The technology of book production has evolved to suit postmodernist egalitarians. Hence a possible scenario in which magazines propagate to serve diversified intellectual, political and aesthetic interests, ever more at the expense of relatively larger publications. The editors of Going Down Swinging, a ‘Hit and Miss Production’ from Coburg, Victoria, ‘regret that they are as yet unable to pay writers what they deserve’. Any hint of drollery aside, it is clear both that their scribes donate a substantial amount of labour to warrant the notice, and that the editors anticipate improved conditions. Better established, more mainstream magazines ought not be too complacent.

Ten-year-old independent veteran Going Down Swinging occupies a vibrant node in the ‘lit mag’ web, preserving enviable production values while indexing what might once have been called counter-cultural potentials. The magazine is au fait with the contemporary Australian writing scene and maintains connections abroad. The magazine’s comradely regard for fellow periodicals is disarming, and even more so is its spontaneity and sense of contiguity with a flesh and blood writing community. Interviews in Issue 10/11 with poets Geoff Goodfellow and Bev Roberts (former Literature Field Officer for the Victorian Ministry for the Arts) contribute to the effect and to the related anti-elitist credo. It was ‘Roberts’ idea in 1985 to foster projects in community writing using 150th Anniversary funds, arousing antipathy in some official quarters: ‘They were saying things like: We don’t want to encourage those sorts of people to write – there’s enough writing going on already, what we need is people to read it’.

Their objection may seem entirely logical to some, but it is anathema to the postmodern ‘atomisation’ of unifying social forces, such as are evident in the traditional literary scheme, wherein a few speak to many. The ‘democratisation’ of literature is in the wind, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the popular reclamation of poetry, and in particular where this manifests itself in the rise of performance poetry. Poets like Goodfellow perform in ‘prisons, schools, markets, factories, music venues’ and so on. The desire is to reach ‘ordinary people’, to show them that ‘their lives are worth recording’, and that they too can achieve art.

Goodfellow found that a performance place like Adelaide’s Friendly Street ‘was a good platform to share ideas – and a good place to be able to pick up small press publications to see what others were doing’. The editors of Sydney University Union’s Hermes 6 reiterate the general idea:

Many of the writers included here are closely involved with keeping writing alive in pubs, cafes and public venues, actively moving writing away from the sole auspices of publishers and English department academics. Hermes offers another venue for energetic innovation.

Not only is the spoken/written cross-over such that a magazine is obtainable at a performance, but it may become a public venue in its own right, organised according to who knows what capital flows – probably not existing ones.

Hermes annexes the high ground of ‘the country’s younger writers’ – not entirely through choice but because of the vast number of contributions from around Australia. Consequently, it has gone national in its distribution, and has needed to produce a companion Hermes Papers to accommodate theoretical and critical interests. These more scholarly pursuits should perhaps have their forum amongst the plethora of literary publications, although theory is eschewed as elitist by some progressive aesthetes. Reporting in Hecate 16 on a Feminism and Literature Seminar held at the University of Melbourne in May, Carmel Macdonald-Grahame touches on a related point, when she notes the ‘limitations of being preoccupied with constructing ourselves as feminist intellectuals’. This is in the context of a reiterated call for ‘pluralism within feminism’. Western Australian Macdonald-Grahame fears an East Coast centralisation of feminist exchange, contrary to the de-centred postmodern culture that feminism has helped bring about. It seems almost needless to say that the Hecate journal functions to counterbalance this effect, by disseminating the results of interdisciplinary research and the proceedings of conferences in reports like Macdonald-Grahame’s own.

Outrider is more experienced than most in issues of cultural diversity, having aimed since its inception in 1984 ‘to expand the concept of Australian literature by pleading for a stronger representation of so-called migrant writing’. ‘So-called’ because such labels carry counter-productive biases. As Lisa Jacobsen observes in her critical article on the experimental writer Ania Walwicz, to ‘read a text solely as a piece of migrant writing, even if the text self-consciously proclaims a migrant experience, is already blinkered to what else it might contain’. Outrider is seasoned by the effects of marginalisation, within a writing culture it sees as dominated throughout its history by male Anglo-Celts. Perhaps it is ironic that it has adopted so ‘mainstream’ a style, given the current aesthetics of diversity, and presented itself in a bookish form, rather as a definitive anthology. Imago, a self-proclaimed literary magazine from Queensland University of Technology, is similarly sleek, and while emphasising Queensland writing and culture, ‘publishes the best Australian writing’. One would never deny that both these publications succeed in attaining the highest of quality – it merely remains for the thinking postmodern reader to contextualise the achievement.