Hardly anyone reads Meanjin any more. So why does its end even matter?

1 week ago 5

Opinion

September 7, 2025 — 4.30pm

As death sentences go, the line from Melbourne University Publishing explaining the axing of Meanjin spoke volumes: “The decision was made on purely financial grounds.”

Whatever the merits of the second-oldest literary journal in Australia – and there are plenty of people who have come out in support of it since the news broke on Thursday – that line might equally apply to the entirety of cultural production in this country. And its impact is chilling.

The value of culture, it implies, is to be assessed in monetary terms purely.

But is money pure? Is that store of value paradoxically value-free, uninformed by ideology or personal interest or shadowy motivations? Hardly.

MUP chair Professor Warren Bebbington this week defended the decision to axe Meanjin by saying the journal was “no longer viable to produce”. That presumably has something to do with the equation between readership, circulation and costs. But for all that, this was a “purely financial” decision, there has been no disclosure about numbers, leading some to speculate at other shadowy motives.

The economic rationalists who have held sway over political discourse in the West for the past 40 years (largely regardless of which “side” was in power) would have us believe “the market will decide” is the only mantra we should pay heed to. But that would be the same market that has decided to turn our universities into degree factories where the barely literate can still earn a qualification because to fail them risks jeopardising the business model that now underpins the very existence of those institutions.

Value-free? Hardly. Valueless? Increasingly so.

What we can see from MUP’s most recent financial records, for the 2023-24 financial year, is that the university funded Meanjin to the tune of $220,000 per year. Subscriptions brought in another $112,790. A print and digital subscription cost $120 per year; digital-only was $5 per month. Buying it in a bookstore will set you back $25.

As the ABC’s Jonathan Green, a former editor of the journal, told Crikey this week: “Meanjin’s financial demand is trivial … a few hundred thousand dollars.”

Most cultural production, in this country and elsewhere, does not make sense on “purely financial grounds”, and it never will. The vast majority of actors, writers, painters, musicians, singers, sculptors – add your field of choice, really – ply their craft for a pittance, subsidising their low- or no-paid efforts with other jobs (call centres, hospitality, office work) that may not nourish the soul but puts food on the table. The lucky get a job at scale every once in a while. The very lucky have the bank of mum and dad or inherited wealth to lean on. A mere sliver become successful beyond the dreams of mere mortals.

According to a Creative Australia report published in March 2024, in the 2021-22 financial year, the more than 47,000 people who identified as creative workers in Australia earned an average of $44,500. Of that, just $11,000 was classed as “creative income”. The rest came from supplementary work or other sources. For context, the average wage in Australia in 2022 was about $73,000 a year. The minimum wage was roughly $42,000.

For the average creative in Australia, then, the work they do makes no sense at all on “purely financial grounds”. But thankfully, most creative work is not done on those grounds at all.

And yet, it is on the basis of economic contribution that arguments in support of Australian culture are most often made. Whether it be the soft-diplomacy value of showcasing our locations and production expertise to the world as we invite Hollywood to film here, or the jobs created, or the “economic impact” and “multiplier effect” of a major stage musical, it is more often than not the dollars that dominate the discussion.

That is both a philosophical and a strategic mistake. Culture is where we find our voice, challenge our assumptions, learn to think differently and express ourselves in new ways. It is where we create and discover shared meaning and identity, a sense of what we have in common and where we can celebrate difference.

It is so much more than dollars or clicks, but that is too often how value is determined by those who can’t (or won’t) see it through a more nuanced prism.

As Peter Carey – one of the many leading Australian authors published in Meanjin since its launch in 1940 – put it in a statement issued on Friday, to assess the value of cultural output in financial terms is to miss the mark entirely.

“Remember when property developers destroyed mangroves without understanding they were a breeding ground for mud crabs, prawns and barramundi,” Carey said. “They bear comparison with MUP [Melbourne University Publishing], who are now destroying a proven breeding ground for Australian literary culture.

“The proof is everywhere about us, in our bookshops, in our universities, wherever Australian literature is valued. As for me, here are the receipts: I was an unknown writer before I received these letters.”

The letters to which he was referring confirmed his inclusion in the autumn and summer editions of the quarterly journal in 1972, for the princely sum of $40 a piece (roughly $500 in today’s money). On purely financial grounds, it no doubt represented a lousy return on the time and effort expended in crafting the short stories, Peeling and Windmill in the West. But in terms of a break for an emerging talent who would go on to become one of this country’s most lauded authors, it was priceless.

Whatever Meanjin’s challenges may have been in terms of reaching audiences, they demanded imagination and initiative rather than the axe. That they didn’t get those things is disappointing, but hardly surprising.

It’s exactly what you get when you assess things on purely financial grounds.

Karl Quinn is a senior culture writer at The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald

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