'In a 1987 interview with Kevin Brophy and Nolan Tyrrell for Going Down Swinging, Bruce Pascoe explained his reason for starting Australian Short Stories magazine five years earlier:
As a writer of short stories I was disappointed with what was happening to my stories when they were published. Apart from the few stories I got published in The Sun and The Sydney Sun-Herald, I wasn’t getting any readers… I started Australian Short Stories because I was offended by the rates of pay, offended by the lack of readership, and felt that the intelligence of the readership was still there. (Pascoe quoted in Going Down Swinging 1987)
'For short story writers living in Australia in 2018, the disappointing situation Pascoe describes is more or less unrecognisable – newspapers accepting submissions for short fiction, indeed!' (Introduction)