SAMUEL J. COX

Phoenix Journal: The “Pilot-Ship”
of Australian Modernism

Figure 1. The cover of Phoenix Issue 1. Published by the Adelaide University Union, printed by the Hassall Press, 1935. Reproduced with permission by the Adelaide University Student Association (formally the Adelaide University Union). Cover design by John Dowie. Orphan work. Every effort has been made to trace other copyright holders.

Modernism from the Margins: Phoenix (1935–1939)

The phœnix renews her youth

only when she is burnt, burnt alive, burnt down

to hot and flocculent ash.

— D. H. Lawrence, “Phoenix” (1932)[1]

No need for apologies. It is time for a change.

— “Editorial,” Phoenix (1935)[2]

Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker’s The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (2009–2013) brought little magazines into the heart of modernist studies. Such a development would have appeared belated to Ezra Pound, who in 1930 had already noted that the radical history of “contemporary letters” is written in little magazines.[3] Following the first volume’s coverage of Britain and Ireland, Thacker and Brooker’s second and third volumes expanded the scope of their history to include America and Europe, mapping the “vast hinterland” of magazines they acknowledge remains unexplored.[4] Aware of the northern-hemisphere bias to this revival, I, along with Andrew Van der Vlies and Benjamin Madden in December of 2023, convened a workshop at the University of Adelaide titled “Modernist Print Cultures of the South,” aimed at beginning to redress this imbalance. Phoenix—a virtually unknown precursor to both the dominant literary movements responsible for the revival of Australian letters in the 1940s, founded at the very institution hosting our workshop—became emblematic of these oversights.[5] If there has already been a widespread predisposition to overlook the impetus of little magazines in literary studies, then Phoenix was doubly disadvantaged: already placed upon the putative edge of modernity in the Antipodes, its marginality was further compounded by its location in Adelaide, a provincial centre in comparison to the dominant metropolises of Sydney and Melbourne. In this respect, Phoenix presents itself as a case study for the study of modernism on the margins, both in little magazines and on the geographical edge of modernity.

The only widespread survey of Australian modernist-era magazines remains John Tregenza’s Australian Little Magazines 1923–1954 (1964). The book’s oversights include the omission of Phoenix, despite Tregenza noting it as the precursor to Angry Penguins in his bibliographic entry.[6] While several histories of modernism in Australia have been written, a literary focus remains occluded.[7] Within the study of Australian print cultures, David Carter has long been close to a lone hand in the study of Australian little magazines, including important precursors of Phoenix such as the Sydney-based Vision (1923–1924), Melbourne-based Stream (1930–1934), and Adelaide-based Desiderata (1929–1939).[8] Carter has overcome the tired old arguments about modernism’s belated arrival in Australia, by moving away from strictly studying modernism and instead showing the “contemporaneity” of a range of magazines, moving towards a model of networks rather than of import and export.[9] Victoria Kuttainen, Susan Liebich, and Sarah Gallety’s The Transported Imagination (2018) extended this approach to Australian pictorial magazines in the interwar years, establishing their “near simultaneity” with literary, artistic, and intellectual issues in London, Europe, and America.[10] However, many Australian little magazines remain undigitised and virtually unstudied. This paper returns to Phoenix to show that the radical history of Australian literary modernism—its initial impulse, or what Ezra Pound refers to as the “germ”[11]—lies in the largely-unread pages of these magazines.

Although Phoenix was born at a university, this paper argues that it must be read, like its successor Angry Penguins, as a little magazine.[12] As defined by Pound, a little magazine must announce a “program,” though this need not be complex, and, indeed, Pound adds that “One idea and its environment is probably enough for one magazine.”[13] As Brooker and Thacker argue, for Pound “the magazine itself functions as a form of manifesto.”[14] With the launch of student-union newspaper On Dit in 1932, the old Adelaide University Magazine had died; Phoenix—“modern, literary and artistic”—would be birthed from its ashes in 1935.[15] It featured a bold new name, artistic cover, and a manifesto-style editorial declaring the necessity to make “things new,” distancing itself from the “limp, anaemic” university magazine tradition, while announcing itself as a place for “significant writings.”[16]

Phoenix would take several years to reach its fiery apotheosis, but its pinnacle—the 1939 issue, published on the cusp of global war and edited by future Angry Penguins D. B. Kerr and Molly Swan—would be dazzling. However, a noted characteristic of little magazines is the constant threat they faced from “censorship” and “philistinism,” and Phoenix’s ascendance would stimulate a counter reaction by conservative forces that brought about its demise.[17] John Miles, poet and biographer of Kerr and another Angry Penguin, P. G. Pfeiffer, describes Phoenix as the “pilot ship” of the early Angry Penguins (1940–1942).[18] Given that both the Angry Penguins, an avant-garde internationalist force, and the Jindyworobaks, a radical localist and nativist force, emerged from Phoenix, it is the contention of this paper that Phoenix was the “pilot-ship” not merely of the Penguins, but of a distinctively Australian modernism.[19] The very name of the journal, Phoenix, is emblematic of the ephemeral nature of this modernism, marked by numerous fiery rebirths and many little deaths. I present the first in-depth scholarly study of Phoenix, by first examining the situatedness which enabled the journal’s emergence. I then analyse Phoenix’s material development across the five issues of its initial print run from 1935 to 1939,[20] to better understand the magazine as agent, its audience, and its implied reader.[21] Finally, building on this analysis, I examine the key contributors and their work across the first four issues, before turning to the defining issue of Phoenix, published in 1939.

