When a new Australian magazine invites me to reminisce about old Australian magazines I have worked for, it has either a lot of courage or a shocking grasp of my history. True, I have written for so many weeklies, fortnightlies, monthlies and quarterlies over the years that an envious colleague once commented I had more columns than the Parthenon. But that’s the good news. The bad news is they are all ex-magazines. I qualify as a serial killer.

Prominent among the corpses are Oz magazine, Richard Walsh, Richard Neville and Martin Sharp’s post-undergraduate effort – actually not all that post – and Nation Review. In the years since and in-between have come tumbling a clatter of offspring: Living Daylights (Neville’s attempt at hippiedom in which he wrote under the pseudonym Harry Gumboot); The National Times (political scandal meets lifestyle – both lose – under the upwardly mobile Max Suich); Australian Left Review (populists trying to be academic); Australian Society (academics trying to be popular); Matilda (satire and scatology inside some deceptively picturesque covers); The Independent Monthly (Suich returns, this time downwardly mobile); The Republican (the best thing about which was Louisa, mother of Henry, Lawson’s old title); The Unicorn (local plagiarism, with the owner absconding just in time); and The Eye (biting and funny but hopelessly over-designed).

Some were so fleeting that their names are forgotten. Others were actually aborted; after receiving my contri-butions the editors failed to publish at all. The only truly long-term survivors have been the university papers, with their built-in subsidies and captive audiences, and The Bulletin, which has constantly remade itself since the days of founding editor J.F. Archibald. If a year is a long time in politics, then ten years is a lifetime for an Australian political magazine.

One groundbreaking magazine – or “independent journal of opinion”, as it styled itself – actually lasted 14 years. Nation, published every fortnight from 1958 to 1972, was founded by Tom Fitzgerald. Undernourished by his day job as The Sydney Morning Herald’s brilliant financial editor, Fitzgerald bankrolled Nation by mortgaging the family home and taking out a 5,000-pound loan. Filing cabinets were constructed from fruit boxes. My father, who wrote about TV, books and much else for Nation, described the upstairs office at 777B George Street, Sydney, as “a room above an illegal abortionist in a grimy building near Railway Square”. Once, when Nation extracted a chapter of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, federal security officers scoured the printery in search of the incendiary pages. They were hidden, its Adelaide correspondent Ken Inglis recalls, in a toilet cistern.