Meanjin, Overland and Australia’s cultural identity: a vivid history by Jim Davidson

Midway through this extraordinary story of the making of Australian literary and political culture, the people who made it and the times in which it was made, author Jim Davidson has Clem Christesen — the founder, defender and stalwart of Meanjin Quarterly — in the 1950s in Eltham where he had moved after he and wife Nina had arrived from Brisbane (Meanjin is a Turrbal word for the spike of land that bends the Maiwar/Brisbane River on which the much-flooded city sits).

Christesen was supplementing the meagre editor’s stipend given to him by the University of Melbourne by doing gardening work around the new, vaguely bohemian suburb (Eltham in those days was mudbrick, Featherston chairs and modern jazz from the HMV, though the Christesens had a bungalow). It occurred to Clem that he could make more money if he bought a dump truck and moved loads of dirt from one place to another. What on earth gave him that idea?

Everyone who has edited a “small” magazine knows exactly what gave him that idea. The “small” magazine’s need to be bloody edited, again and again, and the endless, lumpy, brownish articles that come through the door, and the ceaseless movement of loads of text from one place to another in the sodding thing, and then back again, because you realise you were right the first time.

Christesen founded Meanjin and edited, nurtured, nudged, revived and propped it up for 35 years before, in order to save it, it had to be taken off him by his — and its — friends. Christesen was, by this account and that of everyone I know who ever came in contact with him, obsessive, irascible, impossible, infuriating and dogged beyond measure, traits that appear to have made the magazine’s creation and flourishing possible, and which flourishing worsened those traits until they were pretty much the whole of him. Like all editors, he was always on his way to somewhere else.

Davidson records him noting that he had three half-finished novels, and wondering if the decades of arranging other people’s work had been worth it. It would have to be. After being shoehorned out of the editor’s chair in 1975, some of the fiction was eventually published, to little fanfare, and Australia’s greatest magazine-maker of the 20th century got the treatment from the only higher editorial authority, when fire destroyed most of the manuscript of his memoirs. Nature, like most editors, was probably right in this. Clem’s early poetry was undistinguished, and the excerpt of his memoir Davidson provides is not striking writing.

The life was the work, but the work consumed him as fire consumed the “life”. The middle decades of his Meanjin impress even today, not merely because he synthesised themes and “suites” of work, nor because he got in world-standard writers at a time when Australians had little access to them — Anaïs Nin, Chinua Achebe and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn were published in Meanjin, among many others — but because the editor’s presence disappears in the making, as it should, catalyst, self-consuming flame.  

But this is not simply the biography of Clem Christesen, a Brisbane boy, born in 1911 in Townsville, father a public servant, mother a sometimes journalist, who became a journalist himself and was drawn into the ferment around the idea of Australian culture that began, in that cycle, with PR Stephensen’s The Foundation of Culture in Australia (1936), would peak with the Ern Malley affair and Nolan, Tucker and Patrick White, and in between had risen with the “Jindyworobak” poets and writers, who combined/appropriated Aboriginal languages and concepts with settler bush myths to derive a culture of place, still Anglo but not British, and sadly, as poetry, usually ghastly.

Neither Christesen nor Meanjin went in for the full Jindyworobak practice of mixing in Aboriginal words (often from multiple languages) to work that remained conventionally Georgian in form. But the magazine and the man shared a sense that the culture should arise from here, from the lived experience of Australian life, and not from the idea of a continuity with British traditions, as was the overwhelming sentiment of the time.

The entwined lives of the two, which marked not merely the boundaries of a certain type of literary culture but the two ways of living the cultural life of the time, expressed the paradox of the left in the 20th century. Murray-Smith, the Geelong Grammar boy, protégé of its Fabian socialist headmaster James Ralph Darling, was both the Marxist and the dashing bohemian. He lived as part of the pre-1960s, share-house, communist Carlton bohemia of the time, going on to be the genial host, holding parties and de facto country house sojourns at his family’s large house in Mt Eliza (then still a village/holiday post), and his politics gradually drifting from orthodox Communism (he left the party in 1958) to a standard “save the furniture” (Featherston chairs, mainly) conservative pessimismus.