London, Paris… Adelaide: A “New World”

I remember lying in bed awake at night with the words swirling round […] It was a new world.

— Clement Semmler, Pictures on the Margins (1991)[22]

Former Angry Penguin Geoffrey Dutton has noted that, while Jack Lindsay could write a memoir about Sydney titled The Roaring Twenties, “Adelaide in the 1920s made a noise like a dull groan.”[23] And yet, Max Harris could accurately state that by “the early 1940s,” a mere decade later, “Adelaide was the literary capital of Australia. No big deal.”[24] The Jindyworobaks and the Angry Penguins had dramatically shaken the arts out of their comfortable stasis to usher in a renaissance in Australian letters that briefly placed Adelaide at the centre of Australian culture. It was an anomalous position the city never held again. A number of contrary forces led to this unusual flourishing of modernism in a peripheral city, and Phoenix was at the heart of understanding this transformation. As noted, for Pound the essential ingredients of a magazine include not only its “idea,” but also its “environment,” so we first turn to the local specificities which contributed to Phoenix’s fiery emergence.

At the beginning of the 1930s, Adelaide was (unlike today) Australia’s third largest city, having attained an urban mass of 300,000 people. Yet it was also, compared to Sydney and Melbourne, regional. The city had direct links to the outback and Central Australia, and yet, thanks to its free-settler-state heritage, it was also the most aspirationally British Australian city. Nonetheless, in the hub of “conservative Anglophile Adelaide” that existed as a local pole of the wider “philistine Establishment forces of the country,” youthful radical forces, who saw themselves as immersed in European modernism and the convulsive political upheavals of the thirties, burst forth.[25] Little magazines and their programs were, like the café and the backroom press, among the “institutions that sustained and promoted modernism.”[26] Phoenix’s emergence was enabled by a bookshop, a local periodical culture, a university, and a collection of remarkable individuals. Together these forces enabled Adelaide’s formative print culture to be connected to and imagine itself as contemporaneous with London and Paris.

Figure 2. King William Street, Adelaide, bustling with trams and automobiles, 26 January 1935. Preece’s Bookshop is in the striped Beehive building on the left. Colin Thiele recalls that by the early 1940s both Rex Ingamells and Max Harris were leading literary movements that had offices in the city. See History Trust of South Australia, https://collections.history.sa.gov.au/nodes/view/36598.

Even in large European cities, the role of a single bookshop in fostering modernism could be impactful. In the smaller urban centres of Australia, they were vital. At the beating heart of modernism in Melbourne was Leonardo’s Art Shop; Adelaide had Preece’s Bookshop located in the now iconic Beehive Corner building on the corner of King William and Rundle Street.[27] Founded in 1907 by F. W. Preece, Preece’s continued in the hands of his two sons, Edgar, a consummate bookseller, and John, a dilettante whose concerns were more artistic and cultural. In the late 1930s, Preece’s was a “literary haven” where young poets and firebrands would meet, and it was often used by students as a sort of free reading room.[28] Whether it was selling Baudelaire and Rimbaud, the Faber & Faber poets, or, at the end of the decade, the New Apocalypse poets, Preece’s provided direct connection to the moderns. As Dutton recalls, Edgar “had all the advance notices of new books airmailed to him from London […] while despite a six-week sea voyage, he had the latest novel or book of poems very close to the date of their publication in London.”[29] Thanks to Preece’s Bookshop, the cultural belatedness between London and Adelaide was then, at most, six weeks.

By launching its own magazine in 1929, titled Desiderata: A Guide for Good Books, Preece’s would stimulate the beginnings of a local literary periodical culture. Although staple-bound, Desiderata presents in typesetting and layout as a quality publication. It was an “elegant” and “intelligent” magazine that across its ten-year print run “achieved a rare synthesis between literature overseas and at home.”[30] As Carter puts it, Desiderata was interested in the “contemporary—that is, modern—arts and letters.”[31] Although the Preece brothers were not strictly modernists, they were alive to its importance: introducing an article by C. R. Jury on T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), John proclaimed it “undoubtedly the most important [poem] of our generation.”[32] John’s contacts in London also enabled a fecund process of “cross-pollination” between the local and international.[33] Issues would feature, for example, occasional poems by Australian poets alongside criticism on D. H. Lawrence, reviews of outback travel literature, and extracts from Australian manuscripts paired, in issue three, with an excerpt from Virginia Woolf’s essay “Beu Brummell” (1929). Desiderata achieved all this, despite being in what Carter describes as a doubly disadvantageous position: the magazine both inhabited a marginal position within the world literary system and existed at the edge of provinciality in the national space.[34] For this reason, Carter argues that Desiderata’s very publication was a “quietly radical act of the imagination,” conceiving of Adelaide as contemporaneous with London.[35]

