The recent, sudden closure of Meanjin has brought renewed attention to Australian journals: those hardy perennials that support Australian literature year in and year out. While the sector has been suffering for some time, new entrants in Adelaide’s Splinter and First Nations journal Sovereign Texts – and a resurrected Southerly – reflect a surge of growth.

When Melbourne University Publishing issued a statement that Meanjin was being closed for “purely financial reasons”, the sector collectively baulked. A literary journal is not a profit-generating enterprise.

Breaking even is as much financial success as most of these publications aim for. The logic of capitalism is incompatible with journals. Like those other notoriously “loss leading” enterprises, tech start-ups, journals are about experimentation, training, play and provocation. Unlike tech-startups, journals are not made to sell once they start to turn a profit.

Instead, they feed their most valuable assets – writers and skilled-up editors – back into the literary system.

As Kent MacCarter, from poetry journal Cordite, said in a recent Creative Australia report on the state of literary journals, they are “the breeding grounds and the petri dish of new talent”.

While these new journals, and existing quality journals such as Heat, Overland, Island and Griffith Review, are doing great work, the reality is that literary journals are under intense financial pressure. Current funding for journals, when provided by Creative Australia, is just enough for subsistence – not flourishing. The time for major government investment is now. If Australian arts were funded at a similar rate to our OECD peers, there would be plenty of funding to go around.

Returning after a three-year hiatus is Southerly Journal. Begun in 1939, it held the mantle of the longest consistently running literary journal in Australia before it took a break in 2022.

Co-edited by Martu writer K.A. Ren Wyld and creative writer and academic Roanna Gonsalves, Southerly’s latest issue, First the future, features an impressive line-up of First Nations poets. They include Ali Cobby Eckermann, Kirli Saunders, Elfie Shiosaki, Jazz Money, Jeanine Leane and Natalie Harkin. It is dedicated to the memory of poet and visual artist Charmaine Papertalk Green, who died earlier this year.

Gonsalves described her vision for the new Southerly as “to continue to build on its glorious tradition”. That is, “to publish the finest Australian literature and scholarship, to be the........

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