still holds the Packer imprint. Dykzeul is another kind of man altogether, slightly built, nervy and — as I discover over the course of an hour’s conversation — astonishingly cheerful given the nature of the job he’s been handballed. (When I mention this to a mutual Kiwi friend, NZ Life & Leisure editor and publisher Kate Coughlan, she replies, “Paul is wonderfully upbeat like our prime minister, ‘relentlessly positive’ — maybe it’s in the water.”)

Dykzeul was running the New Zealand end of things for Bauer when he was called back to Sydney last June to replace Nick Chan, who had lasted only a year as chief executive. Chan had replaced David Goodchild, a Brit who didn’t ever make Sydney his home, and Goodchild had replaced Matt Stanton, who’d led the company through the first two tumultuous years of Bauer’s ownership and then left at the end of 2014 to work for Woolworths. Dykzeul, who is sixty-five, wasn’t busting to be Bauer’s next Australian CEO. He had settled back in Auckland after spending many years in Sydney, and was doing a good job for Bauer there, from several accounts. “I needed this like a hole in the head,” he says.

“I love the company,” says Paul Dykzeul. “I thought the challenge of trying to put the business back on an even keel, of plotting a path forward, was not too much for me to take on.”

Coughlan thinks the Australians are “bloody lucky to have him,” but Bauer’s internal appointment didn’t set the Sydney media alight. Mumbrella called it uninspired, which seems to have hurt. “You can call me anything but don’t call me dull,” says Dykzeul. He also takes umbrage at the persistent criticism that Bauer cops from other media. The attacks on its performance are “so dumb and ill-conceived that I shake my head in disbelief,” he tells me. He maintains that a lot of the damage to the company’s business was done during the CVC period. “People say Bauer have done it, which is an extraordinary leap, based on complete ignorance of the position.” Moreover, he says, if ever there were a time for media companies to stand together and be proud of what they do, it’s now. (A month later, when six major media companies announce they’ll support Bauer’s appeal over the amount of the Rebel Wilson payout, I find myself wondering if Dykzeul’s wounded feelings are mollified.)

So why did he come when the Bauers whistled? He’s loyal, that’s why. To the magazine industry in general but to ACP (and, because of the changing circumstances, to Bauer) in particular. He got his start with ACP in distribution and worked his way up through management ranks. At one point he worked for the competition (Murdoch Magazines, Pacific) but he came back to ACP. “I love the company,” he says. “I’m not talking about loving the Bauers… I thought the challenge of trying to put the business back on an even keel, of plotting a path forward, was not too much for me to take on.” He seems to search for the right way to say this. “I would rather that people thought of the company…” He pauses. “In some ways I wish it wasn’t called Bauer.”

But it is, and Morrison thinks that Dykzeul — “the cheerful, practical, no-nonsense guy” — might be the one the Bauers have been looking for all along, the one who will stabilise their business in Australia “as long as he is given the freedom to rationalise the business on the way to developing truly versatile media brands.”

Since his arrival, Dykzeul has slimmed down the executive team (“the business couldn’t afford the structure it had”) and not only closed four consumer titles, including Yours and Men’s Style, but also pulled the plug on Bauer’s custom-publishing business. Just recently he sold yet another of Bauer’s smaller titles, Australian Geographic. “We have tried that stuff, and we are terrible at it. Big companies cannot publish niche titles in my view.” (Bobbi Mahlab, one of my lunch companions and a custom publisher herself, offers the opinion that Bauer didn’t recognise where the jewels were — “the whole world has gone niche,” she says.)

What Bauer is hanging onto are mass-market titles, including Woman’s Day and the Australian Women’s Weekly which, in its heyday, was famously the most widely read magazine in the world on a per capita basis. With the Bulletin gone, the Weekly, founded in 1933, is the oldest magazine left in Australia.

Personally, I’m not heavily invested in whether the Weekly has a future. My mother didn’t read it, and nor do I, though I believe I missed a time when I might have. I’ve heard it said that Helen McCabe, who was editor-in-chief for six years from 2009, published some great covers. When she left suddenly in January 2016 she said all the right things, then resurfaced six months later at Nine Entertainment as head of lifestyle, and is now Nine’s digital content director. She’s preparing a new subscription site, Future Women, aimed at professionals and entrepreneurs — “a highly attractive female premium advertising demographic,” as she says. The content will be longer-form and “curated.” McCabe’s obviously still in the magazine business, but without the “legacy” millstone around her neck.

Bauer has appointed two new editors to the Weekly since McCabe’s departure, most recently Nicole Byers, who came to the magazine in July after seven years at the helm of OK!. She’s bagged the Prince Harry–Meghan Markle romance and the magazine has a discrete section for the royal engagement on its website. By chance, I have an old copy of the Weekly at home, dated 30 June 1971 (my artist daughter found it at a local market and was going to use it for collage). In that issue, the bride on the cover is American royalty, Richard Nixon’s elder daughter, Tricia. What knocks me for six is not how much has changed in the magazine in forty-seven years, but how much has stayed the same.

Page image from the National Library of Australia’s Newspaper Digitisation Program

Timeless: the Australian Women’s Weekly’s 31 June 1971 edition. Trove

When Dykzeul assures me that the Weekly is “still one of the great cornerstones of the publishing industry in Australia,” I am reminded of the swanky party that ACP threw for the 125th birthday of the Bulletin, where similar kinds of things were said about that “iconic” magazine. Three years later it was gone, closed by the accountants at CVC, who obviously did not see any future in the brand.

Even after an hour’s conversation with Dykzeul I’m not clear what he plans to do next with the Weekly. He tells me it has “years and years to go… and it is under no pressure.” He uses the word iconic. He also says the Weekly is “socially extremely important.”