Phoenix sits crucially at the nexus of Adelaide-linked little magazines and publications that reshaped Australia’s literary history. Prior to Phoenix, these would include not only Desiderata, but also So This is Adelaide (1932–1933) and Foolscap (1933).[36] Alongside and after Phoenix, more impressive and significant publications emerged, including Chapbook (1935–1936), Venture (1937–1940), Jindyworobak Anthology (1938–1953), Jindyworobak Review (1938–1948), Angry Penguins (1940–1946), and Poetry (1941–1947). Despite their more amateurish quality, So This is Adelaide and Foolscap indicate an expanding periodical culture, presaging the two polarities that came to define Phoenix. The former is notable for its attacks on the establishment, for its Australian outlook, and for several reviews of contemporary avant-garde writing that retrospectively appear proto-Penguin in outlook. Two particular essays in the latter, on the “Character of the Australian Bush” and on “Australian Nomenclature,” can be considered proto-Jindyworobak.

By 1935, Adelaide had produced an accomplished platform for book reviews (Desiderata), two furtive though specialised magazines for intellectual and artistic comment (So This is Adelaide and Foolscap), and the “first Australian chapbook” (Chapbook). Preceding Phoenix by a matter of months, the finely produced Chapbook shows a periodical culture conversant with Europe and determined to reanimate aspects of its periodical history to serve contemporary ends.[37] Combining striking linocuts in the “modern manner” with creative work from youthful writers (most notably Rex Ingamells), Chapbook’s first issue set the stage for Phoenix.[38] The presence of two more experienced artists in Chapbook—Mary P. Harris and Dorrit Black—also reveals key connections between Adelaide and European modernism.[39] Among Australia’s most significant modernist painters and evangelists of modernism, Black returned to Adelaide permanently the year before Phoenix emerged. Having studied in 1927 at the London Grosvenor School of Modern Art (where Claude Flight was championing the linocut), and having taken tutelage from renowned cubists André Lhote and Albert Gleizes in Paris in 1929 (contact she reestablished in 1934), Black was directly connected to contemporary European modernism. In turn, Mary P. Harris was a socially progressive Quaker who had been educated at the Edinburgh College of Art. The spiritual and modernist-informed nature of her work has only recently become clear. Harris furthered her influence as an educator by her editorship of the Adelaide South Australian School of Art’s annual magazine, the Forerunner (1930–1938), which, with its daring woodcuts, linocuts, prints, and work by students alongside work by established professionals, was a direct forerunner to Phoenix.[40]

Though the University of Adelaide, another key institution in Phoenix’s emergence, was deeply conservative in the early 1930s, the ferment of change was brewing.[41] A small though expanding institution (under 1500 students in 1935), its model and atmosphere had attracted a high-quality faculty, with former students recalling its rigorous intellectual standards.[42] Amid the social upheaval of the early 1930s, its student body would be emboldened by the establishment first of the student union in 1930 and second of its primary organ, the student newspaper On Dit, in 1932.[43] Coinciding with growing student agency, the English Department gained two new staff members in the 1930s who were young and well acquainted with contemporary Europe and the moderns. The retiring Jury Chair of English, Archibald Strong, a man who “did not recognise literary figures much beyond the late nineteenth century,” was replaced by John Innes Mackintosh Stewart.[44] At twenty-nine, reputedly the youngest professor yet appointed at the university, Stewart’s appointment as Jury Chair of English coincides with the year of Phoenix’s first issue (1935). Having attended Oxford alongside W. H. Auden, Stewart had a compulsion to teach “The Moderns”—writers such as Auden, Eliot, Lawrence, and James Joyce. Some of these works faced local censorship—most notably Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), which was kept under lock and key in the library, only accessible “for study purposes” with a letter of permission from Professor Stewart.[45] Yet Stewart did not merely foster the established and foundational modernists; he remained a lifelong friend of Auden, forming a direct conduit to the Auden group, who combined avant-garde poetics with radical left-wing politics.[46] His lectures positioned Auden and his disciples as spokespeople for the polarisation of English culture during the 1930s, caught between ideas of catastrophe and rebirth, and these notions recurred in Phoenix.[47] Stewart’s impact is recalled by many of the Phoenix cohort who went on to become significant writers and cultural figures. Clement Semmler recalls the aftereffects of Stewart’s uniquely affected reading of The Waste Land: “I remember lying in bed awake at night with the words swirling round in my brain—the image was haunting […] poetry of the sort I had never before encountered. It was a new world.”[48]

