A GUM TREE GROWING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 786, 13 August 1954, Page 13

A GUM TREE GROWING

MEANJIN, Vol. XIII, No. 1, Autumn, 1954; University of Melbourne, 5/-. NDER C. B. Christesen’s editorship Meanjin’s tempered and patient growth is something Australia may be grateful for. In 1940 it was an eightpage bi-monthly; in Number 56, as a quarterly, it reaches 160 pages, containing more reading than the average novel. Mr. Christesen reaffirms its aims as "the re-examination of the roots of Australian society," the support of those who are "coming to grips with immediate contemporary problems," "the presentation of a new and questioning generation in Australian letters," and the founding not of a "school" but a "meet-ing-place for progressive intellectual expression." These are phrases familiar, heaven knows, to the inkwell of any editor of any literary journal conceived to mirror and express its own environment. Without a manifesto less general phrases can scarcely be found. But if the pages of Meanjin have sometimes echoed the emptiness of an Australia perhaps too big to be grappled with, it may be that the editor. knows that a gum tree takes a long time to gum up, where an acanthus (such as Angry Penguins) spikes as a more temporary irritant. Meanjin is not gummed up: it has grown to mean something in Australia, and to make Australia more meaningful to us. Of the new number’s material some is of interest primarily in its Australian context, but there is a great deal ("Culture and Comics,’"’ Norman Bartlett, and the articles on, and by, James Picot) of interest anywhere. The stories and some (continued on next page) |

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(continued from previous page) of the poems afte unassertive as Australia most certainly is not. Unfair, so briefly, but James McAuley should not, in ten and a half pages of heroic couplets, keep on addressing Dryden as "dear John’; it may be doubjed if satire can now be effective in an ambitious literary exercise. Some comperison with our own Landfall is inevitable. They have roughly similar aims, and both, being non-com-mercial except in the battle against increasing costs, receive a subsidy from public or semi-public funds (which Meanjin more delicately refers to as a subvention). If both quarterlies are concerned with the local scene it is from an emphasis on regionalism not narrow nationalism. (There is a valuable article in Meanjin, "The Importance of Regionalism," Geoffrey Thomas.) And both, by keeping a window open on the international world of thought and letters, have achieved an integration based not on self-esteem but on self-respect.

D.

G.