I refrain from telling him that a man further down the line but closer to the market than him, a newsagency owner in Victoria called Mark Fletcher, has told me that the magazine looks “lost.” Fletcher also writes a very lively blog for newsagents, and is a software developer for newsagency businesses. He gets to see a lot of magazines, though like all newsagents he sells many fewer than he’d wish these days. He feels a strong residual loyalty to the Weekly, but from what he sees its audience has changed and left the magazine behind. “If I was influential at Bauer, I would say that the magazine needs to be exploded and dramatically altered for it to have a future beyond 2018.”

Several weeks later, Bauer Media launches a Female Future strategy that pledges, among other things, to publish ten million words about women across all its platforms before 2019. Dykzeul tells the breakfast audience of marketers and the like that Bauer Media’s “understanding of what women think, feel and want is unmatched across the publishing industry.” I remain underwhelmed. What is the meaning of all those words? (At least Dykzeul speaks plain English, unlike Melissa Overman, executive editor of News Corp’s freshly minted women’s site, the With Her in Mind Network, or WHIMN, who struggled to do so in an interview with Mumbrella: “Next year is really trying to understand the female digital consumer and what drives her to purchase products, or consume content, and then making sure we are innovating for that.”)

The Weekly’s star shines much less brightly than it once did, though independently audited circulation figures are no longer available. Bauer pulled out of the Audited Media Association of Australia in December 2016. News Corp and Pacific Magazines followed shortly after, arguing that circulation stats don’t recognise online and mobile readers or, as News Corp’s (then) chief digital officer Nicole Sheffield phrased it, no longer reflect the breadth or depth of the “brand reading audience.”

The latest magazine readership stats I can find were released on 9 February. They show print readership of the Australian Women’s Weekly down by 7.7 per cent in the year to December 2017, about the same decline as Better Homes & Gardens. Survey company Roy Morgan put a positive spin on the release — fifteen million Australians read magazines across print and online, it headlined. That’s a big figure, but it doesn’t speak as loudly as a figure published a week later: the first lot of Standard Media Index, or SMI, data for 2018 shows a 42.5 per cent decline in ad bookings for print magazines in the year from January 2017, with magazines’ digital properties also suffering a 40.5 per cent decline in the same period.

I read this after I’ve met with Dykzeul. That news was worse than the earlier SMI data I’d put to him, to which he had countered that the SMI doesn’t reflect the direct revenue from clients, small agencies and PR organisations that is now “a significant proportion of revenue.” When I ask exactly what the proportion is, I get no further response.

I don’t press Dykzeul unduly over Bauer’s stop–start progress into digital either. If Pacific wants to trumpet about outpacing Bauer Media’s digital performance “for the first time,” as it did just before Christmas, well, it’s still early days for everyone in the digital journey, as even Pacific admits.

Dykzeul says that if digital “migration” is not happening at Bauer as fast as he’d like then the same goes for everyone. “A lot of the big publishing companies are not that much more advanced than we are in this space.” He confirms that Bauer didn’t exit the deal that had locked up digital rights of magazine content within Ninemsn until June 2015 and that Pacific Magazines got out of a similar deal with Yahoo at about the same time.

None of this is very long ago. Time moves so fast in a digital world and I recall what Mahlab told me over lunch: Bauer didn’t move fast enough, but even the groups that did move early into digital publishing didn’t know how to make money out of it “because the revenue isn’t there.”

In a digital world, with its emphasis on content, Morrison explains to me, the large company has to work hard to build any kind of competitive edge. The economies of production, distribution, sales and marketing have all been undercut. “That’s why all over the world magazine companies are changing ownership.” For the large companies, he believes, the future is likely to be much leaner. They won’t own nearly as many titles, and they will concentrate on key brands that can become much more than magazines.

Brands, brands, brands. It’s how the future is configured. When Morrison talks of the “sheer untapped power” of the Weekly, he’s imagining how, based on its decades of selling millions of cookbooks, the Weekly might put its name to a range of high-margin products and services. He cites as a model for this kind of diversification the Weekly’s major competitor in the Australian market, Better Homes and Gardens. BHG is owned by Meredith Corporation, an Iowa-based publisher that about twenty-five years ago came to an agreement with Walmart to stock branded BHG products in its homewares and garden centres. Today Walmart stocks around 3000 BHG products in more than 4000 stores and online, according to Morrison; and on the back of this single monthly magazine, Meredith is second only to Disney in global licensing. And though you may not recognise its name or its other titles, Meredith has just bought Time Inc.

Kathy Bail, my other lunch companion, tells me she doesn’t think Bauer has an executive team that “knows how to maximise the power of [its] brands across different platforms.” Bail is usually very diplomatic, so I suspect she knows more than she’s letting on. These days she runs UNSW Press but she’s spent a lot more of her working life editing magazines. (I worked under her for seven years at the Bulletin.) She’s one of the smart ones who saw the future before it arrived at ACP. In 2006 she put up a blueprint to management for a different way forward for the Bulletin. She wanted to take it away from news and capitalise on its rich historical and literary associations (anybody think the New Yorker doesn’t do that?). Nobody wanted to know. She’s philosophical about that now. “Magazines do have eras, and sometimes time’s up.”

Brand conscious: Monocle magazine’s recent redesign. Magculture

And sometimes their time arrives. Recently I read about a magazine called The Party Next Door, which is presented like a twelve-inch vinyl record, with an inner sleeve and a gatefold outer sleeve. The Party Next Door is an extreme example of the kind of magazine I was hinting at when I said that perhaps there might be a time when the rules don’t apply. Mahlab had suggested as much to me. “Because there isn’t a commercial model, non-commercial models are springing up.”