Jury was another figure key to Phoenix’s rise who returned to work at the university in the 1930s. Absorbed in literary passions considered classical and even archaic, Jury appears an unusual bedfellow of literary modernism. Having left Adelaide to attain his M.A. from Magdalen College, Oxford, Jury served in the Great War, turning down the position of Jury Chair, which his own mother had funded, to spend much of the next two decades pursuing his literary passions in England and Europe. He describes in his youth falling “into passionate calf-love with Greece—a disease, if it be a disease, from which I have never wholly recovered.”[49] Yet, key to Jury’s classicism were two impulses that marked him as a maverick: a rebellious streak that drove him to thwart others’ expectation that he should become an “Australian” poet, and a desire to subtly, but openly, ennoble homosexual love.[50] That he might have taken a different path is evident in how shaken his notions around poetry became after giving a paper to the English Association on Eliot’s The Waste Land in 1932.[51] Although Jury could never abandon his classical tastes, he was enthusiastic about contemporary and “modern” developments, which aligned with his eccentric streak.[52]

Jury was part of a network of figures associated with Phoenix who shared connections with a small residential college in North Adelaide: St Marks. This quiet college for boarders became a regular meeting place for a remarkable group of young radicals. Colin Thiele would describe them as “Firebrands, out to change the world.”[53] By the end of the decade, the room of Pfeiffer, then tutor and resident at the college and future Angry Penguin, became the centre of these gatherings. Thiele recalled that

The poets, a description that fitted almost everyone in the group, met periodically in Paul Peiffer’s rooms at St Mark’s, the university residential college. These were volatile meetings, yeasty with poetry and intense with argument about literature, art and international politics. Claret of doubtful vintage tended to illuminate the debates early in the evening but blurred them after midnight. As clarity of thought and speech diminished, vehemency intensified, until some of the more passionate orators were in danger of being thrown out.[54]

Among the cluster of literary figures associated with St Mark’s were Kerr, Pfeiffer, Harris, Dutton, Thiele, Jury, Rex and John Ingamells, Flexmore Hudson, and Ian Mudie. Stimulated by an international order collapsing, this heteroglot mix of individuals came together, united by an intensity and diversity of views, underlined by a notion that literature and art could—and must—“change the world.”[55]

This Adelaide community had, therefore, an intriguing mix of contrary elements: provinciality and internationality, nativism and modernism, a grounding in the classical and traditional along with the means and increasing desire to pursue the experimental.[56] There was an established and increasingly self-confident periodical culture which was conversant with contemporary developments in Europe, while also advocating for regional differentiation. A small body of interlinked educational, artistic, and literary institutions enabled the formation of a radical scene. Several important figures also ensured that this scene was directly linked to the latest developments in modernist literature and art.

Figure 3. The covers of Phoenix issues 1 to 4. Publication of the University Union, printed by the Hassall Press, 1935–1938. Reproduced with permission by the Adelaide University Student Association (formally the Adelaide University Union). Cover design for issues 1, 2, and 4 by John Dowie and for issue 3 by R. A. Blackburn. Orphan works. Every effort has been made to trace other
copyright holders.

Phoenix was not merely a product of its environment, but also a defiant reaction against it. As Harris’s trial for obscenity in the 1944 shows, Adelaide’s establishment was, much like the rest of Australia, laughably, even suffocatingly conservative. Dutton later reflected how in that “dead time in Australian art and literature […] something new, modern, out front was desperately needed”—something avant-garde.[57] Teachers from England ruled the roost, maintaining traditional English literature while looking down on local efforts. Where any Australian writers were recognised, they remained the now dated figures of Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry Kendall.[58] Adelaide, emblematic of Australia, resembled an altar committed to the worship of cultural dead wood—homogeneous, conservative, a bourgeois utopia for the anti-intellectual philistine and deferential colonial—that was waiting to be set ablaze. Between 1935 and 1939, Phoenix would provide the spark.

Phoenix Journal: Little Magazine as Agent

On Friday, 25 October 1935, the staid University School Magazine, epitome of the “unmistakable ‘chronicle’ tradition,” was irrevocably committed to the flames and the inaugural issue of Phoenix appeared from its ashes.[59] The “striking” cover, designed by John Dowie, symbolises this transformation, “its flame-embossed black” as “modern” as the contents inside.[60] This design was matched by a bold editorial statement:

No need for apologies. It is time for a change […] The function of Phoenix, as we see it, is to provide an opportunity and incentive for the publication of significant writings […] it is not for the sake of novelty that we make all things new. We have no alternative.

