The diversity of perspective is integral to the approach: chapters are contributed by literary historians and biographers; by a diarist writing ‘to the moment’ (A.G. Stephens, edited by Leon Campbell), by editor–writers (Michael Wilding’s is an excellent memoir which captures the immediacy of the phases of Tabloid Story), by a poet (Tom Shapcott) writing on an earlier poet–editor (Douglas Stewart), by participants and editors writing retrospectively on the movements with which they identified (like Jack Lindsay on Vision and the London Aphrodite, and Peter Cowan on Angry Penguins), and by partisans and editors writing on the history and aims of more recent magazines with which they are associated.

To focus on magazines in relation to writers and literature is to explore from a particular angle the nature and conditioning of the artist himself. External local influences – of geography, literary politics, economics, social climate, tastes, and surrounding literary activity – bear subtly and inescapably on the writer’s purpose and individuality (and on what he sees and acquiesces in) even if, at the extreme, the effect of these influences is his determined rejection of them. Cross Currents shows that editors and coteries, probably more than writers, often tend to define literary undertakings in relation to alleged desiderata within their specifically Australian locality. Consequently, to read this book uncritically might well reinforce the mistaken impression that the history of Australian literary culture is a journey from one intellectual oasis to another, each one sheltering a separate literary tribe (traditionalist, modernist, primeval, nationalist, internationalist, feminist, et cetera) which disdainfully looks out upon a vast but specifically Australia-shaped cultural desert.

Indeed, the grievances and conceptual vocabulary of certain literary groups have helped to shaped much false ‘common wisdom’ about the Australian literary past: the Vision school, for example, advertised themselves as if nobody in the twenties or before in Australia had ever looked beyond Mulga Bill’s Malvern Star – ‘the time had come for a more adventurous kind of poetry, one which looked to the whole English, indeed European tradition, rather than merely to the Australian past’. The ambiguity and contextual changes of meaning of the term ‘national literature’ have also obfuscated a great deal of literary debate. Paradoxically, the very substantial value of this collection is that in aggregate it documents a complexity, a vitality, a perennial diversity, and a dynamic in Australian literary culture and in the thinking that has taken place about directions in literature in relation to practical Australian realities; and the book amplifies what particular groups mean in context by the common vocabulary they use.

Bennett points out that ‘certain themes recur: idealism and pragmatism, local loyalties and international strivings; shared policies and literary warfare; the discovery and sustenance of talent’. They do, as one would expect, but in the abstract I can’t see that they add up to a challenging view of the significance of magazines. It is amongst specific documents, details and arguments in this book that I find revealing or arresting material: Jack Lindsay’s and Peter Cowan’s accounts as cultural documents, for example; Stuart Lee’s information about the origins and workings of Southerly, the data that Tom Shapcott marshalls to argue that ‘it is overwhelmingly evident that when poets submitted work to the Bulletin (during Douglas Stewart’s literary editorship), they sent in work that fitted into the general framework of the editor’s inclinations’; John McLaren’s exposure of patter and Philistinism in newspaper reviewing.

A.G. Stephens almost steals the show. In Leon Cantrell’s edition of the previously unpublished diary, Stephens is vigorous, detailed, and entertaining, as much in the absurdity of his prejudices and queer obsessions (about race, bloodstreams, or the rate of insanity amongst jailed redheads, for example), as in wiser speculations and in his observations of writers, personalities, and on the practical business of writing and editing in his time. The diary is a necessary source for any interpretation of the problematical relationship between his personality and the Bulletin’s tone, and of his social and intellectual representativeness.

Bennett’s editorial selectivity is inevitable, for reasons of length and unavailability of material. His only inexcusable sin of omission, in my judgement, is that he represents the entire period before the 1890s in a solitary chapter. Elizabeth Webby provides as authoritative an indication as is possible, in thirty pages, of colonial issues and of the century’s succession of literary ashes and phoenixes. Regrettably, her task virtually requires that the chapter will read, to the uninitiated, like a dutiful catalogue of antiquarian curiosities. It needs to be expanded, or supplemented by a case study of a journalist-editor (James Smith, Kendall, Deniehy, Clarke), or of a significant newspaper or magazine, in order to convey the period’s real intellectual urgencies, its conflicts and cross currents, and the overlap, greater than in the twentieth century, of magazines and serious literary activity.

Cross Currents is one of those pluralistic books that initiates and opens up. To censure it on the grounds that this is at times frustrating would be unfair. In the section of the six major contemporary literary magazines, for example, I did feel deprived of overall analytical pattern, and severity. One cannot, of course, expect an editor to slaughter his baby (Stephen Murray Smith attempts a gentle reprimand), and these informative chapters are written by persons associated with the magazines. They offer intelligent (through sometimes rather slight) considerations of motivating idealism, identity, achievement, difficulties, development; and their inside knowledge and self-assessment have a documentary importance, which a more rigorous distanced examination will draw on. Bruce Bennett quite rightly declines as premature a full-scale analysis of the literary, political, and social significance of magazines and newspapers. Cross Currents is a useful and stimulating approach to the subject.