An interview with Peter Coleman.(Devine)(Interview)

IN OCTOBER this urbane, sceptical, implacably independent journal celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of its first issue. This is some achievement for a shoestring operation, meanly treated by the Australia Council, which has generously funded other "little" magazines. Quadrant has always been able to pay its contributors, frugally and only just, but rarely its editor. It has also been adept at making and retaining enemies, some powerful.

The magazine began as the offspring of the Australian branch of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (a Committee here rather than a Congress), an international organisation of intellectuals founded in 1950 and committed to fighting communism in the war of ideas--financed, as it later turned out, by the CIA. Quadrant's fuse was lit by its founding publisher, Richard Krygier, a resolute and indefatigable Polish immigrant bookseller, who continued to guide it until his death in 1986.

Now published by Quadrant Publishing Co Ltd, a private non-profit company whose sole activity is publishing Quadrant, the magazine has undergone considerable evolutionary change in its half-century, much of it under the baton of its longest-serving editor, Peter Coleman.

When were you editor?

Peter Coleman: From early 1967 until the beginning of 1990, but there were about three or four years when I was on leave.

On leave? Why were you on leave?

Well, I got elected to the New South Wales parliament, which was okay, but then became leader of the Liberal opposition.