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Welcome to the new Meanjin

Zora Sanders September 01

Last Saturday I sat in a theatre in Melbourne, as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival, listening to Sarah Kanowski (editor of Island magazine) talk about her recent move south and her impressions of Tasmania’s artistic community and its relation to the rest of Australia and the world. She was eloquent and thoughtful and made me eager to see where she would take the journal after their stand out MONA issue.

The news that Island and several other key Tasmanian arts institutions, notably the Tasmanian Theatre Company, had lost the State funding that they, like so many arts organisations, rely on, came the following Wednesday. We can imagine the huge shock and disappointment to her and her team. It’s also a shock to everyone who cares about writing and the arts in this country.

Online and digital publishing has come to stay, but it is still in its infancy. Of course it is exciting to talk about the possibilities and to try and foresee what publishing will be like in two, five, ten years, and for anyone even mildly connected to the publishing industry it probably feels as if the conversation is about little else at the moment anyway. But these conversations are only part of the story.

We are blessed with a diversity of publications and audiences in Australia. We produce a truly astonishing range and quantity of writing, from the poetry scrawled on an alley wall to the imposing mountains of bestsellers in the bookshop, we have a lot to say and we say it loudly. And every one of these conversations is different, every publication we produce is unique, unavoidably so. When we lose a publication a whole chorus of voices falls silent, and cannot be recaptured.

Forcing publications to choose between hard copy and digital formats, or using digital publishing as an excuse to narrow the cultural debate, shows a grave misunderstanding and ambivalence towards the cultural life of our country. If we are concerned about how hard copy publications will fare in a digital age, then we should give them the means and support to explore their options and find new audiences that will ensure their long term health. Defunding a journal because of the trend toward digital publishing is like prescribing decapitation to a patient with a sprained ankle. In utilitarian terms it’s effective, but it also brutally misses the point.

We want more outlets for discussion, not fewer. We want more voices, more diversity, more books and zines and websites and blogs and journals and newspapers. We want to keep talking.

It was with these thoughts in mind we set about creating a new Meanjin website. We will publish a new piece every week day. A new poem, a new piece of memoir, a new essay, a new interview, a new piece of fiction, a new video or audio recording, a new voice every day. There are websites that do this sort of thing already, many of which I love and follow closely, but none of which have been based in Australia until now. Our special thanks and extreme gratitude go to designer and artist Jenny Griggs and to Virginia Murdoch at Inventive Labs for the astonishingly hard work they have put into this site.

Still, it feels a little bittersweet to be launching our new site in light of the news from Island. We are lucky to be in a position where creating a new website is something that, while difficult, is possible. If this new site gives us a slightly louder voice, hopefully we can put it in the service of increasing the scope of cultural debate. Even so, one website can never take the place of a healthy and vigorous diversity of publications, catering to all audiences, many of whom value and require print publications instead of, or in addition to, digital ones. We also encourage you to check out the newly redesigned Meanjin print edition.

This website will provide high quality, stimulating writing from Australia and the world, as well as hosting events, both online and IRLz (In Real World, obviously). Our first will be the Meanjin Tournament of Books, which will launch at the Wheeler Centre in a fortnight and then move online. Come along, get involved!

We are thrilled with the website, and we’ll keep working to hone and perfect what we do with it. As always you can reach us via email at meanjin@unimelb.edu.au or on twitter and facebook. Heck, you can even write us a letter or give us a call.

Take a look around, and keep coming back. It’s going to get better and better from here.

 

Our Friends

• Overland
• Alien Onion
• Ampersand Duck
• Andrew McDonald
• A Pair of Ragged Claws
• Arts Victoria
• Australia Council for the Arts
• Ben Eltham
• Bookshow blog
• CAL
• City of Tongues
• Crikey
• darkly wise, rudely great
• David Astle
• Elmo Keep Does Stuff
• The Ember
• Fly the Falcon blog
• Going Down Swinging
• Griffith Review
• Hackpacker
• Harvest
• HEAT
• Island
• Killings blog
• Literary Minded
• Lorraine Crescent
• Lynden Barber
• Mandy Ord
• Marcus Westbury
• Matilda
• Meanland
• Melbourne University Publishing
• Mel Campbell
• The Monthly
• Musings of an Inappropriate Woman
• Oslo Davis
• Paul Callaghan
• Read, Think, Write
• Sleepers Publishing
• Sorrow at Sills Bend
• SPLOG
• Tom Cho
• Virgule
• Wet Ink
• Wheeler Centre

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