Who killed Meanjin?

In February, Meanjin’s performance and sustainability were the focus of a review commissioned by Melbourne University Press (MUP). Its report, delivered a month before the publisher’s controversial axing of the 85-year-old journal, was never released publicly. Its list of recommendations did not include closing Meanjin.

Meanwhile, prior to the August decision to shutter the journal, the relationship between editor Esther Anatolitis and MUP had soured to the degree that Anatolitis had appointed a lawyer, Josh Bornstein, to represent her interests. The revelation comes as interested stakeholders continue to come forward with proposals to take on the title, even as MUP confirmed last week that “the journal is not for sale”.

Nothing in the final recommendations of MUP’s independent review into Meanjin pointed towards this outcome. Delivered in July, the review was conducted by arts, cultural and nonprofit consultant Kate Larsen. The recommendations remain confidential for now, but it’s understood they were of a structural/organisational nature — to ensure the journal’s sustainability — rather than about any staff’s personal performance.

Larsen released a statement last Thursday saying that, “like the rest of Australia’s literary community”, she was “shocked and devastated” to hear of the closure. MUP never showed her full review to the Meanjin team, many of whom had provided information to it.

‘Political motivations’

Readers will no doubt see the irony in a cash-strapped organisation paying an independent consultant for three months to provide strategies for financial viability, only to ignore the findings on the grounds of financial viability. They will also understand that the window of July to early August (when staff were notified of the impending closure) allowed no time to even begin to implement any of the report’s recommendations.

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The revelation comes amid continued scepticism around MUP’s official explanation for closing the journal being based on “purely financial grounds”. Former staff believe the decision had a political component.

Meanjin’s former poetry editor Jeanine Leane told Crikey that the sudden closure was “part of a wider shrinking of publishing spaces that provide venues for rigorous social debate and allow for differences and diverse voices”. The “cancellations of artists and fellowships — not just at Meanjin — [has been] intended to curtail social discourse”, and the forces allied against free speech were trying to “edit the national conscience”.

“Meanjin allowed people to speak out.”

Former Meanjin deputy editor Eli McLean said, “Considering the University of Melbourne’s track record of censoring and surveilling certain modes of political speech on its campuses, I am not surprised that so many people have come to the conclusion that there may have been political motivations for Meanjin’s abrupt closure.”

The journal’s book reviews editor Cher Tan questioned the haste and the lack of contingency planning. Staff contacted by Crikey were devastated by the closure, confused at how suddenly it happened, and dismayed that it had been done without any consultation.

A non-disclosure agreement

Anatolitis is subject to a non-disclosure agreement and has not made any public statements. (Why a simple matter of financial viability for a small magazine would necessitate a non-disclosure agreement is unclear.) However, it’s understood that, for months, Anatolitis had been under growing pressure from management. There are two narratives on why this was.

The first is that it started around the publication of a Spring 2024 essay entitled “Jews, antisemitism and power in Australia” by Melbourne academic Max Kaiser, which was critical of Australian Jewish organisations’ support for Israel’s actions in Gaza. (Meanjin had also published other writers on Gaza both before and since then.)

The narrative from university and MUP sources is that as the journal’s costs rose (for distribution, production, paper, etc) and subscriptions fell, management and Anatolitis fell out over how to address this — or indeed whether it represented a significant issue, compared to all the other times past that Meanjin and MUP had been cash-strapped.

“I think anyone who has looked at the actual sums involved can see that the financial arguments just don’t add up,” Kaiser tells Crikey.

“It’s hard not to surmise that Meanjin was killed at least in part because it was too problematic politically and culturally for the University of Melbourne. Certainly the current editors were not at all afraid to publish challenging work, including work supporting a free Palestine. Meanjin was one of the few spaces in Australia where such perspectives could be explored freely and where someone like myself could publish a long-form essay as cultural/political intervention.”

Digging into the numbers

Everyone understands that literary magazines exist on subsidies. They always have. Meanjin, housed under MUP since 2008, lived off subsidies and subscriptions for 85 years, and its cost base was very small indeed. In 2025, it had two part-time staff; the handful of other workers were freelancers. No-one was paid handsomely.

Nevertheless it’s also understandable that the magazine’s owners would seek an audit such as the Larsen report every so often. Meanjin subscriptions had risen during the Covid pandemic — as did for many magazines — and have fallen back since. McLean has stated that he believed they were trending up again recently, and he had been feeling positive about the journal’s future. Either way, rather than treating low subscriptions as a reason to invest effort, MUP chose to kill the publication.

It is worth noting that MUP, rather than Meanjin’s editor, is ultimately responsible for Meanjin’s finances. Crikey understands the editor was not responsible for, or privy to, budgets and distribution contracts.

