Australian Letters and postwar modernity.(Essay)

AUSTRALIAN Letters, 'a quarterly review of writing and criticism', was launched in Adelaide in 1957. Max Harris, co-owner of the Mary Martin Bookshop, poet Geoffrey Dutton and Bryn Davies (both members of the English Department at Adelaide University) were its initial editors. In 1963, on Davies's resignation, Rosemary Wighton joined the team, the only woman involved in editing a literary magazine in Australia at that time.

This journal was one of an extraordinary range of literary enterprises undertaken by Harris and Dutton, who together played a major role in establishing a robust literary culture in postwar Australia. They had been undergraduates together at Adelaide University and co-editors (along with 'Sam' Kerr and Paul Pfeiffer) of Angry Penguins in its first incarnation as a university Arts Association journal, published from 1940 to 1942 (Miles 13). Passionate about modernist poetry, each published his first book while in his early 20s. Dutton, after serving in the RAAF during the war, took a BA at Oxford, and then travelled extensively in Europe, making a wide variety of literary contacts, before returning to Adelaide in 1951. In 1956 he took up a lectureship in the English Department at Adelaide University. Harris, as is well known, had taken Angry Penguins to Melbourne where it was published by the arts patron John Reed and where, in 1944, it became the unfortunate target of the Ern Malley hoax. Although his co-editors at the time were Reed and Sidney Nolan, Harris bore the brunt of this scandal when he was prosecuted, in Adelaide, for publishing obscene writing. By the mid-1950s he was running the Mary Martin Bookshop and publishing the satirical monthly, Mary's Own Paper, and occasional issues of Ern Malley's Journal (the name of which signalled his refusal to be silenced by the hoax). (1)

The Harris-Dutton partnership turned their hands to numerous successful literary enterprises. They not only published Australian Letters for 11 years from 1957 to 1968, but during this time they also published an annual collection, Verse in Australia. In 1961, with Brian Stonier, they set up Penguin Australia. After four years they were fed up with the British firm's half-hearted attitude to some of their most exciting commissioned works--Robin Boyd's The Australian Ugliness and Donald Home's The Lucky Country (Dutton, Out in the Open 294-95). Nothing daunted, they established Sun Books, bringing out in paperback a number of important new non-fiction titles and reprints of novels as diverse and important as Christina Stead's The Salzburg Tales, Henry Handel Richardson's Maurice Guest and Elizabeth Harrower's The Long Prospect. (2) In 1961, as well, with Rosemary Wighton they established the Australian Book Review, which ran in this first series until 1973.

Dutton was a founding member of the Writers Week Committee for the first Adelaide Festival of Arts in 1960. He also played an important role in the growth in university teaching of Australian literature, through his work as editor of affordable paperback collections. After his resignation from the English Department in 1962 he was responsible for the Australian Writers and Their Work series for Oxford University Press (1962-66), the 1964 reference work The Literature of Australia (Penguin) and the 1966 Fontana/Collins anthology Modern Australian Writing. As for Max Harris, during the 1960s, in addition to his involvement with Australian Letters, Australian Book Review and other publishing, he began a thirty-year career as a journalist, writing columns for newspapers and periodicals including the Australian, Adelaide's Sunday Mail and the Bulletin. He also chaired 'The Critics' panel on ABC television from 1962 to 1972 (Ward 6).

When Australian Letters was launched it joined a flourishing population of literary magazines that included Meanjin, Southerly, Overland, Quadrant and Westerly. Although it did not align itself along the Left-Right continuum of Cold War cultural politics, it maintained good enough relations with both the Left-wing journals, Meanjin and Overland, to initiate an offer of joint subscriptions--all three magazines for four pounds a year (advertisement, AL 3.1, July 1960). In practice Australian Letters was closest to Meanjin in outlook, being similarly committed to openness and eclecticism. Indeed, it came under attack from the Right for its lack of tendentiousness. In 1959 the editors defended its non-aligned position against accusations from 'certain Catholic right-wing intellectuals' (no doubt James McAuley, then editor of Quadrant) that they were merely 'moral dilettantes': 'We are trying to give expression to the general cultural vitality and variety of Australian life,' they wrote, 'without imposing any political belief, religious bigotry or clique ambitiousness of our own' (Editorial, AL 2.1, June 1959).

Australian Letters was proud of its financial as well as its political and intellectual independence. It claimed to be 'a freak in Australian literary publishing - a quarterly which pays its own way' (Editorial, AL 3.1, July 1960). Its business was conducted from the Mary Martin Bookshop and there is no evidence that the University of Adelaide ever supported it, as the University of Western Australia supported Westerly and the University of Melbourne gave house room to Meanjin. Nor was it subsidised by political or professional associations, as Overland, Quadrant and Southerly were. It did begin to receive a small Commonwealth Literary Fund grant of 250 pounds from 1961, which it vowed to spend ...