AustLit
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'The Australian Journal (1865–1957) is wellknown to students of Australian literature as a publisher of Australian fiction, including the first version of Marcus Clarke’s celebrated convict novel, For the term of his natural life. Apart from the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century when it relied heavily on syndicated fiction from overseas, The Australian Journal was consistently a significant publisher of Australian fiction, issuing several thousand stories by some hundreds of Australian writers. Histories of magazines acknowledge the preeminence of the magazine in the 1870s, but then ignore or treat cursorily its next eighty years. However, not only did the journal survive for ninety years, but under the editorship of RG Campbell from 1926 to 1955 it fostered the careers of a range of freelance Australian writers, contributing to their incomes and allowing them to develop their craft.' (Introduction)
Notes
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Epigraph: I hurried along Swanston Street…My business took to me past Little Burke Street…beyond the Melbourne Hospital, the Public Library and La Trobe Street to No. 350, an inconspicuous three-storey brick building housing the printing works of A. H. Massina and Co., and the office of The Australian Journal. From within came the sound of machinery dominated by the rhythmic thud of a heavy flatbed press. Those sounds were to become as familiar to me as the beating of my own heart, for that building was to be my working home for just on thirty years. - RG Campbell ‘An Editor Regrets’
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
- The Australian Journal 1865 periodical (900 issues)
- The Australian Journal Story Book 1954 anthology short story
