Against a backdrop of war, and coinciding with the publication in London of Arthur Koestler’s parable for modern times, Darkness at Noon, the first modest issue of Meanjin Papers appeared in Brisbane in December 1940. Clem Christesen with friends and mentors Vance and Nettie Palmer set out to produce an open forum ‘fired by the literary rebels of our century’. The vision included ‘an ambition for the nation, the emergence of an Australian polity that was to be self-aware, mature, distinctive and just’.*

Seventy-five years later, the June issue of this essential little magazine is published into a climate of moral ambiguity—the glorification and commercialisation of past wars while security provisions escalate and individual freedoms erode. So it is fitting that much of the dark fiction, the poetry and several of the essays here reflect the ugly and unresolved knots of this era of ours.