'In his editorial introduction for Southerly 70(1), David Brooks observes that
Southerly's mandate, often missed by critics who find it their task-of-the-moment to review one issue or another, is to publish, almost exclusively, new writing by Australian poets, authors, critics and scholars, or commentary by critics and scholars on Australian writing. There are few print journals left now that do any such thing. Indeed it sometimes seems as if we are the last one standing.
Whilst this year's bibliography demonstrates that Southerly is not the last journal to follow this tradition, the bibliography certainly attests to the prevalent attitude which has seen many journals direct their pages away from literature to general political or socio-political issues...' (from authors introduction, 558)