The decision to close Meanjin misunderstands its wider importance. Australian culture deserves better

Last week’s announcement of Meanjin’s closure marks a poignant moment for Australian culture. Meanjin is a nationally significant cultural institution with a storied history. Closing it suddenly, without warning and with no consultation, on “purely financial grounds”, is a very deliberate act.

If an institution this venerable and important can be killed off with the click of a mouse, few cultural organisations in the country can feel safe.

Outrage has emanated from many quarters, from contributors and readers, to colleagues in the media and publishing – even famous writers such as Peter Carey. In a nice touch, Carey released some acceptance letters from Meanjin he received as an emerging writer in the early 1970s. The Booker Prize winner accused Melbourne University Publishing of “destroying a proven breeding ground for Australian literary culture”.

Australian letters are small and penurious. Hardly anyone is making a living. Excellent writing is scratched out, despite a crippling lack of resources. The sector survives on tiny amounts of funding and vast amounts of good will and volunteer labour.

While Creative Australia recently established a dedicated agency for writing and literature, Writing Australia, public support for literature lags well behind cultural endeavours such as the performing arts, galleries, museums and festivals. Other art forms enjoy much better funding and more generous philanthropic giving.

In the much-reduced circumstances of Australian publishing, making two editors redundant is a major blow. The closure will also ripple out through a network of contributing editors and writers.

More broadly, a journal like Meanjin is a keystone for a wider Australian culture. Its value lies not just in its illustrious past and vibrant present, but in the role it plays as a venue for ideas and talent, and as a flagship for cultural and literary achievement.

The phrase “purely financial grounds” has resonated for all the wrong reasons. Callous and actuarial, it seems to encapsulate the approach of so many managers and leaders in the contemporary Australian university.

Melbourne University has stated that the decision was made independently by Melbourne University Publishing, and that its “council was only informed after MUP had made its decision to close Meanjin”.

Now that they do know, perhaps the University of Melbourne’s leaders can reflect on the responsibility they hold as custodians of an 85-year old literary magazine that has published many of the nation’s most famous and important writers.

The decision to close Meanjin is the latest in a string of recent decisions by Australian universities. As Graeme Turner has observed recently in his book Broken, our universities are no longer safe harbours for priceless cultural institutions. Indeed, they are in some specific cases the biggest threat to their survival.

There have been major cuts to academic jobs in disciplines such as history, sociology, teaching, cultural studies, literature, dance and the performing and visual arts. ANU is closing the Australian National Dictionary. The University of Queensland has taught out its acclaimed course in museum studies. Macquarie University is shutting courses and making academics redundant in history, sociology, archaeology, the performing arts and music.

It’s worth contrasting the line about “purely financial” reasons with the reality of the University of Melbourne, one of Australia’s wealthiest non-government organisations. In last year’s annual report, the university disclosed an annual revenue of $3.2 billion and assets of $12 billion. In 2024, it spent $74.6 million on “travel, staff development and training” and $21 million on “advertising, marketing and promotional expenses”. Compared with this, Meanjin is a rounding error.

As critic and former editor of the Sydney Review of Books Catriona Menzies-Pike notes in Crikey:

Usually when a cultural organisation experiences financial hardship, there’s a call for donations, or a series of negotiations with other parties, or a weary effort to restructure. Quarterly periodicals become biannual; print publications go online. Were there really no other options for Meanjin?

Nearly everyone who has ever worked in publishing can tell you that little magazines don’t make money. Like public libraries or public parks, literary journals are not profit centres with expectations of self-sustainability. They require succour and support if they are to fulfil their mission. That’s why the sudden closure has provided such a lightning rod for the arts community.

Even leaving aside the decision itself, the way it has been handled is widely seen within the cultural sector as disgraceful. No one seems prepared to explain it, let alone justify it, and MUP’s publication of an “FAQ” page over the weekend raises more questions than it answers.

The two employees made redundant, editor Esther Anatolitis and production editor Eli McLean, have not spoken to the media. Asked by the Guardian, the current chair of MUP, Warren Bebbington, declined to confirm whether Anatolitis had signed a non-disclosure agreement as part of her redundancy package. While Bebbington has made a couple of short media statements, the board of MUP has been conspicuously silent.

A protest is already being organised against Meanjin’s closure. It may well be that this lockout becomes more controversial than the bean-counters at MUP might have predicted.

If a backlash ensues, it will hardly be surprising. With a Senate Inquiry into misgovernance running, Australia’s universities are increasingly seen as out of touch. Many openly speculate that they have lost their social licence. Decisions that erode the foundations of the national culture can only reinforce that perception. Australian culture deserves much better than this.

There are hopes that another university or publisher might pick up the imprint. A crowdfunded future in which readers and the public support an independent Meanjin in a dedicated nonprofit organisation is also imaginable. If MUP no longer wishes to publish Meanjin, now is the time to pass the torch, giving up the intellectual property and the back catalogue to someone who does.

Even if another host isn’t willing to take on the custodianship, there is still a chance a reconfigured and newly independent Meanjin could survive. Funded properly by Creative Australia, and supported by readers and donors, founding editor Clem Christensen’s wartime dream of a journal that would “talk poetry” and contribute to Australia’s “mental life, its intellectual and aesthetic activities” can yet live on.