He became the presiding spirit of that bizarre (in the memory) annual event: the Meanjin v Overland cricket match (imagine fielding that today — half of the 13 people on the field would be mid-anxiety attack; the umpires would have to be Lacanian therapists). That a Melbourne/Australian small magazine editor will once again attain such douceur de vie is not impossible. We can be pretty sure they will never have their own island, as Murray-Smith did: Erith, in Bass Strait, where the family hosted an annual summer camp for friends, Stephen as Prospero, south of Wilsons Promontory.

The magic was a lot rougher for Clem, an autodidact from working people, who, it appears, was never persuaded by Marxism for a minute. Melbourne University had offered a berth for his small Meanjin Papers publication in the 1940s, but from the moment he installed himself, the university appeared to disown it, obliging Christesen to engage in continuous guerrilla warfare to try and get the funding that would get it to the next level, or just keep it on the existing one.

How much of this was university politics — including the anti-left persecution of the 1950s, which saw Overland denied funding by Menzies himself, acting as arts minister — and how much was due to Clem’s obsessive self-defeating drive, is something Davidson spends some time considering, not least when Davidson himself is taken on as Clem’s successor in the 1970s, only to be white-anted by him for several years.

By the 1970s, Clem’s Meanjin had become archaic and funereal, while Overland had taken on the larrikin spirit of the nationalist side of the radical left, the Maoists and independence movement, the street poets and anarchists; a looser, funkier publication. Here the contradictions of these two ways reach their height: there is nothing fun in the past couple of years of Christesen’s Meanjin, but the entire run of Murray-Smith’s Overland has no stretch that matches the quality that Meanjin achieved for years on end.

Under conditions in which the Christensens (his wife Nina was the founder of the Melbourne University Russian department, a key figure in her own right, and biographised by Judith Armstong) subsidised the magazine to the tune of about half a million in today’s money, Meanjin went 28 years of quarterly publication without a break. That is, as Davidson notes, an extraordinary achievement.

Meanjin had been the place for thematic issue debates about what an Australian high culture would consist of, giving us the term “cultural cringe” (and the less alliterative, therefore less known, “cultural strut”), and a series of debates called “Godzone” (God’s Own Country). Overland was a place for a lot of debates on the left at a time when cultural questions were still being sorted out.

In World War II, the Communist Party of Australia had adopted a left nationalism, taking over the “myth of the bush” and presenting Australian settlers as “natural communists”. This strategy continued after the war, constructing Australia as an oppressed peripheral nation, with national aspirations to be drawn on as a mode of mobilisation. In the 1950s, Overland took the motto “temper democratic, bias Australian” from Joseph Furphy, at about the time Donald Horne was taking “Australia for the White Man” off the masthead of The Bulletin.

The editors’ exacting grip sets the tone. Meanjin’s debates are now about some vanished conceptions, but it is still easier to take either side in the stoushes. Overland features well-thought-out contributions about cultural matters on the political radical left, and, mixed in with that, a certain amount of silly revolution-libido stuff. The good and the bad have aged equally. By that time, both publications were suffering falling circulation, as more reading options and American mass culture began to shift the high-cultural framework (and the “third” Melbourne journal, Arena, which this author has been associated with for 35 years, snaffled a lot of the political debate, not being restrained by grant considerations — we seek none — from full polemic and theorisation).

In the 1940s, Meanjin could sell 4000 copies to a population of just more than seven million, mostly educated to Year 9 level and with 2% doing an arts degree — equivalent, with a bit of finagling, to around 20,000-25,000 copies today. Small-magazine editors would give a kidney, literally, no exaggeration, a kidney, for those numbers today. Davidson, Judith Brett and Jenny Lee, Meanjin’s post-Clem editors, kept the practice of debate high-culture, national identity and intellectuality going, into the 1990s, by which point, in the era of full globalisation, it became a dead letter.

Thereafter Meanjin has been a magazine simply oriented to good writing, and a lot of it has been very good indeed, and issue-based debates, unanchored to an explicit “national” notion. Steadily drawn into the Melbourne University apparatus, it has finally gained (in some years) the funding Clem sought, just as its purpose has flowed into general middlebrow/academic culture. 

