A Northern Affair: Victor Kennedy’s Northern Affairs in/and Australian Magazine Culture

It is not particularly controversial to observe that the history of Australian publishing has been condensed in—though not confined to—the south-eastern quarter of the continent. It can, at times, be tempting to view the writing from Australia’s northern and westerly reaches as historical marginalia. Nevertheless, Frank S. Greenop, in his History of Magazine Publishing in Australia (1947), recognised Victor Kennedy’s Northern Affairs (1931–32) as ‘the first attempt since the goldrush days to produce a provincial magazine’ in the country. The magazine’s editor, the journalist, poet and story writer Victor Kennedy, is now better known for his later connections with the Jindyworobak group, but this earlier foray into publishing in Far North Queensland reveals his nascent ambitions to develop a magazine that would provide an opportunity for local and visiting writers ‘to interpret the life, aims and ideals of the people of the Farthest North’. In its short life, Northern Affairs achieved its aims with varying success, but it provides a record of a moment in which an organ for regional writing intersected with national debates about the development of an identifiably Australian literary culture. This paper examines Victor Kennedy’s Northern Affairs as a miscellany of magazine departments that addressed both local and national concerns in the context of the literary, cultural, and political debates of the 1930s. The paper positions the magazine in regional and national contexts in order to isolate a unique tone of address that might be a sign of Kennedy’s future literary directions, and identifies the ways in which writing from and about Far North Queensland extends beyond the parochial to engage with culture on a national scale.

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