The indies are hiding in plain view. You may have seen some of the bigger titles, like Apartamento or Kinfolk or Cereal or The Gentlewoman for sale in bookstores or cafes or art galleries or hipster clothing shops. I doubt you will have come across 032c, or Anxy, which won launch of the year at last year’s Stack awards, but you may well have seen some of the Australian indies that have made the Stack award shortlists: Dumbo Feather, The Lifted Brow, New Philosopher or Womankind (the last two out of the same pod in Hobart).

This is the countercultural magazine movement, a deliberate and slow form of magazine publishing that rejects and in some cases actively agitates against mainstream media values. The British magazine Delayed Gratification, for example, prides itself on being “last to breaking news.”

I can lose myself for hours in these beautiful products. They are carefully printed on delectable paper, and feature smart writing, stylish photography and a purist design ethic (always). Some appear monthly, but more are quarterly or even biannual. They shun news and celebrity and rely on social media to spread the word. They have websites, but the physical magazine is the thing they treasure. Some, like Womankind, deliberately don’t carry advertising. Others carry “partnered content” or “native advertising” (that’s a whole other subject).

Megan Le Masurier, a Sydney University media academic who has been researching indies for ten years, says she doesn’t think there is one indie magazine that survives on the cover price alone, though cover prices are comparatively high. Hardly any make enough money to pay their makers, who generally have day jobs. “Some of them are so idealistic it breaks your heart,” she says.

She is not being condescending. There is a chance that one of these small titles might become the next Frankie magazine, or thinking bigger, the next Dazed and Confused, the British fashion and culture magazine founded in 1991 by Jefferson Hack and the photographer Rankin. Dazed and Confused has not only survived the digital firestorm, but in its latest manifestation as Dazed Media has teamed up with Chinese luxury publisher Modern Media to form a new network, Modern Dazed. Hack is its CEO. Modern Dazed is the new home for Nowness, the video channel screening arts and culture that Hack founded in 2010 in conjunction with luxury brand conglomerate LVMH. You could never accuse Hack of being stuck in the past, and yet when he talks about the community-based culture of magazines, he sounds positively artsy.

Hack goes back to the ancient Greek root of the word, which means a container or storage unit, and from there surmises that a magazine can be in any format. “It can be a shop, a club, it can be in print, it can be people, or a city… As long as that container of knowledge is something that is accessible, and you’ve got that ability to step into it as an audience, then the format is valid in whatever shape it comes,” he told 1 Granary, a biannual European art-school magazine and blog.

If you’ve seen Monocle magazine, you’ll perhaps get what Hack is talking about. Monocle was launched in 2007 by Tyler Brûlé (who created Wallpaper magazine in 1996 and sold it to Time Inc. in 1997 for a small fortune). I wrote for Monocle briefly in 2008, and at the time its London editor explained that the magazine’s target readership was cashed-up globetrotting young professionals. I didn’t really get it or them, and I fully expected Monocle to be gone within a year or two. But Brûlé had identified his community, and he knew how they saw the world. As the best magazine editors always can, Bail reminds me.

That Monocle didn’t fail is an understatement. It comes out in print ten times a year and around it Brûlé has built a twenty-four-hour radio station, a website, a special-issues publishing division, events and retail businesses and cafes. In 2018, Monocle is expanding into mixed-use residential developments in Bangkok. In November, Brûlé sold a 12.5 per cent stake in the business for US$6 million to Thai property developer Sansiri. The plan is to build houses that reflect the urban architectural designs that appear in the magazine. Monocle is much more than a magazine, and while I baulk at calling it a global brand, others don’t.

Like his contemporary Hack, Brûlé seems to be able to remake magazines at will. They move remarkably fast for middle-aged men, as someone has commented. But they’re not media barons in the way we’ve come to know them, and you sense they won’t be passing the baton on generation after generation, as the Bauers have done. That time is up. ●

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency Limited’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

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At first glance, Draft No. 4 appears to be a fairly standard writing book — its chapter titles include “Structure,” “Editors & Publisher” and “Frame of Reference” — but it quickly becomes apparent that it is much more than a simple textbook. To a certain extent, it invites comparison with two of the most famous autobiography-cum-writing texts of recent years, Stephen King’s On Writing and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, but Draft No. 4 is more about McPhee the writer than McPhee the person. While reading it, in fact, I was reminded less of other writing books than I was of sitting in a dusty lecture theatre at a university listening to an experienced professor reflecting on his lifetime’s work. This image is rather apt, because as well as spending decades as a staff writer for magazines such as the New Yorker, Time and the Atlantic, McPhee is also a long-time writing professor at Princeton. Draft No. 4 is, put simply, a masterclass in long-form narrative journalism, with vignettes and techniques rubbing shoulders. It is also a collection of essays rather than a single book, each previously published as a standalone piece in the New Yorker.

Although the layout makes sense in terms of structuring the collection roughly around the writing process — from development to drafting to editing — things unfortunately get off to a slow start. The first and second essays, “Progression” and “Structure,” are by far the weakest of the book, peppered with barely comprehensible line diagrams representing the structures of pieces of writing, alongside excerpts from the finished products. These diagrams, and McPhee’s explanations, are often clunky — there is the sense that, like laws or sausages, there are some parts of articles that you don’t want to see getting made. The essay is also quite self-referential, so that a reader unfamiliar with the article being discussed may find it difficult to piece the structural diagrams together in context. The short excerpts, however, are the saving grace, simply because of the sheer beauty of the writing. I confess I hadn’t read any of McPhee’s work before, but partway through Draft No. 4 I went out and bought his book Looking for a Ship, solely on the basis of a one-hundred-word excerpt. His prose sings.