Prior to the August decision on Meanjin’s closure, Anatolitis and MUP’s relationship had soured to the degree that Anatolitis had appointed a lawyer, Josh Bornstein, to represent her interests. If MUP sought to get rid of her, or believed she was the problem, it presumably didn’t have sufficient grounds, given that it did not fight to pursue the action. Instead it sacrificed the whole magazine.

‘The journal is not for sale’

It was put to me by two informed sources that the university administration had decided to pull its funding for Meanjin, and that this was the reason the journal was financially unviable. The University of Melbourne, Australia’s wealthiest university, put a mere $220,000 annually into running it, a fraction of the earnings of a single executive.

But when Crikey put this to MUP chair Professor Warren Bebbington and the university administration, both flatly denied it.

Bebbington cited the university’s original statement denying it had any involvement in the cessation decision, adding: “It was a decision of the MUP board alone, and whoever told you that our decision followed a university decision to withdraw Meanjin’s funding is completely misinformed: it did not.”

Bebbington also added, “If you wanted to develop your own picture of why Meanjin became unviable, many of the comments on Georgie Kibble’s (sic) story in today’s Australian https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/09/16/meanjin-closure-melbourne-university-press-university-of-melbourne/, the lead Letter to the Editor in today’s Age by head of Readings Mark Rubbo https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/09/16/meanjin-closure-melbourne-university-press-university-of-melbourne/, or Guy Rundle’s blog on Meanjin last Friday https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/09/16/meanjin-closure-melbourne-university-press-university-of-melbourne/ might help.”

Each piece of writing represents a depressing and pessimistic vision of Australian literary culture, certainly strange choices for the chair of MUP to tout. (Among the comments under The Australian piece: “Meanjin meandered then marched over to the far left which made it less and less interesting and relevant” and “Meanjin is no loss. For a long while it has been indulgent and stupid as any writers festival. Why did it take the soporific UMELB so long to bring on the beneficial execution.”)

A university spokesperson reiterated earlier statements: “The decision to cease publication of Meanjin at the end of 2025 was made independently by the Melbourne University Publishing (MUP) Limited Board. The MUP board chairman subsequently informed the University of Melbourne Finance Committee of MUP’s decision in August. The Finance Committee noted the MUP board’s decision to cease publication of Meanjin and that therefore the contribution towards Meanjin would cease from 2026.”

Unexplored options

Pressure can be levied in many and varied ways, and while Crikey accepts these statements, there are other reasons to believe Meanjin’s closure had a political component.

MUP made scant effort to save the journal before shutting it down. In addition to not implementing any recommendations of the Larsen review, MUP neither called out for public support in any form, nor appealed to subscribers or the broader public, nor waited for any possible grants from the new Writing Australia literary body, established in July. It didn’t approach philanthropists (some of whom have reportedly already expressed interest in saving it). It didn’t seek a new home for Meanjin. It simply folded the 85-year-old institution.

As it stands, MUP is holding on to the copyright for the journal and promises to open the archives to all and sundry (including AI bots, presumably). “The journal is not for sale”, MUP’s chief executive and publisher Foong Ling Kong told The Guardian on Thursday. This stance of officially protecting its legacy while not allowing anyone else to exploit or continue it will not be popular among Meanjin’s supporters, and the issue threatens to play out over months: there are still two editions of Meanjin to come out. The last scheduled edition will be the 85th anniversary edition in December.

Crikey put questions to Arts Minister Tony Burke, including that, given there are several philanthropic outlets interested in saving it, what steps in his view should be taken to save Meanjin, and whether the government was looking into the closure as a matter of urgency or proposing to step in to help. His office did not respond.

Despite the lack of clarity and competing versions about motives and culprits, some things in this ugly episode are irrefutable: another venerable cultural institution has been terminated by a corporate managerialism that places little value on literary expression, and the university behind it refused to fight for its preservation.

“Its loss is not just a literary blow,” concludes Max Kaiser. “It signals a narrowing of public debate and unfortunately a chilling message to people daring to support the publication of inconvenient truths. I do not know exactly what the machinations were that led to the decision to close Meanjin, but I think we should all be very disturbed by it.”

Regardless of MUP’s own stance or financial constraints, the university also refused to step in to save Australia’s second-oldest literary journal. What this means for the literary community is the loss not just of a precious independent outlet for writers but also the financial support it entailed for writers and editors. MUP’s decision led to the loss of $220,000 from the university, grants from Creative Australia and the Copyright Agency, and other financial support for the magazine.

The shallow pond is nearly dry.

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