Here it is, without apology. But Phoenix has not risen perfect from the ashes. It clamours for food for its continual growth.[61]

As Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman note, when considering a little magazine as an agent, rather than as a context, editorial influence must be considered in almost authorial terms.[62] However, as Phoenix’s editorial staff altered each year, I consider the first (and notably only) editorial as the publication’s key unifying statement. The 1935 editorial pre-empts criticism by employing a rhetoric of necessary rupture, which must be contextualised in relation to interwar exhaustion, rapid change, and rising global crisis. Both Phoenix and its “limp anaemic” predecessor, the University School Magazine, are envisioned by the editors, not simply as magazines, but as conditions of possibility for literary and cultural production. Renewal and rebirth form a precondition for significant writing. Indeed, the eponymous phoenix is a totemic presence and symbolic patron of sorts, underwriting the new magazine’s project. Keeping this editorial in mind, and guided by Scholes’s and Wulfman’s methodology, let us turn to the various aspects of the magazine, to contextualise Phoenix and its assumed audience.[63]

Dowie’s striking cover artwork pairs with an overall material sophistication that suggests this is not a standard “university” magazine.[64] In line with the declarative editorial, all the issues are dominated by literary contributions, confirming the magazine’s status as a literary annual. Yet there are further elements in each issue that can guide our understanding. Prominent linocut art is a defining feature of Phoenix, to which was added the “modern” art of photography from 1937. Meanwhile, looking at the inaugural issue, we also find remnants of university business, from a closing section labelled “Ex Cathedra” to another labelled “Graduates’ Notes.”[65] Although used by the editors in 1936 to offer a defiant response to critics of the first issue, the “Ex Cathedra” section disappears from 1937. Likewise, while the editorship of “Graduates’ Notes” by Rex Ingamells from 1935 to 1937 signals his role as a key node and connective pivot, the section remains a relic of the old varsity format and is dispensed with in 1938, migrating to a special issue of On Dit. Excepting the almost purely literary and artistic Phoenix 1939, each issue also includes articles and reviews which tell us about the magazine’s shifting form and the interests of its (intended) audience. Featuring prominent academics alongside leading undergraduates, these intelligent articles include, for example, speculations on the novel in the twenty-first century and on the intermixture of science and art, along with reviews of influential books on socialism and on philosophy, of a popular series encouraging scientific literacy, and of Stephen Spender’s play Trial of a Judge (1938).[66] Such works betray that Phoenix and its readers did not view themselves as peripheral, belated, or passive receivers of culture and knowledge: they were across and directly interceding in international developments. Such work also re-immerses us in the ideological vortex of the 1930s, out of which arose the seeming necessity for the “new” in literature and art.

Although ostensibly surplus to the literary content, advertisements can provide key insights to a magazine’s environment and audience.[67] From Phoenix’s first issue, advertisements account for over ten percent of the magazine’s overall content. Some of these adverts are directed at students, from adverts for medical, science, and sports supplies to adverts for student-discounted holidays promoted by the Tasmanian Tourism Bureau. Yet, these remain significantly less than half the total, with more general advertisements—for bookshops (including Preece’s) and binders, clothing and department stores, a stockbroker and luxury cigarettes—indicating an intelligent, moneyed, or upwardly mobile readership. We can discern advertisers adapting to the youthful radical program of Phoenix across its print run, best shown by Alliance Insurance Company’s advertisement. Recurring from 1936, this advertisement features “PROGRESS” emblazoned above a tagline that reads: “New times bring new risks.” Overall, the development of advertisements charts the magazine’s growth. From 1937 we see full pictorial images included for the first time, while from 1938 they further expand to be included at the front of the magazine. The 1939 issue features advertisements for watches, stylish leather coats, portable 35mm cameras, and automobile-tyre remoulding services, all speaking to a youthful audience actively engaging with modernity’s technologies and trends. Indeed, the 1939 issue would not only be the most literary and radical; it would also, perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, include the most advertisements (nineteen).

The picture we are developing of the magazine’s implied reader—well educated, intelligent, upwardly mobile—suggests an audience consisting perhaps primarily of students, but by no means exclusively. How the magazine was received and reviewed, in the local press and in the student organ On Dit, can tell us more. The opening issue of Phoenix attracted reviews in the local newspapers, indicating interest beyond the university, including the major dailies the Advertiser and the News, as well as the Catholic weekly, Southern Cross, while Phoenix 1939 would also be reviewed in the weekly Mail. Although evidence exists that Phoenix’s reach extended beyond South Australia, and even internationally, we can presume its primary audience is local to Adelaide.[68] The local reviews of Phoenix 1935 show that the magazine was immediately received as modernist, with one paper declaring that “modernism, with its ideals and methods, had taken hold,” while another unfavourably links the magazine to that “incoherent pessimism which was fashionable about twenty years ago.”[69] Similar criticism also appears in the student organ On Dit. One remarkable letter reviews the entire debut issue by parroting the press’s criticism and descrying the appearance in Australia of the “decadent tradition” influenced by Joyce and Sigmund Freud.[70] Another letter, supporting the first, criticises the magazine’s “depraved literary taste” and urges that “the tastes” of the majority “be considered.”[71] These reviews express the recurrent criticism that characterises Phoenix’s modernism as both derivatively fashionable and yet already out of date, showing that the notion of modernism’s belatedness in Australia was first propagated by its enemies.[72] These reviews also confirm that, within the wider public and even the student body, Phoenix was aimed at a minority.

