The ‘bourgeois public sphere’ that Habermas defined and discussed has been further eroded during the period of this study, even if his definition was dependent upon a relatively radical and questioning intellectual class of writers and readers desirous of conversation in relatively close proximity. Yet there is some evidence of the remnants of a public sphere, if only in the support that the Griffith Review has maintained for its type of discursive essays on contemporary issues.

Australia, though, may only be capable of supporting one such journal. The bourgeois public sphere is now, if anything, decentred, asymmetrical in terms of potential communities of interest and basically pragmatic rather than idealistic — and radically different from Habermas's organic idea. As Stuart Glover has pointed out, ‘the contemporary public sphere is very different from the free public sphere Jurgen Habermas imagined about eighteenth century London’. Glover suggested that ‘by the nineteenth century this idealised free literary sphere gave way to a quasi-literary public sphere wherein corporate and state interests predominated’ (‘No Magazine’ 24). Even so, he has argued that small magazines represent, apart from geography, a second sphere defined by ‘diversity and independence’ where news and media are dominated by corporate voices (23).

Overland has retained and refertilised its constituency through its own brand of Leftism. The Australian Book Review has deliberately promoted itself as respectable and authoritative, and is still in search of respectability, whereas Meanjin is attempting to refind its feet. Of the other magazines I have discussed, most were creative writing journals, some of which were exclusively oriented towards poetry. It is a moot point as to whether the more anarchistic and less commercially oriented magazines were evidence of transgression in this stage of late capitalism. Yet lack of recognition and market coverage can go hand-in-hand, so it can be construed that they were incompatible with useful bourgeois norms, which are sometimes expressed in commodified terms. In any case, publishing unknown authors, as was the brief of several of the magazines, is transgressive (whether or not conceived in ideological terms) and counter to the dynamics of commodification in a culture dominated by celebrity as market branding.