Cirrus@Austlit

‘The colonial Australian journals provided venues for the establishment of often tightly-knit literary networks, featuring groups of writers who worked (and often socialised) together and who would write about each other, reviewing and promoting each other’s books. Some of the longer-lasting journals would also try to sustain the literary careers of writers in their ‘circle’, offering regular payment for contributions; the serialisation of a novel, for example, or a series of articles on a particular topic. The writers associated with a journal helped to make it both distinctive and recognisable in terms of style, content and values. And they also determined what counted (and what didn’t) in the ongoing project of establishing an appropriate literary canon. At one level, journals are all about literary ephemera, the kind of writing that lasts only a moment and then disappears. But at another level, they work hard to establish longer-term views of literary production, memorialising certain writers and speculating about their legacies. The colonial journals enabled writers to talk candidly about their influences, their aspirations, their fortunes and their misfortunes. As we look back on them now, we can say that the journal played a vital and constitutive role in structuring an Australian literary field: investing in it, evaluating it, gathering it together and then distributing it across the colonies and beyond.’ (Authors introduction : 111)