In 1981, Scripsi replaced the poetry magazine Compass which had been produced by the English Department of the University of Melbourne for many years. The editors, Peter Craven and Michael Heyward, aimed to develop a 'product which will genuinely reflect Australian writing, while being critically aware of the best overseas work'. Scripsi was produced in the English Department until 1986 when the Scripsi office moved to Ormond College at the University of Melbourne.
Scripsi attracted the contributions of many prominent Australian writers. The most frequent contributors of poetry during the 1980s and early 1990s were Laurie Duggan, Bruce Beaver, Gig Ryan, Peter Porter, Alan Wearne, John Scott, Peter Rose and Robert Adamson. A smaller number of fiction writers contributed, but these included Helen Garner, David Malouf, Gerald Murnane, Tim Winton, Janette Turner Hospital, Elizabeth Jolley, Amy Witting and Catherine Ford. The new publications of many of these writers were regularly reviewed in Scripsi. Articles presenting closer readings were also printed, focusing on the works of writers such as John Forbes, John Scott, Helen Garner, John Tranter, Peter Porter, David Malouf and Elizabeth Jolley.
Prominent overseas critics and writers such as Frank Kermode, Susan Sontag, Harold Bloom, Julian Barnes and John Ashberry appeared in Scripsi, asserting the international focus of the magazine. In addition, articles were published on many overseas writers, including Seamus Heaney, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Andre Gide, Frank O'Hara, Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden and Gertrude Stein. An entire issue was devoted to James Joyce to celebrate the centenary of his birth and another was devoted to French literature. Another feature of Scripsi was the regular translations of the work of a number of overseas and classical authors.
By 1993, both Craven and Heyward had given up the responsibility of editing Scripsi, but they remained active in an associate capacity. The new editors, Owen Richardson and Andrew Rutherford, were hoping to guide the magazine through a new period of development, but they were immediately faced with significant cuts to regular government grants. Scripsi had been published by Oxford University Press since 1990, giving it a solid institutional foundation, but the funding cuts made meeting production costs extremely difficult. Scripsi ceased publication in 1994.
