Bulletin

an Australian journal, founded in 1880 by J. F. Archibald and John Haynes. In 1961 it was sold to Consolidated Press and became more of a newspaper, although literature was reintroduced in a quarterly supplement in 1980, edited by Geoffrey Dutton. In its early stages the Bulletin contained a mixture of humour, illustrations, cartoons, political comment, and sports news. The new element in Bulletin was the invitation for the readership to contribute. As a result material from a bush readership began to appear; underlying the humour, which was a dominant note in the early years, was a sense of the grimness of bush life, accompanied by a radical hostility to harshness and repression in the social system. Paradoxically, a separate Red Page was created as a forum for writers, and over a period of seventy years the journal published works from the most famous in Australian letters. The editorial requirement of ‘brevity, originality, realism and dramatic force’ elicited the greatest of Australian short stories, and it was in the pages of the Bulletin that Australian literature's first major argument, between the realism of Henry Lawson and the romanticism of Banjo Paterson, was rehearsed in detail.