Thankfully, after “Structure,” McPhee seems to get back onto much more comfortable turf, and the book proceeds apace. He clearly has a passionate curiosity about people, and he is a deft observer. His third essay, “Editors & Publisher,” about his experience at the New Yorker, gives a lovely insight into the magazine in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, and paints especially dexterous portraits of its long-running editors, William Shawn and Robert Gottlieb. At times, McPhee’s exquisite turn of phrase just leaps off the page, as with this description of Shawn: “Mr Shawn was in the class of leaders who see no succession, like certain dictators, publishers, headmasters. Yet of course, as he advanced in years, the question of what would happen next grew around him like a rind.”

Other aspects of life at the New Yorker also weave their way through the book. “Checkpoints” is devoted to the magazine’s army of fact-checkers, whose sole job was (and still is) to verify all aspects of the writer’s assertions — sometimes spending weeks doing so. In the era of the twenty-four-hour news cycle and the rise of “fake news,” such a job seems both critically important and remarkably quaint; there is a sense that, for all the benefits that technology has brought in terms of media production and consumption, a level of quality has also been irrevocably lost. There have always been newspapers and magazines that subsist on scandal rather than substance, and whose standards are nowhere near the level of the New Yorker’s, but the insistence on quality — in terms of both writing and accuracy — as described by McPhee is now the exception rather than the rule.

Indeed, there is more than a hint of nostalgia to Draft No. 4, a sepia-tinted longing for a time when the business of writing was less frenetic and more straightforward. To be fair, it’s sometimes hard to judge how much of this is inherent in McPhee’s writing, and how much of it I’ve overlaid as a reader, based on my own experience. I began my writing career in the early 2000s; I’ve never used a typewriter (although, like McPhee, I do sometimes handwrite to combat writer’s block) and the internet is my natural home. The point at which I started writing seriously for publication also coincided with the decline of the traditional media and the subsequent drop in remuneration, especially for freelance writers. A career like McPhee’s, built predominantly on being paid by magazines to spend months or sometimes even years building stories into book-length manuscripts, seems utterly foreign to me, as does the army of fact-checkers and the editors who genuinely invest in writers’ careers.

It’s possible, however, that a reader of McPhee’s generation may not have quite the same sense of cognitive dissonance, and herein lies the book’s missed opportunity. McPhee is in a unique position in that he began his career during print’s golden years in the 1960s and has continued on through the digital revolution, all the while teaching up-and-coming writers, but in none of his essays does he reflect on the monumental changes to the industry and the effects these have had on writing as a profession. If this were indeed a face-to-face masterclass, someone would surely ask about what future he sees for long-form journalism, particularly as magazines and newspapers cut their budgets and online media fills the gap, but he doesn’t engage with this topic in the book. Consequently, there is a bit of a “back in my day” feeling to some of the essays, and a sense that, for the younger writer, aspirations of a similar career trajectory are all but impossible to fulfil.

That said, Draft No. 4 is also packed with wisdom on the more timeless aspects of the writing craft. The subject matter of the titular essay, which comes towards the end of the book, is hilariously familiar to anyone who has ever stared at a blank page or screen and willed words to fill it. There is immense reassurance in seeing a writer of McPhee’s calibre and experience assert, “If you lack confidence in setting one word after another and sense that you are stuck in a place from which you will never be set free, if you feel sure that you will never make it and were not cut out to do this, if your prose seems stillborn and you completely lack confidence, you must be a writer.”

It is this recurring good humour, as well as McPhee’s candour about the complexities and challenges of the writing process, that prevents Draft No. 4 from descending into pomposity. One enduring image for me, from the essay “Structure,” is his description of how he overcomes writer’s block: “Get away from the computer, lie down somewhere with a pencil and pad, and think it over… Sooner or later something comes to you. Without getting up, you roll over and scribble on the pad. Go on scribbling as long as the words develop.” Picturing McPhee lying on the floor scribbling out his articles makes me feel rather better about the fact that most of this review was composed while walking aimlessly around my neighbourhood.

Draft No. 4 is, at its heart, a charming book. McPhee’s authorial voice is witty and engaging, and his turn of phrase is sublime. His natural humility shines through, giving the reader the sense that, despite his achievements and status in the literary firmament, he is also an everyman. For the reader it is a lifting of the veil on an often-opaque process, and for the up-and-coming writer there are also plenty of practical gems regarding the craft, such as relying on the dictionary for synonyms rather than the thesaurus: “At best, thesauruses are mere rest stops in the search for the mot juste. Your destination is the dictionary.” McPhee also emphasises the importance of redrafting; indeed, the book’s title is a reference to how many drafts he believes it takes to develop a decent piece of writing. Unlike the popular culture image of the writer, who just sits down, bangs out a book and then sells it to great acclaim, McPhee notes that, “Actually, the essence of the process is revision. The adulating portrait of the perfect writer who never blots a line comes Express Mail from fairyland.”

This book is both a reflection on a long and distinguished career, and an homage to great writing and those who make it happen — not just writers themselves, but editors, fact-checkers, “grammarians” and, of course, subjects. If you aspire to great writing, or even if you just enjoy reading it, then you could do a lot worse than spend a few hours with John McPhee. •

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For nearly all of the 1930s Slessor edited Smith Weekly’s film pages under the title of “Through Smith’s Private Projector Conducted By Kenneth Slessor.” These film pages had a coverage of the cinema that was not matched in any national mass circulation Australian publication, then or since. Comprehensive reviews ran alongside news items, gossip, opinion and humorous pieces, light verse, and line drawings of film scenes, actors and industry personnel. Not only that: Slessor and Smith’s also waged campaigns through these pages – against the censor, for a better deal for country exhibitors and viewers, and for particular films and film-makers.

This is decidedly not the familiar Slessor, the man best known as Australia’s foremost poet between the two world wars. Poems like “Five Bells,” “Five Visions of Captain Cook” and “Beach Burial” could claim an importance in the Australian literature of any period. Long featured on the reading list for high schools, this verse provided for many of us our first encounter with Slessor. When he is not known for his poetry he is known for his contribution to Australian literary criticism and journalism. A visit to a good library will yield anthologised selections of his reportage, book reviews and war despatches, as well as his wartime diaries as official AIF correspondent during most of the second world war.

