In the unlikely assortment of recent magazines I have for review, consumer involvement is particularly evident in alternative lifestyle magazines like Maggie’s Farm and especially Grass Roots, a fascinating mag which offers helpful information from amateurs and professionals on everything from bee-swarming to op-shopping to writing as a cottage industry. It is also evident at what the Literature Board would see as the ‘lower’ end of the literary scale – magazines like Peninsula Writing from Geelong or Migrant Seven, involving some of the same Melbourne poets who brought out the now defunct 9 to 5.

The fourth issue of Peninsula Writing includes the winning entries in the Peninsula F.A.W. Open Day competition. Whatever you may think about literary prizes, and it certainly is a curly one for many of those who believe in them, enter and win them, it’s a thrill desperately needed in a line of business where disappointment, doubt, rejection and just plain pitfalls are a lot thicker on the ground than thrills. Unfortunately even the winners, particularly of many of the smaller prizes and awards, often miss out on seeing their stories or poems published at all, and that’s obviously one little literary service these small circulation magazines can perform very readily and well.

More earnest is Migrant Seven, produced “by and for migrants, and with the help of friends who are sympathetic to the plight of migrants here and everywhere else…!” The operative word here is “plight”, summing up the flavour of a magazine which focuses on the politics and injustices of racism as the most important aspect of the migrant experience. In an editorial fairly hopping with dots and exclamation marks, editor, jeltje, explains that “we’re an artistic and literary magazine and we’re trying to interpret the migrant experience. What form this literature and art might take is really up to our contributors themselves…”

It’s all good, solid intention, and although never likely to achieve enormous circulation or critical acclaim, Migrant Seven slots comfortably into a niche that might otherwise remain vacant in the great multiculturalism debate. And if the sheer acreage devoted to multiculturalism in the wide variety of recent literary and cultural magazines is anything to go by, it must be the biggest single concern exercising the minds of those who are thinking about art and culture in Australia at the moment. So much so that in that game of musical chairs called small magazine subsidising, where every time there’s a shuffle someone misses out, and where there seem to be fewer and fewer grants to go round an ever expanding circle of hardy players, the Literature Board has decided to fund a high-class twice-yearly multicultural magazine, Outrider.

Outrider takes up a quite different position from Migrant Seven, declaring that it “shall serve no sectarian ends”, and that it shall “aim at freedom of expression within the confines of propriety and the spirit of ecumenism”. But apart from the common interest in the migrant experience, there’s no comparison between the two magazines, and they perform vastly different functions – the one typeset on the family Remington and laid out on the kitchen table (yes, even you can do it), the other professional-looking, proud and very conscious of setting extremely high literary standards, publishing fiction, poetry, interviews, comment, book reviews and bibliographical and other research by the country’s leading ethnic writers as well as Australians writing about the multicultural experience. (But still only able to pay $10 per 1,000 words, just one-seventeenth of the Australian Journalists’ Association rate for professional writers.)

There’s some excellent writing in Outrider, and it seems certain that a significant slab of the multiculturalism debate will take place between its covers. In the massive 234-page second issue which I have here, dated Dec., 1984, no less than 15 articles are devoted to aspects of multiculturalism, including an excerpt from Meanjin editor Judith Brett’s review of the first issue, and including two bibliographical contributions, one of Greek writing in Australia from 1943 to 1983 by Alexandra Karakostas and another by Serge Liberman, “Creative Writing by Jews in Australia”. This issue’s feature, in a special pink insert, is a very nicely-written playscript by Manfred Jurgensen, although I do get the feeling that this kind of play has been written over and over again during the last 15 years or so.

Reading a huge pile of recent magazines from cover to cover in the space of a week is not the ideal approach to catching up on what’s going on, but there are advantages, and one fact that became abundantly clear was the number of stories and poems being produced by Australian writers which deal with the Australian traveller overseas. In magazines as diverse as Sydney’s Billy Blue, Poetry-in-Queensland and the Melbourne-based Going-Down Swinging, Australians are writing about the impact of travel, i.e., of involvement in other cultures, on the ideas we have of ourselves as individuals and as Australians. It’s still multiculturalism, and at least the editors of Outrider are aware of the importance of this phenomenon, with their inclusion of work like Beverley Farmer’s ‘White Friday’, another of her Greek stories. But I didn’t come across any satisfactory discussion of the importance of this other half of multiculturalism, which, in view of the sheer weight of the numbers that still go to make up Australian society, is at least as important as the immigrant experience to our understanding of where our literature is going. So that a question like whether ethnic writing is mainstream or tributary seems more worrying to many writers than it should be.

