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3 weeks ago
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Is it worthwhile working in publishing anymore? Recent events would seem to suggest not. Writers’ festivals are forcing their guest speakers to sign “codes of conduct” banning them from speaking about the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Government bodies are opening the floodgates for AI models to train themselves on writers’ works. Neo-Nazis are pouring into the streets and assaulting activists. Every day, the pernicious forces of capital find new ways to align themselves against the interests of creative people, of working people. Every day, another person wishing to carve out a life, or at least a consistent hobby, for themselves in the arts is met with the crushing reminder that there are people, completely arbitrary people who really should have no stake whatsoever in these matters, who can and will control their means of creative production. Working in publishing now, for the majority of workers who aren’t lucky enough to control their own output, has nothing to do with publishing good writing, and everything to do with following orders.
Why open on such a bleak note? Recently, in case you hadn’t heard, Meanjin — Australia’s second-oldest literary journal at a spritely eighty-five years of age, of which I was fortunate enough to be the deputy editor — was shut down. Both the editor, Esther Anatolitis, and myself were made redundant. Curtains. Goodbye to all that. I don’t wish to bemoan the loss of my job and how it affects my own life (the answer is “considerably”, if you cared) but instead to try and reckon with what this means for the ever-withering Australian publishing landscape. It’s not good. We as the editorial staff were not involved in this decision, and it was a decision that will cause irreparable damage to the opportunities afforded to writers, especially emerging writers, in Australia.
If you take a look at the paltry statement offered by Melbourne University Publishing, “custodians” of Meanjin since 2008, you’ll see that the magazine was no longer “financially viable”. However, what we are consistently seeing in the public response to the closure is that nobody believes this. “Purely financial reasons” was all we at Meanjin were ever told, and it would be all the public was ever told. Legally I can’t do much to correct that narrative, but I can’t help but feel there were political reasons for this decision that far outweighed the importance of some figures on a profit and loss statement.
I needn’t rehash here the accusations of hypocrisy, articulated so well by others, that have been levelled toward the university regarding the disparities between what they do and don’t consider worth spending money on. But it’s worth reiterating that entrusting a literary journal — especially one such as Meanjin with a long-standing record of political integrity and radicalism, —to the custodianship of an institution like the University of Melbourne was bound not to last.
I had started to feel over the last few months that the ever-watchful eye of the university panopticon was sooner or later going to cast its gaze on our publishing activities, due to the swiftness and force with which the university dealt with its students and staff protesting the institution’s complicity in Palestinian genocide. Meanjin was a subsidiary of Melbourne University Publishing, and as such a product of the university. Many have sensibly connected these dots, surmising that the university, and by extension MUP, would surely not have taken kindly to having such material on Palestine and broader questions of First Nations sovereignty published in its name. What has been suggested strongly and consistently by the public outcry to this decision is that Meanjin had fallen afoul of the kinds of Zionist lobby groups that hounded the Bendigo Writers Festival, and our comrades at Overland, and every other publication or organisation that dared to express tangible support for the Palestinian people over the last two years (MUP’s chair strenuously denied such suspicions in a comment to the Guardian).
I don’t blame anyone for coming to this conclusion. The environment in which writers are now creating work has been shaped by some of the most insufferable, cowardly and punitive reactionaries one can imagine, and it pains me to say that, in a way, what they’re doing is working. Viable opportunities for writers and artists are being rescinded left, right and centre, and the kind of work being published is being done so under these auspices, which negatively affects the strength of that work and, thereby, the health of our literary culture. None of us gains anything if we keep bowing to such pressure, though.
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In a series of FAQs since published on Meanjin’s website, in which MUP seem to be reckoning for the first time with the litany of headaches they have now brought upon themselves, it is said that the website will remain active, and all the work on there will be unpaywalled and “freely accessible to all”. It’s a shame that everything in that venerable archive will now be open to being harvested by one of the countless LLMs that trawl the internet 24/7 to “train” themselves (ie steal everyone’s work). An archive of this size and cultural impact necessitates a duty of care, a concerted effort to safeguard its longevity. I don’t believe such a duty has been, or will be, exercised here.
Further, work we had commissioned for the coming years “will be published here on the Meanjin website and promoted on Meanjin’s social media platforms”. Publishing a piece of writing is far more than uploading it to a website — it requires situating that piece in a cultural context, allowing the voice of the work to speak into a continuum, rather than a vacuum. There are simply too many factors to mention here that were not considered at all, and too many writers whose work is being insulted.
Australia’s literary culture depends for its life on its journals. Literary journals are not just clearing houses for pithy snatches of commentary and readable middlebrow fiction — they’re incubators for successive generations of literary talent. One need only consider how many published novelists in this country have secured those deals on the back of work published in journals, and how many truly exciting risks have been taken in the pages of those journals throughout history.
A journal is a polyphony, a bulwark, the reassurance of the integrity of our intellectual and cultural life. Meanjin’s founding editor Clem Christesen argued in his first editorial that “it would be a grave error to suppose the nation can drop its mental life, its intellectual and aesthetic activities” in the face of encroaching fascism:
Literature and art, poetry and drama do not spring into being at the word of command. Their life is a continuous process growing within itself, and its suppression is death.
Meanjin was always intended to be a publication that mounted considerable resistance to fascist threat. For nearly a century, it succeeded. I’m sorry to say though, Clem, that history vindicated you on that last point.
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So, what now? The public outcry at this decision has been overwhelming. Philanthropic offers have been many, and generous. At risk of sounding cynical, however, I don’t think reviving Meanjin is the conversation we should be having. I think, first and foremost, the name should be repatriated to the Yagarabul people from whom it was unceremoniously taken. As the publishers of Dhoombak Goobgoowana, a series of books on the relationship between First Nations people and the University of Melbourne in which “the University no longer wishes to look away” from “the stain of the past”, it would be ironic and rather egregious for that university to make any specious claims of ownership over a Yagarabul word.
Furthermore, the space left by Meanjin should not be mourned (too much), but filled. It would be a tall order to build a journal up to the legacy it took Meanjin nearly a century to secure, yes, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t now easier than ever to publish.
Instead of sitting around bemoaning the absence of good writing, we should be producing more of it. Get work out there in whatever form you can. Start a blog. Serialise a novel on your Instagram story like it’s the nineteenth century again. Print a zine out at Officeworks and drop it in peoples’ mailboxes. The possibilities are endless, so long as we remember to disentangle the idea of literary publications from institutions. If we’ve learned anything from the recent slew of Zionist attacks on culture in Australia, it’s that institutions — mainly universities — are often a poisoned chalice for writers and editors.
I know firsthand that there is an insatiable appetite for good writing in this country (don’t let a university tell you otherwise), but sating it depends on us, not on the institutions that happen to fund and distribute us. It’s all too easy to be cowed by fascists, to run away with our tails between our legs and say “well, we tried our best, but the bastards got us”. It is imperative that we don’t let ourselves be cowed. Write, keep writing, and put it out into the world in whatever way you can. Take up space, make it impossible for people to ignore you. Do what Clem did and look fascism right in the eye, before spitting in it. What else is there to do?
