Appearing in Brisbane in December 1940, the first issue of Meanjin Papers was a mere leaflet, eight poems bound in a buff cover with a design of four splayed footprints which inclined, as some readers tartly pointed out, to the left. The issue of 250 copies cost £4.10.0 to print and was distributed, usually unsolicited, throughout Australia to libraries, educational institutions, government departments, critics, academics, poets, potential patrons, enthusiasts for Australian culture, balladeers, yarners, acquaintances, relatives and friends. The footprints, later Meanjin‘s most nostalgically loved symbol, referred to the mundowi or cult figures of the Aboriginals. The Aboriginal motif recurred piously in the magazine’s name, the Aboriginal word for the spike of river-bound land on which Brisbane stood, and in the cute game-hunting piccaninny on the title page. The spike doubled as a metaphor for Meanjin‘s audacious cultural role.

The footprints also signified the four poets who were represented in the first issue by two poems each: peripatetic former violin teacher, Brian Vrepont, zealous Roman Catholic, Paul Grano, self-educated English emigrant, James Picot, and Townsville-born journalist and poet-editor, Clem Christesen, whose editorial ‘Foreword’ insisted on the need for cultural continuity during war and especially that the nation should be scorched into action and unity by the moral fires of poetry. Though they reaped conservative criticism for alleged pessimism and other anti-social traits, the contents confirmed the ascription ‘Traditionalist Number’: Vrepont’s lyric celebrations ‘The Apple Tree’ and ‘The Heron’; Grano’s courtly love poem ‘For These Are Gracious Things’, together with his plea for the individual over abstractions, ‘Pray Pity for Bill Smith’ ; Picot’s jagged syntax and rushed sincerity in ‘Australia to a War’ and his sonnet ‘Variation on a Theme of John Keats’; and Christesen’s sea-poems ‘Morning Bound’ and ‘By Lantern Light’, with their aura of unformulated longing.