But the more unpleasant possibilities of the multiculturalism we arc now practising are not really being questioned, apart from the odd sideswipe, in any of the magazines I have looked at for this review. And that includes Island, another excellent magazine which has devoted a good bit of space to this debate in recent numbers, including Humphrey McQueen’s predictably well-argued ‘Blainey and Multiculturalism’ in No. 21 and Donald Horne’s ‘National Identity and the Arts in Australia’, where he declares that “we must develop a working approach to the Australia Council’s national-identity function that excludes any possibility of their being one national identity and of the Australia Council being its prophet”. Well, who could argue with that?

But there is a slimy underbelly to all this. A magazine like The Jewish Commentary seems a harmless enough community project – common interest speaking to common interest in a community radically unlike any other, whose ties are religious, cultural and racial, cemented together in our time by the Holocaust and the birth of the state of Israel. The Jewish Commentary seems to cope OK with the trickier aspects of Zionism, for instance, by having a good range of Jewish argument and opinion, at least to my outsider eyes, and admittedly looking only at one number – Volume 2, Issue 1. But going back to Outrider, one of whose leading lights seems to be Serge Liberman, the problem shows up quite sharply in his story, ‘Seeds’ which ends in this way:

...I open my soul and through that opening his (Ziada’s) own soul enters into me and with his soul, he brings still more, hosts of souls, generations of souls, the ever-surviving souls of my people that through me they may continue and live and abide and that their greatness, our greatness brilliance light may yet be given unto the nations as was the charge given to our father of fathers Abraham our Father whose own seed was to be as the stars of heaven and the sand upon the sea.

Those few words, “that their greatness, that our greatness brilliance light may yet be given unto the nations” are bound to get right up some people’s noses, and while very few Australians would want to detract at all from the right of members of the Jewish community to preserve their heritage, if that or any heritage involves the expression of a feeling of superiority to other racial, cultural or religious heritages, there will be the same kind of trouble which almost spelled disaster for community broadcasting a very few years ago. In the case of Melbourne’s 3CR Community Radio versus the Jewish Board of Deputies, the battle still goes on. The tension will also continue between those forces which operate to dissolve individuality and those, like multiculturalism as we know it in Australia, which seek to preserve individual and group differences. But it’s as old as the hills to think that your group is better than the others. In many cases that’s why we belong to one bunch and not another. Although there’s no choosing race, nationality or gender, for instance, that’s never stopped us from considering ourselves superior on those grounds.

However all of this applies, not just to ‘ethnic’ groups, but to all the groupings and formations which make up a society like ours and which put out periodical publications like these. After all, multiculturalism isn’t just to do with ethnicity. Apart from the obvious practical functions, small mags appeal, to the ‘clubbing’ instinct. It goes back to childhood, to secret cubbies and passwords and although that’s healthy enough and even necessary, in some cases it occurs to the detriment of the magazine. In that category I would have to include Art and Text which, in the issue I have here, is published jointly with ZG in the U.K., the U.S. and Australia, and is showing truer colours in this slicker, up-market format.

I could never warm to Art and Text. I think ‘up itself’ is what somebody less couth than myself would call prose like this from ‘What She Means, To You’ by Jane Weinstock “originally printed in catalogue for the Barbara Kruger exhibitions at the ICA, London/Kunsthalle, Basel, 1983”: “Barbara Kruger will not become what she means to you. But what exactly does she mean to you? Perhaps nothing, or maybe almost nothing. She’s your almost nothing, your pretty pet.” The “you”, the ignoramus viewer of Kruger’s works, poor unfortunate, couldn’t possibly, with your own eyes, have the slightest idea what this genius is on about. Ugh. It’s so easy for magazines like Art and Text, Sydney’s Billy Blue and the Adelaide-based Words and Visions (much better than the other two) to come completely unstuck in their determination to be up-to-the-minute and groovy. That way danger lies – the Emperor’s new Clothes, Ern Malley and all that. But Billy Blue is by far the most doubtful of these three. They lost me altogether when they boastfully proclaimed responsibility, in the first issue I read, for that atrocious book of sexist humour, Never Hit a Woman – What Are Your Feet For?

Measured against these three, Going Down Swinging No. 6, has been a long time coming, but well worth the wait and includes lots of new names and an interview with the Greek poet TTO, who is currently editing an anthology of performance poetry for Penguin.