The Australian Journal is better-known to students of Australian literature who are familiar with the history of Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life, which was first serialised in its pages during the 1870s. Histories of magazines tend to dwell on this period as a high-point in Australian writing in the magazine, but then devote only a sentence or two to the next eighty years of the magazine’s history. Admittedly, the magazine drifted away from its early reputation, relying too heavily on syndicated fiction from overseas, and so has been of little interest to literary historians.
But the last thirty years of the magazine tell a different story when R. G. Campbell was at the helm as editor. This was a period when many Australian writers were supported with regular payments; or had their careers fostered in the pages of the Australian Journal as they developed their skills as writers of popular short fiction and serials. Campbell was editor of the Australian Journal from 1926–1955, publishing the work of hundreds of Australian writers, and a total in excess of several thousand stories. But little has been written on this period, except for a few works of scholarship devoted to writers such as Vance Palmer and Xavier Herbert.
This gap has occurred despite the existence in the Fryer Library of Campbell’s fragmented typescript-memoir, ‘An Editor Regrets’, and the typescript of an anthology Campbell compiled in 1952, ‘The Australian Journal Story Book’. When closely examined, these artefacts provide an interpretative threshold into the world of freelance story writing in the middle decades of the twentieth century. For instance, Campbell’s foreword to the anthology clearly states his intentions, and reveals his attitude to these particular stories first published in the pages of the Australian Journal:
As they were written for the entertainment of magazine readers, these stories have invariably a beginning, a middle and an end , though not necessarily the conventional “happy” end. In fact, few of them are conventional stories at all, from the standpoint of the ordinary “popular” magazine. But they are all good yarns , selected because they deserve a better fate than burial in the dusty files of a monthly periodical, and they all pleased a great many readers when they were first published. It is hoped that, in this new setting, they will please a new audience.
But Campbell’s goals were not realised. The anthology remained unpublished and survives now as evidence of one editor’s desire to achieve a greater profile for those stories he believed rose above the dust of the magazine’s history. The typescript anthology includes the work of writers active during the middle decades of the twentieth, and some whose work has been long-forgotten. In a letter to Beatrice Davis with a proposal for publication that survives with the anthology, Campbell outlined the possible contents:
“Foreword” by R. G. Campbell
“Van Dieman’s Land, 1830” by Marcus Clarke (1870)
“The Diggings in 1855” by “Waif Wander” (1882)
“Art and Artifice” by J. P. McKinney (1930)
“The Main Road” by Roy Bridges (1930)
“The Early Victorian” by J. H. M. Abbott (1931)
“Mulligan Taubada” by Osmar E. White (1931)
“The King of Luggertown” by Vance Palmer (1933)
“Collecting the Evidence” by Gavin Casey (1934)
“Reunion” by Margaret Fane and Hilary Lofting (1936)
“The First White Man” by William Hatfield (1937)
“We’ll All Go to See the Sea” by Frances J. Moon (1940)
“Seven Emus” by Xavier Herbert (1942)
“Why Did They Look At Mr Smith” by J. B. Warren (1942)
“Safe Horizon” by Jon Cleary (1943)
“The Book” by Robert Close (1943)
“The Sky Stone” by Sidney Hobson Courtier (1947)
“The Night I Poisoned Grandpa” by Melva Lester (1947)
“Miss Tarleton” by Rex Grayson (1948)
“A Visit to the Dead Heart” by Frederick Howard (1953)
These are the authors who Campbell thought deserved greater recognition for their work as popular storytellers, but his publishing project was probably stymied by entrenched attitudes. In the late 1960s, when he was writing his memoir in Brisbane, he lamented that ‘academics and highbrows who had never read the magazine’ regarded the Australian Journal as ‘a trivial publication, suitable only for the less knowledgeable type of housewife.’ For some of the magazine’s content this assessment might hold true. But the careers of many of the writers on this list were positioned at the intersection of popular and literary fiction, perhaps also intersecting with the field of middlebrow or ‘good commercial’ fiction. These intersections tend to unsettle attitudes that see these fields as mutually exclusive. The careers of some of these writers can tell a different story, one where movement between the fields of popular and literary story writing occurs with greater ease than literary histories would have us believe. Other posts on this blog will dwell more closely on R. G. Campbell’s chosen authors, some who were considered ‘experts’ in their field, and explore the dynamics of the cultural field of the Australian short story.
The Australian Journal Story Book 