Yet his film criticism has simply dropped out of sight. His biographer, Geoffrey Dutton, skates over his role as chief film critic and “conductor” of Smith’s Weekly’s extensive cinema pages during the 1930s, instead focusing on the things that strike Dutton as important to Slessor’s formation as a poet and senior journalist. Slessor himself contributed to this omission. He didn’t consider any of his film reviews worthy of inclusion in his 1970 collection of prose writing, Bread and Wine, and by the 1950s he had moved away from writing about film. He stressed instead his contribution to serious poetry and journalism.

Slessor’s film criticism has fared no better with film historians. We didn’t anthologise or cite him in our readers, books or essays. His lengthy essays about the film-maker Charles Chauvel, his advocacy of the McDonagh sisters’ Two Minutes Silence and his ongoing disputes with the censor were mostly invisible to us. So thoroughly was Slessor made over into “poet and wartime journalist” we didn’t even think to look.

Estimations started to change when Philip Mead noted a feature of his poetry that, once observed, becomes blindingly obvious. His poetry is a form of cinematism – a performance of the cinema by other means. In his book Networked Language: Culture & History in Australian Poetry, Mead argued that Slessor’s major poems were best understood as his response to the cinema. He pointed to Slessor’s extraordinarily intense involvement with the cinema from the 1920s, and especially in the 1930s, when his film reviewing had become central to his journalistic activity.

Seen in this light, Slessor’s film reviewing and other film writing is not only important to understanding his poetry and poetics but is likewise a response to and writing with the cinema. Mead concluded that not only those interested in literature but also those interested in film needed to take Slessor seriously, not least so we could make sense of our film history and the presence of cinema-going in the cultural and social life of Australia in the 1930s.

Soon after reading Networked Language Huw Walmsley-Evans and I approached Philip Mead to collaborate on filling out Slessor’s contribution as a film critic. We approached the online cinema journal Screening the Past and they agreed that we should assemble a “dossier” on Slessor consisting of a jointly written overview essay situating and assessing Slessor’s film involvements and coupled with a modest selection of his film reviews. To give Inside Story readers a sense of Slessor’s film reviewing we have reproduced two of his reviews – appraisals of John Ford’s The Informer and the 1935 MGM action film China Seas – below.

Restoring the cinema to Slessor not only recasts estimations of his poetry. It also gets us to recognise that the notion of an Australian national cinema – which we film historians had seen as a late 1950s and 1960s phenomenon coming out of the conjunction of film societies, film festivals and dedicated film publications, mediated through journals and newspapers – was first articulated in Slessor’s advocacy for and response to the Australian cinema of the 1930s. It also gets us, at a time when we are experiencing our own digital transformations reshaping film, television and publishing, to appreciate how his film criticism and film writing were a creative response to the drastic media transformations that were taking place around him with the coming of sound. For Slessor writing in 1931, the significance of the coming of sound for the film world could “only be compared to a sort of French Revolution – the upsetting of accepted standards, and the enthronement of strange gods.” As he wrote in Smith’s Weekly in January 1931, he was in the midst of an “Elizabethan age of entertainment” in which “vague, golden isles in the mists are floating on the edges of our maps.”

Slessor saw himself as tracing and responding to the new kind of cinema, the sound cinema, that was coming into being before his eyes. His film criticism was of a new kind being improvised around the world as a response to the circumstance and possibilities of the sound cinema. It was one that accommodated an attention not just to performance and performers but also to film language, film genres and film directors. While this is the form film reviewing now takes, Slessor’s reviews carry the additional excitement of invention – of finding the right words and the appropriate response to the sound cinema as he conjured it in words for his readership.

You would probably expect a film person to say this. But we think Slessor’s major contribution to Australian letters and literary journalism lies, like Graham Greene’s, with his film reviews. They deserve a wider readership. This is a first step. •

Kenneth Slessor reviews “The Informer”

Smith’s Weekly, 24 August 1935

Whether or not the crude alcohol of The Informer is in danger of dismaying those cordial-loving and ticket-buying masses on whom, I am assured by experts, the picture industry is built, there can be no question about its native strength, its disturbing realism, and its authentic play of tragedy and humour. I can go further than this, and say that personally I think The Informer is the finest picture that I have so far seen in this year of abnormally good pictures.

With the exception of one passage at the end (and it is hard to understand how this can have been joined to the consummate perfection of the rest), there is literally nothing on which even the most citric critic could base depreciation. The story is by Liam O’Flaherty, who (as you will guess) is not an Armenian, and who offers no compromise to reality. It is a hard, harsh story, simple in outline, as with the outline of most tragedies. It moves on a predestined, inevitable course; from the motive of a moral crime through a reactive interval of mad jubilation to the only ending. The “Informer” is not a vicious or a criminal type; the tragedy is that he is a human being, moved by instincts and circumstances to a fate that is inexorable, if unforeseen. In this awful study of a tormented man, driven by starvation to betray his friend, it is difficult to say whether most credit should be paid to the book by O’Flaherty, the direction by John Ford, or the astonishing acting of Victor McLaglen.

Thanks to these three, the picture is something more than entertainment. It has the odour of raw life. You cough in the fog, feel physical pain, smell the reek of whisky and fish. The film, in fact, has the feeling of true poverty – intense, miserable, aching poverty – not the sentimental poverty of tradition. The dreadful days of Dublin in 1922 are explained, perhaps for the first time, as no newspaper could explain them.

