In order to understand why these values should be uppermost in the relationship, to the point where no legal protection has been thought necessary, at least until now, it is important to remember that literary magazines have traditionally been the proving ground for new writers and new kinds of writing in Australia. It isn’t only that they provide an entry point for new and emerging writers. Magazine editors commission and foster writing projects. They work closely with authors in ways that can have a decisive effect on the form their writing finally takes.

The relationship between editor and writer, once forged, carries over into later work as well. I don’t think there is a writer who wouldn’t value this kind of editorial conversation, this freely given opportunity that, begun early or late, continues to offer encouragement and criticism, and carries with it the promise of publication. In the past, our literary magazines have published the best Australian writers at all stages of their careers, not simply at the beginning.

It is hard to codify or quantify this ongoing relationship, which is presumably why the idea of a contract seems somehow peripheral to its conduct. It used to be understood that literary magazines were both valuable and vulnerable, and this understanding gave protection: it guaranteed respect from the more commercial players in the literary world, and at least a commitment to the forms of civility, even if rarely accompanied by practical support.

I put this understanding in the past, because I think it changed some time ago. With the boom in Australian publishing, and the emergence of multinational publishers in the local marketplace, the demand for new books has been such that writers – young writers in particular, but most writers in fact – have been encouraged to go straight to book publication, without any expectation that their writing will have been tested or developed through the traditional medium of periodical publication. The sidelining of the literary magazine has been further exacerbated by the singling out of the novel as the most easily marketable literary genre. Neither the miscellaneous character of the literary magazine, nor its open and provisional quality, nor its favouring of the shorter forms, nor its commitment to literary or ideological principle, sits well with the imperatives of this market-driven economy.

Inevitably, the reputation of the literary magazine has suffered, so that it has come to be seen in some quarters as the preserve of the would-be rather than the accomplished writer, and those who aren’t able to cut it in the marketplace because of their eccentricity or their devotion to unpopular forms, ‘experimental’ writers and poets in particular. To others, no doubt, with a keener sense for the truth of the matter, the magazines must look like what they are: targets ripe for the picking, rich in resources, undervalued and unprotected.

I’ve got nothing against anthologies that reprint already-published writing, but when they are more or less contemporaneous with the sources on which they draw, they ought to be handled with great care. I am particularly annoyed by the argument that because literary magazines have a limited readership or a limited reputation, these anthologies are doing them a favour by rescuing their best pieces from obscurity and publishing them in book form.

We don’t need this condescension. In response to the high premium placed on book publishing by the marketplace, many literary magazines are now presented as books, with the claim on increased shelf life that this entails. Nor is it clear that our readership is as limited as is often assumed. Certainly a one-line acknowledgment at the back of an anthology does nothing for us in this respect, just as it offers no recompense for our editorial efforts. Indeed, an anthology offers little incentive to readers to venture beyond its own selection, especially when, as is the case with the Black Inc. anthologies, it presents its selection as the best of all there is.

It is ironic that one should have to argue the case for a more respectful attitude towards the literary magazines, indeed to insist on this through the introduction of contracts, at precisely the moment when the boom in publishing that has brought about their devaluation is coming to an end. As writers of literary quality find it harder and harder to be published in book form, they will look increasingly to the literary magazines for editorial engagement and the offer of publication. To provide this effectively, we need real support from the publishing industry, not the payment of lip service that we sometimes get now, and sometimes don’t.