‘The artist is responsible.’ He must ‘concern himself with present-day social and political problems.’ So asserts a Meanjin editorial. It seems a reasonable, almost a necessary demand. The diseased state of our body politic has its origins in the detribalisation of our society. We are left with no secure set of traditional values. Our anthropological pattern has been broken, and we wander as aimlessly as the aborigine after his disruptive contact with the white. Unless we can quickly achieve a coherent set of values suited to modern circumstance, can re-construct a pattern, we are done for. In that task the creative writer can help us if he will; and if he can, surely it is his plain duty in so urgent a crisis. At a moment of emergency, ‘all hands to the pump’ is a reasonable demand, and the Trade Unionist who grumbles that he didn’t sign on for pumping is a frivolous slacker.

But, adds Meanjin, the writer ‘must retain his artistic integrity.’ True again. But what happens if his artistic integrity does not happen to permit him the discussion of contemporary social problems? Meanjin appears to believe that the artist’s integrity is simply a matter of employing ‘the greatest artistic skill and imagination of which he is capable,’ of shaping his material into satisfying form. Artistic integrity goes deeper than that. It is vitally concerned with the selection of themes.