Institute of Advanced Studies

The Australian literary landscape is a graveyard marked with the headstones of our dead journals.

Here Lies Melbourne's Argus, Rest in Peace Adelaide's News, Father to the Bulletin Our Love - Sydney'sObserver; like row upon row of the Earth's teeth, attesting to the cruel ecology of the national and state-based publishing industries. Such journals seem to be born in waves, following the Second World War, the Cold War and long periods of political conservatism. They similarly die in clusters, by sudden seizure after the money-drip dries out or by fusion with their counterparts and competitors. In Western Australia one of these journals has refused to be cold and still; it comes clawing back up through the peaty ground, curling its fingers over the green-lip of the turf and announces Lazarus-like that this not the time for demise! Western Australia's The Critic has been mouth-to-mouthed and brought back to life as The New Critic - the journal of the Institute of Advanced Studies.

The Critic ran from 1961-1970 as a two-page broadsheet published by the Literary Society of the University of Western Australia and supported by a £45 subsidy from the Arts Union of that university. It sold for sixpence. The journal was initially focused on the arts (theatre, architecture, literature and exhibits) but later spread into the arts more broadly, and then into politics including education and freedom of expression. The Critic declared an open agenda of 'assess(ing) in all directions' whilst denouncing the insanity of WA's press and the insularity of the national journals (that 'fashionable Melbourne game of Critical Standards'). The journal disappeared in 1970 along with a number of other state-based publications, correlating with the increasing readership of national publications. The Critic still exists in physical form in the archives of the Scholars Centre in the University of Western Australia, a luminous artefact of thin onion-skin pages waiting to be unearthed.

In 2005 the Institute of Advanced Studies (the IAS), headed by Terri-ann White, decided that the time was ripe for the production of a journal. The IAS is a cross-disciplinary research unit in Western Australia, motivated by the desire to advance intellectual debate through collaborative research and public forums. Noticing that WA thinkers, artists, scientists and scholars did not get much circulation in the national publications, and nor did Western Australian issues manage to grab much of the limelight, the IAS set about trying to clear a glittering blank page for new thoughts and new writers.

The New Critic attempts to balance heavy-weight contributors against emergent thinkers, many of them post-graduates or younger industry-based writers from around the nation. It attempts to cut out a new territory for the stories that aren't being told in the mainstream; the opinions that other publications won't take risks for. The journal covers politics, the arts, international issues, sport, literature, science, history, ethics, reviews and a small amount of creative fiction. All articles are refereed according to the standard Peer Review refereeing process as required by DEST.

The reason that The Critic managed to exist, mushroom-like in the corners of the late 1960s, was that it didn't have to pay contributors and could use short print runs done by small quota print companies. The New Critic is similarly light on the costs of production, whilst maintaining a broad readership.

The New Critic is produced three times each year by the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Western Australia. The opinions expressed within are those of the authors, not of the Editors, the Institute of Advanced Studies, the University of Western Australia, or of any other individual.

The New Critic 2009

ISSN

1833-7597