In Sydney in 1956, in the depths of the Cold War, the publisher Richard Krygier, a Polish-Jewish refugee and one-time representative of the Polish Socialist Party in exile in Australia, and the editor James McAuley, a poet, brought out the first edition of a new literary-cultural journal aiming to break the left’s virtual monopoly of such publications in Australia. It was backed by the small Australian Committee for Cultural Freedom, but only the most quixotic optimist would have predicted a long life for it.
The journal, named Quadrant by McAuley, was first a quarterly and since 1975 has been a monthly. Recently it celebrated its 400th issue, and 2006 is its fiftieth year of publication. Its original leftist rivals have mostly disappeared or drifted into simplistic polemic or academically subsidized postmodernism. None has anything like Quadrant’s continuing influence or circulation.
Robert Conquest said, “Quadrant has survived and flourished in a jungle full of pygmies with poisoned arrows. Australia is lucky to have it and so are we in the world at large.”
Quadrant has been edited since 1997 by the Australian journalist and economist Padraic McGuinness. Its literary editor is Les Murray, the winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Queen’s Medal for poetry, and generally acknowledged as Australia’s finest living poet. Its longest serving editor, still a regular contributor, is Peter Coleman, one of Australia’s most dynamic public intellectuals. Coleman is the author of The Liberal Conspiracy, a history of