Figure 4. John Dowie’s frontispiece “The Counterfeiters” appears to be a response to accusations of imitation. Published in Phoenix 2 (1936): i. Reproduced with permission by the Adelaide University Student Association (formally the Adelaide University Union). Orphan work. Every effort has been made to trace other copyright holders.

How Phoenix responded to such criticism also informs our understanding of the magazine’s arc of development. In a seemingly defiant response, Phoenix 1936, released in September, would debut a boldly modern and industrial frontispiece—a linocut by Dowie cheekily named “The Counterfeiters”—while the editor’s “Ex Cathedra” ironically announces the issue’s abandonment of authorial anonymity, lest the authors be mistaken for “T. S. Eliot incognito.”[73] In response to further criticism, On Dit’s editors felt compelled, the following year, to launch a defence of the magazine while calling for new work, offering both reproachment and placation.[74] Phoenix 1937, debuting new cover art depicting a phoenix propelled upward by a vortex of flames, suggests another defiant response to critics. In spite of these efforts, and four years into the magazine’s print run, criticism of Phoenix 1938 would continue in familiar terms: “when will young would-be poets learn that there is no particular merit in copying the eccentric allusive style of Mr. T S Eliot or […] any of the moderns whose outstanding quality is […] the ease with which they can be imitated?”[75] Phoenix 1939’s almost purely radical literary focus is an act of further defiance, even as it stimulated the demise of the magazine, not by external force, but through conservative elements within the university and student body.

Before we turn to the magazine’s literary contributions, the editorial staff of Phoenix 1935–1939 must also be considered. Although rotating every year, several names recur and stand out.[76] As repeat editors in the early years, Margaret McKellar Stewart and Russel Ward demand attention. Stewart’s contributions to every issue of Phoenix signal her importance to the magazine, even if she remains obscured from later histories, though we do know that she went on to marry her fellow inaugural editor, Maurice Finnis.[77] Ward is well-known as a pioneering left-wing scholar who wrote The Australian Legend (1958), which influentially characterised the roots of the national mystique as left-wing and egalitarian, if also masculinist. His involvement in Phoenix remains surprising and largely unknown. Phoenix 1938’s editors, Helen Wighton and Finlay Crisp, along with 1936 “Business Manager” Elliott Johnston, were all key to the establishment of the National Union of Australian University Students (NUAUS) and the inaugural Australian Universities Students’ Congress held in Adelaide in February 1937.[78] To these figures, we can add several recognisable literary figures, including Phoenix’s 1939 editors, Kerr and Swan, and the founder of the Jindyworobaks, Rex Ingamells, whose editorship of the “Graduates Notes” from 1935 to 1937 has already been noted and who was, alongside Stewart, the only other contributor to feature in every issue.

The editorial staff reveal to us that Phoenix was at the heart of both literary modernism and radical left-wing politics in 1930s Australia. We can also say with some confidence that the magazine’s audience (and implied reader)—youthful, radical, and enamoured with literary and artistic modernism—did not readily exist: instead, Phoenix was an active agent in its creation. When we look at the material developments of the magazine, its reception, and its editorial staff, we see a publication testing its fledgling wings, while also developing, albeit not in a strictly linear fashion, into a more radical literary publication. Therefore, in reading and contextualising the literary and artistic contributions of the magazine, I propose examining Phoenix in two phases: first the initial print run from 1935 to 1938, and then the final issue of 1939, which, in hindsight, precipitated an unintended, though perhaps inevitable, act of self-immolation.

Phoenix Journal 1935–1938

can it be that from our modesty

Shall breed a purpose worthy of our power?

Stand we in the darkest pre-dawn hour?

— W., “After Reading Carlyle,” Phoenix 1935[79]

Debates in assessing the literary contributions of modernism in Australia, often defined by sharp criticism, have tended towards prioritising aesthetic judgement. During the 1960s’ smouldering critical warfare between Harris and A. D. Hope, Harris would concede that “the poetic output of the modernists was of nugatory value.”[80] Hope’s earlier critique of Harris’s novel The Vegetative Eye (1943) could be read as at least partially justified on purely aesthetic grounds.[81] However, given the fact that it is an astoundingly harsh takedown of a prodigious twenty-two-year-old experimenting with surrealism, not to mention the deadening cultural effects which the critical triumph of the conservative academic poets produced, such an assessment clearly misses the point. This essay’s judgement of Phoenix’s creative work follows a different logic. The question is not whether youthful radical writers in their early twenties produced literary contributions equal to those of modernist greats like Eliot and Joyce. The subsequent emergence from Phoenix’s contributors of a coterie of publications and two highly influential literary movements—the Angry Penguins and Jindyworobaks—already indicates to us its vital importance. Instead, I am largely interested in what the creative contributions of the magazine tell us about the “germ” that is Phoenix.

