There would have been much to celebrate in a final commemorative issue: the role of the magazine in introducing to Australia the ‘New Journalism’; the sponsorship of a distinctive radical national literature; the significance of the Red Page and, later, literary competitions in developing local writers; and the nurturing of black-and-white art. A special issue could also have ranged across a title reviled for its racism and sexism, notable for its political and other scoops, and studied by academics and students. The Bulletin’s insistence that ‘every man with brains has at least one good story to tell’, which led to a high proportion of reader contributions and even, at times, composite articles made up of the best parts of offerings from multiple authors, might have been considered as a kind of precursor to ubiquitous interactive media. But the magazine lauded as the ‘Bushman’s Bible’ after its appearance in 1880 was very different from the one acquired by Frank Packer’s media empire in 1960. About the only continuities between the magazine of 1880 and 2008 were the masthead, weekly publication and national circulation.

Reality, as well as romance, had long stalked the Bulletin. By the middle decades of the twentieth century, the magazine was struggling to compete with a flowering of literary magazines (including ABR) and the emergence of a financial press. The Bulletin’s endorsement of the White Australia policy and its denunciation of communists and Jews increasingly made it appear strident and outdated. When Ken Prior sold the magazine to Packer, he remarked: ‘We have found it impossible for an independent newspaper to carry on in these times.’ Packer himself, a freshly minted knight, was trying to attain greater social respectability by acquiring traditional institutions; his acquisition of the Bulletin and his aborted bid for Angus & Robertson had commentators wondering whether St Andrew’s or St Patrick’s Cathedral would be the next valuable property to come into his sights. Packer was also a practical man, and the Bulletin was a valuable property: it occupied a six-storey building in George Street, Sydney, where values were rising. And the Bulletin was accompanied by the Australian Woman’s Mirror, which was competing with the Australian Women’s Weekly, the jewel in the Packer crown.

Better quality paper, a more readable layout, a modernised cover and the removal of ‘Australia for the White Man’ from the masthead were the most obvious physical changes to the Bulletin under the new régime. Some older readers, such as the son of David McKee Wright, a former editor of the Red Page, complained that the title had been ‘butchered’. In August 1961 Gwen Harwood, who had worked with Vincent Buckley to devise a hoax to expose what they considered to be the poor judgment of Australian literary editors, decided to go ahead and submit a pair of sonnets in which the first letters of each line spelt out ‘so long bulletin’ – and, for good measure, ‘fuck all editors’. When university students discovered the hoax, a furious Packer tried, not entirely successfully, to have all copies of the magazine removed from sale.

Under a brilliant succession of editors, including the ‘radically conservative’ Donald Horne and Peter Coleman, the Bulletin published Barry Humphries and Hal Porter, Bruce Petty and Brett Whiteley; took a close interest in consumer affairs; went on sale in Asia; and occasionally became embroiled in political contretemps. Not long before Packer’s death in 1974, a young West Australian, Trevor Kennedy, unencumbered by many thoughts of the Bulletin’s past, assumed the editorship and bolstered the business pages, dropped literary coverage and attracted new readers.

In her affectionate 1979 study, The Journalistic Javelin, Patricia Rolfe, a long-time Bulletin journalist, wrote of the challenges facing news magazines in countries such as Australia with scattered populations and far-flung correspondents. In 1984 the Bulletin’s transformation to a news magazine was completed when it merged with the Australian edition of the American magazine Newsweek. Those challenges accelerated as the news cycle shortened due to 24-hour news channels and online media; weekday and Saturday newspapers superseded weekly magazines as places for reflection and analysis; and free magazines proliferated. Kerry Packer was prepared to protect the Bulletin and the Nine network’s Sunday as prestige media outlets with some political weight, and to absorb the magazine’s losses as circulation fell and costs rose. Following Kerry’s death in December 2005 came James Packer’s sale of a significant share of his media interests to a foreign private equity group, CVC Asia Pacific. The time for sentiment, or for a commitment to quality journalism, had gone. On the eve of Australia Day, 2008, reports of the Bulletin’s death were not greatly exaggerated, but true.