The genius of the director begins to work without flourish or ornament in the very first reel. There is hardly a word of dialogue for the first ten minutes. But gesture and symbol build up the emotional scene on which the picture is founded. The smoking mist, the wind and fog, the flaring street-lights, all these serve to speak for the players. And here there is an exquisite touch of metaphor; for the police-bill of the “wanted” man, flying in the gale at the feet of the “Informer,” symbolises the shameful thought which keeps flying at his mind. The director is rich with these effects; as, for example, the exaggerated ticking of the police clock, whilst soldiers are on their way to kill their quarry. The shooting of Frankie McPhillip is almost shockingly realistic.

Victor McLaglen staggers all previous ideas of his ability by the strength of his performance as the “Informer.” The “Informer” is shown as a simple, childish, stupid giant, without even the cunning of the traitor, but somehow terrible or pathetic in his human stupidity. He is soaked in whisky, the drug that fogs his own remorse; he scatters fried fish and his blood-money with a child’s generosity; there are some terrific scenes of drunkenness. The interlude in the shebeen might have been painted by an Irish Hogarth. Here, too, the splendid acting of the minor players is at its best, particularly the performance of the loathsome hanger-on (played by Neil Fitzgerald), who crowns the drunken Croesus as “King” with true Irish hyperbole. From these scenes to the dramatic trial of Gypo is a coldly and terribly related process. It is hard to forget the struggles of this rat-brain, caught in a merciless trap.

And here, with the agonised confession, “I don’t know why I did it, I don’t know why,” the picture should have ended. That it trails on to a theatrical anti-climax, with the “Informer” dying before an altar, does not impair the power of the whole – though the ticket-buying masses whistled to keep their spirits up at the first night in Sydney. An astonishingly good picture this (so good that it is not damaged by the curtain), and one that belongs to the curious history of the screen of 1935. – K.S.

Kenneth Slessor reviews “China Seas”

Smith’s Weekly, 1 April 1936

After a steady examination of this picture, I have decided against taking a rest-cure in Chinese waters. Woy Woy will do me. What with the typhoons, hurricanes, pirates, torture, and sudden death which seem to be chucked in with a pleasure-cruise in China Seas, it must all be very galling and exasperating. The remarkable thing about the travellers in this film is that, having survived the typhoons and pirates, they don’t seem to care two hoots – no more than travellers on the Bellevue Hill tram-line care about such minor annoyances as a hold-up at the power-house.

As you can see, the film is highly-coloured; it is, in fact, full of vigorous rough-and-tumble, pungent humour, and sentimental moonlight. And the players enjoy themselves with a gusto which will transmit itself to you. The star-system has its drawbacks as well as its advantages. One of the principal defects is that a popular player appears in each new role trailing clouds of ancient glory behind him, so that it is hard to dissociate him from the last two parts, or last half-dozen parts, in which he has acted. It comes as a bit of a shock, certainly, to find, when all the passengers have marched up in the gangway here, that the boat holds in close proximity none less than our old friends, Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Wallace Beery, Lewis Stone, and C. Aubrey Smith. You feel like saying, as each remembered face comes down the deck, “Fancy meeting you.”

The film, as you will have gathered, belongs to the vehicular series. Sometimes this sort of story takes place on an express-train, sometimes in a passenger-aeroplane or a luxury-liner. There have been scores of pictures made on the same design, and of these, Shanghai Express bears a rough resemblance to China Seas, with the difference that a steam-boat is substituted for a railway-train. But, in this vehicular series, China Seas goes up very near the top. It moves so quickly, the excitement is so cleverly transferred from scene to scene, and the characters themselves have been so broadly, yet so deeply, painted, that for an hour or so you find yourself sailing with the pirates from Hong Kong.

The director (Tay Garnett) has packed the colour of Crosbie Garstin’s book into the picture with astonishing realism. As the boat slides away from Hong Kong you can almost smell the East; and smelling the East, as experienced travellers have remarked, is one of life’s major experiences. As usual, a wildly assorted section of humanity is flung together on board. There is Clark Gable, the skipper, who actually makes his first appearance with a three-days’ growth of whisker; there is Jean Harlow, the “China Doll,” a lady of that mythical type which enlivens the works of Robert C. Service; and Wallace Berry, as an adventurer, and C. Aubrey Smith, the perfect ship-owner, and Robert Benchley, as a mythical drunken novelist (no practising novelist can afford to be drunk); and Rosalind Russell as a snooty English beauty. All of them fit their frames, though the transformation of Beery from a genial boozer to a bloodthirsty villain, and back to a Heart of Gold again, is rather inconceivable. Clark Gable acts with his usual brisk neatness. He’s English here, but the transatlantic idiom creeps shyly through. Jean Harlow is excellent in spots, where her scratchy, rending, zinc-like voice suits the situations. But she has her limitations as a dramatic actress, and in some of the loudly-yelled emotional passages her voice becomes a little trying. Robert Benchley, better-known as a humourist, lurks humorously at the edge. He is drunk continuously (you can’t blame him, what with the typhoons and one thing and another), and makes a series of abrupt vertical exits down holds and shafts.

But these criticisms don’t destroy the fact that everybody in the picture plays with the richest unction. Take a team of first-class players, with a galloping good adventure-story, and let them enjoy themselves like this, and the result won’t be in doubt. You’ll enjoy China Seas. – K.S.

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AT THE Insomnia Club, upstairs in Nairobi’s T-Mall, Cindy Ogana scribbles on loose sheets of paper as she sips a Tusker beer and sways to the music filling the cavernous black-walled room. The Hot 96 FM presenter is writing a poem – about being friends with exes – to perform in front of the small but growing crowd of young men and women sipping drinks in the shadows and trying to pluck up the courage to take part in this session for wannabe poets, musicians and storytellers.