I have already named Ward as an editor of Phoenix (1935–1936) who went on to become a key cultural figure, yet Phoenix’s pages also reveal Ward to have been a budding writer.[82] His creative contributions are best represented by two pieces, a humane short poem, “Kangaroo,” inspired by his “first and last experience” shooting a kangaroo, and his poem “After Reading Carlyle,” which declares that “You were so droll, you men of other times,” while openly wondering if Ward’s generation might “breed a purpose worthy of our Power.”[83] The first poem could be categorised as proto-Jindyworobak, and indeed it would be republished in their first anthology in 1938, while the latter is emblematic of Phoenix’s avant-garde desire to break with tradition.[84] Ward emerges from Phoenix as a young radical who was interested in the representation of Australian cultural life, yet who also had a passion for modernism.[85] In Ward, we find a triad of forces—typically seen as contrary—which would define Phoenix’s program: left-wing radicalism, Australianist sympathies, and avant-garde experimentation. Alongside Ward we find another of Phoenix’s surprises, an eminent cultural figure who appears in Phoenix as a young modernist: Semmler.[86] His contributions across 1935 and 1936 are mostly forgettable, but 1937’s “The Muezzin from the Tower” reveals the scratchings of a youthful but potentially promising modernist poet. Renouncing traditional metre and rhyme, the poem has its images fall jaggedly across eleven short sections, and although it approaches the absurd and nonsensical, it just about holds together thanks to its fertile imagery and the underlying conceit of a “search.” Indeed, with lines such as “fox drunk maudlin drunk / weeping wailing peeling gnashing / still searching” the poem attains what might be described as a proto-Penguin aesthetic.[87]

Art was an essential part of little magazines, and this was especially true for Phoenix and its expressions of modernity.[88] Made from modern linoleum, the linocut was a medium that was simple, cheap, and—most importantly—without tradition. Despite accusations of belatedness in the local press, the artistic form was still developing, only reaching its pinnacle during the 1930s thanks to Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School. Indeed, in contrast to the literary contributions, and with the exception of Black’s appearance in 1939, the most striking artistic contributions arguably feature in the early issues of Phoenix. This is thanks to two young artists “making it new”: Dowie and Rex Wood.[89] Modernism was first understood as “symbolism,” and Wood and Dowie both embraced the linocut form’s simple shapes and stark lines to render designs of either a symbolic and mythologic or a contemporary nature.[90] Echoing the magazine’s literary contributions, both artists’ works are also marked by bold nudity and hints of modernist primitivism. Other influences are present, too, with Wood’s “Nativity” displaying a cubist influence, while Dowie engages with visceral representations of industrial modernity.[91] Phoenix’s combination of art with literature signals its modernist intent, yet it also foreshadows the contemporary art push of the early 1940s in South Australia and the centrality of artistic contributions to the future Angry Penguins. Reproductions in the 1939 issue of linocuts by Adelaide artists Black, Victor Adolfsson, and May Voke, alongside work by Harris, prefigure the involvement of all four in the establishment of the South Australian branch of the Contemporary Art Society (CAS) in 1942.[92]

Rex Ingamells was never formally an editor of Phoenix, likely due to the completion of his B.A. in 1934, but his charge of the “Graduates’ Notes” and the regularity of his contributions mark him as a significant influence.[93] The magazine’s print run coincides with Ingamells’s development from promising young local poet to one of the “most energetic mover[s] and shaker[s] that Australian poetry has ever seen.”[94] His presence in Phoenix prompts further reassessment of the Jindyworobak movement and its relationship to modernism, but, although aware of work in this area, I seek instead to read his contributions in the context of the magazine and its contemporary surrounds.[95]

Figure 5. Four linocuts by John Dowie and Rex Wood. Wood’s “Nativity” and “Consolation” were published in Phoenix 1 (1935): 2, 45. Dowie’s “Firelight” was published in Phoenix 1 (1935): 29; Dowie’s “The Skaters” was published in Phoenix 2 (1936): 17. Reproduced with permission by the Adelaide University Student Association (formally the Adelaide University Union). Orphan work. Every effort has been made to trace other copyright holders.

Phoenix 1935 printed Ingamells’s “Bush Cameo,” depicting the unknown beauty of “tan-legged children / with towsled hair” in an outback valley.[96] The poem, like his verse in Gumtops (1935), shows Ingamells using Central Australia as emblematic of Australian otherness, foreshadowing its later use by modernist artists in subsequent decades.[97] However, his editorship of the “Graduates’ Notes” also reveals direct connections to T. G. H. Strehlow, a man whom Ingamells describes as having grown up absorbing Aranda culture in a way that “an adult could never obtain.”[98] For all the reflections that have been written on the Jindyworobak program, reading Ingamells’s work as it is located within Phoenix returns us to just how radical his impulse initially was. Surrounded entirely by contributions which, uttered in a European idiom, give no indication of being located in Australia—let alone confronting Indigenous presence—Ingamells’s “Change” attempts to reimagine the “black man’s age of gold” on the Adelaide Plains and the seemingly innocuous (though ultimately disastrous) arrival of “a strange white cloud upon the sea.”[99] The return to this moment, within the atmosphere of the late 1930s and the pages of Phoenix, clearly foregrounds confrontation with the Indigenous past as one clear source of cultural rebirth. Meanwhile, “Rivers and Mountains” finds this forgotten history in the Indigenous place names that live on, “old and new” hopefully side by side. Yet the poem also suggests the partly inaccessible nature of this source: the “secrets of / The days gone by” remain latent in the land but are opaque to Euro-Australians.[100]