Overland has had a more interesting post-founder history. For years it was rumoured that the Overland board was required to have a member of the Murray-Smith family. Turns out this was apocryphal, but it led to the joke that Overland was the only Marxist journal to have successfully made the transition from capitalism to feudalism. Its two subsequent periods (under Barrett Reid and John McLaren, then Ian Syson and Nathan Hollier) were in the nationalist-workerist tradition.

ASIO had infiltrated Overland’s volunteer pool in the 1970s, and it had almost got the editorship; it appears to have concluded that grabbing it might not be worth the fuss (or the work). If Stephen thought he could protect a left-nationalist current from beyond his island grave, he was wrong; in 2007, the international far-left, i.e. the Trotskyists, were let in, with Jeff Sparrow, Rjurik Davidson and then Jacinda Woodhead taking over the masthead. They took it in a new direction, which it sorely needed, and produced many great issues. But of what? By no stretch could it be said to have a continuity with left nationalism.

The fact that such a shift could occur was proof of Overland’s contradiction. Drawing on a political tradition centred on theory, it nevertheless had always been under-theorised (something no one has said about Arena, ever). Murray-Smith, like many passionate people who loved their country and wanted it to be a place of universal flourishing, was drawn to Australian communism by its willingness to inhabit nationalism. When that fell apart, Murray-Smith and those around him were simply unable to think their way out of the dilemma, which resulted in his own withdrawal into a post-political, quasi-aristocratic persona (his last public campaign was against metrication), and his emotional separation from much of the material he was wise enough to know he needed to publish. Overland thus featured Frank Moorhouse’s best work, at the same time as its editor hated it.

To this reader, that theoretical insufficiency shows in the journal’s current expression, as (with some exceptions) something of a clearing-house for the cataloguing of multiple oppressions, unsynthesised. Would it have been otherwise had its guardians maintained something closer to its founding tradition? Who knows. But it poses the question of what is owed to a founder’s vision by those who come after, which is a genuine dilemma. Sometimes you have to destroy Mt Eliza village to save it. 

Was it worth it? For Christesen, it has to be, and it is. This extraordinary, virtuoso book shows that. It weaves together a vast amount of material, fluently merging national and institutional history, portraits of more than a dozen then major, now consumed, figures, with the texture of life as it was then — anchored by the portrait of Christesen, cursing Caliban on Murray-Smith island. A decade in the making, this shows how to do multi-biography in a manner that illustrates a whole cultural terrain, while never losing sight of the people who made the actual difference. It’s a major work of our cultural history.

For the small-magazine editor, shifting the shit from one end of the article to the other and then back again, the life is Beckettian, but the motto is from Ghandi: “Whatever you do will make no difference, but you must do it anyway.” Meaning of course it does, but you never see what doesn’t if you don’t.

Christesen kept a way of talking about Australia going on, that had he not, might not have. To see what didn’t happen, ask what would have if someone could have started and kept a single highbrow Australian film studio going — the “new wave” of the 1970s would not have caught in the gate and unspooled into half a dozen different production strategies over 30 years, each worse than the last, to the embarrassing excuse for a film sector we have today.

Literary culture got its Christesen (and the people around him; film didn’t). Hilary McPhee did time in what Davidson calls “the Clemlin” (one of a most bountiful supply of Clem puns by the generous author), and she and Di Gribble published Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip, and on it goes. One could go through the arts one by one and say where this didn’t and didn’t occur.

Indeed, if Christesen was the last Jindyworobak, then, to go wildly overland, the movement’s great final moment might have been the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics, in which any tendency to po-faced self-celebration was shoved aside by a mix of Hills Hoists, dancing Victa mowers, replicant Ednas and Cathy Freeman lighting the flame in the ceremony’s one shot at getting it right. Possibly, the memory of that now has its own problems, but, look, we not only gave a ceremony that no other nation could do, we finally and absolutely removed from the Olympics the stink of Berlin and 1936, which had lingered in every Riefenstahlite ceremony since.

It is not absurd to believe that was possible because of a sheaf of poems made on a spike in the bend of a river a lifetime earlier.