Nairobi’s monthly Open Mic is just one of the many branches of the literary tree that is Kenya’s Kwani Trust. Kwani (which means “So?” in Kiswahili, and often carries a question mark) describes itself as a literary network, publishing books and the Kwani? anthologies of fiction and non-fiction, organising literary festivals and offering training.

“You picked a bad day,” Ogana says. “Usually, we get around 150 people.” Open Mic’s usual inner-city venue is being renovated. But it turns out not to be a bad day at all; instead, it’s an inspiring, laughter-laced night that opens a window into a boundary-breaking literary scene that’s redefining the city’s creative process – just as the bulldozers are redefining the face of Nairobi and had turned my journey to the Open Mic’s temporary venue into a ninety-minute bump-fest on potholed back roads.

Later than usual (again, that traffic), Ogana, a slight woman in skinny jeans and a turquoise sweater, goes to the microphone and uses apparently irrepressible energy to fire up the brave souls who have journeyed here.

Then it’s time for the first performer: a tiny woman in a black abaya and veil who hesitantly reads a poem about immersing oneself in life. The audience is appreciative as, one by one, young men and women walk self-consciously to the microphone and unfold little pieces of paper or – in one of Africa’s most tech-friendly cities – read their work from their phones.

Kwani Trust’s managing editor Billy Kahora – a writer and editor with a passionate, questioning personality – had explained the point of the Open Mic sessions to me a few days earlier, as we sat in the garden outside the trust’s pale-orange, two-storey headquarters in the Riverside neighbourhood. It was hot, and the garden rang with birdsong and the sound of workers sawing and hacking nearby.

“You have all these literary people who don’t necessarily write but do perform,” says Kahora. “What has happened with Open Mic is that it has taken on a life of its own. You always get new talent coming in and coming out. And it really helps our brand because it tells us how people are thinking and operating.”

Kwani Trust was set up in 2003 by a group of frustrated writers, including Binyavanga Wainaina, perhaps Kenya’s best-known contemporary writer. Wainaina won the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing for his story “Discovering Home” and wrote the seminal (and satirical) Granta essay, “How to Write about Africa.” His acclaimed memoir, One Day I Will Write about This Place, was published late last year.

As director of the Chinua Achebe Centre at New York’s Bard College – one of Kwani Trust’s partners – Wainaina has been dividing his time between Kenya and the United States. While he’s no longer involved in the day-to-day running of Kwani, he is still on the board and actively involved in deciding editorial direction.

Among the other people who brought the project to life are Parselelo Kantai, a Kenyan writer and investigative journalist, film-maker Wanjiru Kinyanjui, and Tom Maliti, a journalist and the chair of Kwani Trust’s board. As Maliti wrote on Kwani’s website, “It began with a question: Are Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Meja Mwangi” – Kenya’s best-known older novelists – “the only writers Kenyan publishers are interested in? Why aren’t new writers being published in Kenya?”

Since its birth in 2003, Kwani has published thirty new writers, including Caine Prize winners like Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor and runners-up like Kahora, whose short story “Treadmill Love” was highly commended by the judges in 2007. It also publishes the Kwanini series of pocket-sized books of fiction.

Kahora is thoughtful and precise as he explains how, after the effervescence of the postcolonial period with writers like Ngugi, there was a feeling that literary creativity had dried up somewhat in the 1980s and 1990s. Kwani sought to “reinstitutionalise” the creative process and legitimise it, he says. But in some ways, the very existence of Kwani is its ultimate strength in a country where traditional publishing houses tend to focus on textbooks, and in a world where the literary canon has long been dominated by the West.

Kahora, who moves constantly during the interview, stretching his legs, leaning forward to make a point, rummaging for a banana in a brown paper bag, describes his own need for role models when he was growing up in Nairobi. “When I was in my teens, in the nineties, it just helped to have Ngugi there, but for someone starting out now, seeing material that’s contemporary really helps. I remember my own hunger for literature… that came from my place.”

He was especially eager for urban tales that would reflect his own experience in Nairobi, where he went to the same high school as Wainaina, who was a few years ahead of him. He started reading early, and apart from Heinemann’s famous African Writers Series, with its distinctive orange covers, most of his recreational reading was from the West: Enid Blyton, the Hardy Boys, the Three Investigators, and later James Hadley Chase. In his early teens, he wanted works that resonated with his life. He turned to Ngugi, who had attracted an international readership, and Meja Mwangi, a prolific popular writer from the 1970s.

“People talk about A Grain of Wheat as Ngugi’s greatest work, but for me it was Petals of Blood (when I was younger), simply because it had scenes in Nairobi where I had grown up, like Jeevanjee Gardens… Urban Africa was a big, big thing, where you are looking for things that you immediately recognise.”

The Kwani? anthologies give these themes a home, and offer new writers a chance to add to the canon. Kahora goes through the stack of Kwani? books on the wooden table. The first two volumes were just about providing a space for new writers. Kwani? 3 tackled Sheng, the increasingly popular Swahili–English lingua franca of young Kenyans. The next issue dealt with issues of ethnicity and, in particular, informal sentiments about the perceived ruling tribe, the Kikuyu, which has long dominated politics in Kenya. And then came the 2007 election.

“We wanted a very personalised, character-driven account of the elections and then the violence happened. We said we are going to publish all the stuff that we don’t think will come out. And we weren’t interested in any agendas or unifying the place. We just wanted all the diverse voices, all these people saying different things,” Kahora says. The anthology that resulted, Kwani? 5, gathered a powerful collection of testimonies about the violence.

The latest – based around the theme “The Kenya I Live In” – includes the winning entries from a short story competition for writers born after 1978, and grew almost organically out of Kwani? 5. After it was published, says Kahora, the editors realised that the people featured were all from their generation (he is in his late thirties). Kwani Trust wanted to hear from younger Kenyans, and issued an invitation that was taken up energetically.

