Yet it was this university that offered Meanjin a home when it seemed likely to founder on the provincialism of Brisbane, whose wartime atmosphere gave the journal its birth in 1940 but could not provide the scope its editor’s ambitions required. The move in 1945 to Melbourne, ‘city of fogs and self-sufficiency’, was undertaken in the expectation that Melbourne University Press would take over publishing responsibility and provide the editor with a salary, but leave him with full editorial responsibility for the magazine. It was on the incompatibility of these conditions that the hope foundered and was succeeded by twenty years of bitterness.

While Strahan’s account of this rift at the basis of Meanjin’s institutional structure, its relationship with its ostensible sponsor, is sympathetic to Christesen, it is also scrupulously fair. While we may wish that the university officials concerned had approached their responsibilities with more vision, the responsibility for the continuing difficulties does not lie with any individual.

Rather, circumstances were to blame. Christesen’s sponsor, Colin Badger, left the university; Medley, the Vice-Chancellor, neither obtained council endorsement nor formulated an official agreement; the other officials concerned saw themselves as proprietors rather than patrons. They believed they had to take responsibility for the magazine and its contents, and thus attempted to impose on the editor a control that would be incompatible with the freedom he needed to enable the magazine to perform that intellectual function that brought lustre to the university that was seeking to cripple it.

These institutional politics, trivial as they may seem, are essential to an understanding of the editor’s role, as well as an indication of the bitterness with which academic politics can be fought to the exclusion of broader issues. Not only was Christesen harassed with financial demands and forced to submit his detailed editorial decisions to the scrutiny of a board whose chairman understood the role only as a professional duty, he was at one stage threatened with supersession and at another evicted from his offices by the expedient of demolishing them around him.

Yet if it was the academic establishment that persecuted him, it was also from the academic community that support came – from Geoffrey Serle, who by acting in his place as editor saved his position from termination, from the scientists R.D. Wright and Sidney Rubbo who eventually insisted that the university accept its responsibilities.

The importance of Strahan’s book rests, however, not so much on the lucidity with which she details this institutional struggle as on her account of the way Christesen operated from this embattled position to maintain a centre of liberal intellectualism in the darkness of the Menzies years. It is a delight to read a book which does not use the terms liberal and intellectual as part of a political demonology, and which in telling the story of the times makes a distinguished contribution to the cultural development it describes.

The key to Christesen’s achievement, as it emerges from Strahan’s book, was his determination, which earned him enmity from both right and left, to keep his journal open to all viewpoints, to owe loyalty to no party or faction but to choose material purely on the basis of its quality. Certainly, this did not prevent his own views from emerging in Meanjin, particularly his commitments to Australian nationalism and to democratic socialism, and what he conceived as a matter of duty rather than choice, his support for international peace movements. Nor did he confuse openness with programmatic balance or a mythical notion of objectivity. But Strahan’s analysis shows that his pages were open to writers from all parts of the political spectrum, and that the right of reply was scrupulously respected, even to the extent of creating an impression of editorial uncertainty.

Certainly, Christesen’s views changed over the years, and the optimism of the earlier period was succeeded by a failure of hope, a belief that what he stood for had perished with the fall of the Chifley government. Yet the bleakness which pervaded the editorial comments during the cold war and the later years of cynical apathy did not extend to the journal as a whole, for during this time it became more rather than less important in keeping its readers in touch with the best that was being thought and written in Australia and around the world. Its contributors joined in controversy, but it never acquired the tone of baleful malevolence which became the Quadrant trademark.

This feeling of value even in the midst of darkness was due to the journal’s commitment to embracing rather than accentuating polarities. Thus was the national assertiveness of early issues balanced by the pursuit of national maturity; nationalism mitigated by internationalism; the emotional commitment of socialism checked by romantic individualism; the allegiance to tradition complemented by a continuing interest in modernism. Christesen published committed writers, but Meanjin remained the arena, not the weapon, of their commitment.

Precisely this policy brought him into conflict with the forces of reaction which hauled Christesen and his wife on the most flimsy of grounds before the Petrov inquiry into Russian espionage in Australia. This experience was in itself emotionally harrowing, and led to personal breaches between the Christesens and their parents, as well as adding to the doubts of the administrators who regarded Meanjin as a cuckoo in the academic nest rather than as an object lesson in the spirit of free enquiry and publication which is the essence of the university ideal.

Although Christesen was to survive these crises and continue editing Meanjin until 1974, Strahan suggests that after this period some of the spirit went out of the journal. Now established, it also became more academic, and although the editor was loaded with honours he was burdened with a sense of failure. From being the outsider he had gone straight to the role of distinguished elder statesman of letters without ever having enjoyed success or power on the way.

This conclusion returns the reader to the question Strahan raises in her first pages. Despite the zeal of their supporters and the passion of their politics, literary magazines, in Australia as elsewhere, reach only the tiniest portion of the population, and remain dependent on private or public subsidy for their survival. Does it all matter? Was Christesen’s heroic dedication to the career of literary editor all a mistake, a waste of his creative talents?

Although she gives no explicit answer, Strahan implies not. Meanjin may never have succeeded in getting a hearing from the ‘common man’ whom Christesen sought, but its commitment to the new and the experimental in itself made this an impossible dream from the outset. But ideas must be tried before they can spread, and Meanjin can claim, on the evidence of this book, to have introduced to Australia ideas about its own past, about the nature of its literary and artistic inheritance, and about the dilemmas of the modern world which are now part of the general current of debate. It has helped to break down the dreadful parochialism which was characteristic of Australia in the forties and fifties. Above all, its editor stood firm when the right to speak freely itself was threatened, and in so doing he widened the scope of freedom for all.

Strahan’s account of the closed minds of the cold war is salutary reading at a time when ideological passions, stimulated by the threat of annihilation and the consequent retreat into individual salvation, are again rising. But if the context is chilling, the book is not. It is warmed not only by the example of Christesen’s courageous endurance but by the liveliness of the author’s prose, which rises to the level of its subject. Her command of imagery and her strong sense of the appropriate adjective constantly engage the reader with her subject, and enable her to encapsulate a character or a literary analysis in a paragraph. Space allows only one example, her comment on McAuley, whose ‘shorter poems, distillations of icy brevity, showed the travail of McAuley’s pilgrimage from cheerless agnosticism to comfortless Christianity’. Both man and verse, with their contradictions, caught in a single sentence.