This year our fellow journal Overland is celebrating its sixtieth birthday, a feat that its founding editor, Stephen Murray-Smith, could hardly have imagined back in 1954. Meanjin too will soon celebrate a milestone birthday, turning seventy-five in 2015, which Clem Christensen would probably have found equally unfathomable when the first slim volume of Meanjin Papers was released in Brisbane in 1940. Meanjin was established to ensure the pleasures and preoccupations of the literary world weren’t forgotten during a time of war-a noble and ambitious goal, as the best ones usually are.

All new literary magazines are founded with just such a mix of passion and naivety. No editor would undertake the task if they didn’t feel utterly compelled, nor if they truly understood what they were getting themselves into. After the initial passion has ebbed, the choices those founding editors make will determine whether their magazine blinks out of existence when the money and enthusiasm begin to wane, or whether they can parlay that initial burst of life into steadfast longevity.