“What was interesting was what people sent. People don’t care that you have all these rules… People sent rants, people sent letters, which in itself said something about that demographic.”

Does he think people just needed someone to listen? “Yes. That kind of covers what Kwani is trying to do, open up a space… using narrative as an expression.”

Next, Kwani will launch a continent-wide competition for novel-length manuscripts. Another project involves digitising all its existing content. “We already have the offline hierarchies and structures and we’ve been building them over time. How do we transfer them?” If somebody else gets in first, says Kahora, it could fatally undercut Kwani’s audience.

Meanwhile, the very material at the base of the creative process is also evolving, in Nairobi as elsewhere, with traditional literary output diffusing into other media, like music, spoken word and animation.

Kahora says it is hard to evaluate the strength of the Kenyan literary scene now, and perhaps even the description is a misnomer, as the Open Mic session showed. In today’s Kenya, it is about so much more than the traditional published word. Creativity seemed to disappear in the eighties and nineties, but it was always ready to bubble up again.

“I always say that the creativity didn’t end. The question is, where did it end up?” Kahora says, describing a move by writers to comics, newspapers and then to smaller publishers in the eighties and nineties – what he calls a “deconstruction.” He says the nineties also saw the emergence of a generation that uses new, non-literary outlets and forms of expression, like FM radio stations, music and Sheng.

KEVIN Man-Njoro exemplifies this new generation. His real name is Kevin Waithaka and by day he is a mechanic. As well as being a spoken word artist outside work hours, he is also a musician: his music is what MC Ogana is swaying to as she writes her poem.

Man-Njoro is the night’s featured act. “You are the fruit of the season because we think you are dope,” Cindy Ogana concludes, and as the crowd claps the lanky man in the white T-shirt and jeans walks casually up to the microphone. His voice is low, at first. In fact, he will display multiple personalities during his act, first rapping spontaneously with his friend Checkmate Mido, a bespectacled twenty-two-year-old accountant and actor with corn-rowed hair.

“I want you to close your eyes. I want you to go to a Nairobi street. Are you with me? Let’s go,” Man-Njoro says, as Checkmate begins to deliver a beat over which the twenty-three-year-old raps about street life in Nairobi. The two men are slick — they used to do this on Nairobi street corners. “People loved us; they forgot to go home,” Checkmate says.

Man-Njoro credits Kwani for giving artists a space. Kwani and other similar platforms “improve art,” he says. “Sometimes you come to see not just what to do, but what not to do.” Weslie Onsando, who also performed a poem, agrees that Kwani has filled a gap. “Most Kenyan publishing houses publish textbooks and educational books. The fact that there is a publisher that will publish a literary book can show people that such work exists in Kenya,” she says.

But the Open Mic evening isn’t all about love, breaking up or street life. Several performers addressed the political–tribal violence that exploded in 2007–08. It’s a hot topic again with a national election likely to be held at the end of this year or early in 2013.

Kahora, who edited a book of shocking photographs of the post-election violence, Kenya Burning, says these issues need to be discussed openly. Successive administrations have exploited tribal divisions to gain power, and the tensions came to a head in 2007. “Kwani is specifically interested in mapping out these conversations and differences in the public space called literature and narrative.”

A rejection of the status quo is gaining traction among young Kenyans disgusted with years of corrupt rule by politicians of advanced years. A giant mural, which appeared one February morning in the heart of Nairobi’s business district, put public frustration into sharp focus. It shows an MP as a vulture, sitting on a chair, his feet grinding into a woman’s head. “MPs screwing Kenyans since 1963,” reads the tagline, and on one side of the main picture the major corruption scandals of the last four decades are listed. It’s a long list.

The mural is a gutsy way of reaching out. Kahora says that one of the challenges for Kenyan creatives is finding an original voice; in a way, this is what Man-Njoro and Checkmate are doing with their rapping and spoken word characters. “A lot of writers are still rebooting because they have all this literary baggage in their heads from the West.”

Kahora, who is writing a novel about a Kenyan family’s collapse during the socioeconomic upheaval of the nineties, says there is a penchant for realism, because there is an absence of literary history that references Kenyan writers’ experiences. “It’s not part of the narrative. So you start from that. But now you find that the younger writers, like some of the stuff in Kwani? 6… have elements of fantasy and hyperrealism.”

Kwani? 7 will deal with the diaspora, a theme close to Kahora’s heart. Like Wainaina, he has lived for an extended period in South Africa — in his case, for seven years, partly studying at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. “There is no way I would have been who I am or where I am,” he says, “if I didn’t go to South Africa and see how society actually decides to become serious about what I’m talking about: organic, creative and cultural expression.”

“The critical mass and the creative core of the Kwani original writers have had defining diaspora moments. I lived in the diaspora, Binyavanga lived in the diaspora, so it was long overdue.”

Whatever the literary ambitions of Kwani, the prosaic reality is that it needs to sell books. Although it hasn’t been doing too badly, Kahora knows a lot more needs to be done — in both marketing and distribution. They have built a collection of titles. The next step is to extend the market, but in a country with a limited distribution network, there are no easy answers.

Kahora says that what they publish sells quickly. Although Kenya Burning sells for 1500 shillings (A$17) — a princely sum for the majority of Nairobi’s residents — it has sold over 3000 copies. “For this market, that’s good,” Kahora says. “We are growing but we could do much better. We want to be doing 5000 to 10,000 and it’s doable, but we need to become much stronger in our marketing.”

Kevin Man-Njoro is no Ivory Tower artist either. He wants his work out there — in all its forms. He is thrilled that his spoken word performances have won play for his music on Hot 96 FM. He dreams of making a living from his art — he wants to build a studio — but in acquisitive Nairobi, this is not just about money. “My dream is not to make money from my art. I make money now for my art,” he says. •

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