Following the launch of Venture in 1937, Ingamells’s contributions run alongside the nascent Jindyworobak publishing program. Venture’s treatise on “Environmental Values” (1937), referring to Lawrence as a “great writer” and praising his Australian novel Kangaroo (1923), signals overt modernist influences from the beginning of the Jindyworobak program.[101] Ingamells’s 1937 contribution, “The Spark,” reflects a blazing transformative intensity, elevated over explanation, which was characteristic of both Ingamells[102] and Phoenix:

A SPARK-CRACK

of fanging fire

hurtled on burnt-black

corpses of trapt desire.

The flame-breast

asht where

mulgas have grim rest

from cloud-fare.[103]

The poem’s initial sound-event—the “SPARK-CRACK” of ignition—speaks to Phoenix and the Jindyworobak movement yet also appears to deny the pastoral desire for renewal, instead suggesting a site of burnt-out intensity. 1938’s “Earth Colors [sic]” builds on these themes by offering a vision of the Australian landscape, as the “blaze and smoulder” of the land’s “Earth-colors” become a medium contaminated by a “blood-hungry” globe. A sunset in the bush, a site of traditional aesthetic pleasure, is no longer a retreat from the world; its primary colours are psychically tainted by a world ablaze in conflict. From Ethiopia, where the “air is filled with smoke of gunning,” to “Death’s keen minstrels” in Spain and China, where “Death’s engined angels / range the sky,” the poem personifies modern war through grotesque inversions.[104] Immersing us in this era of chaos, the poem also suggests lyric and aesthetic refusal: “my heart should burn to praise but it rebels, refusing.” In this refusal, Ingamells expresses Phoenix’s justification for modernist experimentation: traditional aesthetic perception has itself become suspect. Given modernity’s offering of fire without renewal, energy without futurity, “Earth Colors” asks, “Dare you now behold the new day dawning?”[105]

Phoenix’s pages also included numerous writers whose role in the fanning of local modernist flames remains unrecognised, including several women obscured from wider literary history. Returning to Phoenix reveals their contributions as essential to the “germ” of Australian modernism, even as historical conditions obstructed their later careers. Editor from 1935 to 1937, Stewart’s writing is also among the most polished of the early issues. Her open depiction of nudity in Phoenix 1935’s “The Candle Flame” is representative of the issue as a whole and of its “modern” program, which some found shocking.[106] Across her eleven Phoenix contributions, Stewart’s poetry displays a modern rejection of traditional metre and rhyme, while her short stories would variously explore shifting streams of consciousness, an intense subjectivity that recalls the writing of Virginia Woolf, psychological madness, time, and even a grappling with the infinite that recalls Jorge Luis Borges’s later work.

Though Charlotte Jay made only one contribution, 1938’s “Cosmos,” she is another figure of interest as she later became a prolific author of genre fiction, writing mystery and thriller novels.[107] Remembered as a “rebel,” Jay was deeply interested in writers such as Woolf, Christina Stead, E. M. Forster, and Henry Handel Richardson. She always aspired to write what she referred to as “straight” fiction, though she became typecast as a genre writer early in her career. “Cosmos,” with its free-verse experimentation and psychological themes, suggests Jay’s desire and ability to write “high-brow” fiction. The poem’s speaker, “drugged with sleep,” is gifted with some kind of psychic foreknowledge of the planet and its civilisational history—surely part of modernity’s inheritance.[108] “Cosmos,” with its etymological pun linking its title to cosmopolitan themes, suggests how modernity’s powerful globalising forces contributed to igniting Phoenix’s drive towards disruption and renewal.

Given her crucial role in the Angry Penguins, undoubtedly the most important female contributor to Phoenix was the talented young modernist, Swan. Her obscurity in national literary history is explained by a publishing career limited to local little magazines, but attention to Phoenix reveals her significance.[109] Later declaring herself influenced by “Kafka, Rilke, and modern symbolists,” Swan served on the editorial staff of (and published within) both Phoenix and Angry Penguins.[110] Indeed, in 1937 she would become the first of the future Angry Penguins to publish in Phoenix under her own name. Of Swan’s three contributions in 1937, “Childhood,” which laments the onset of maturity in modern fashion, best displays her precocious poetic talents. Although seemingly dealing with a contemporary everyday setting and the minor affects of childhood—“Sweet boredom, rainy days, and illness / lying in a grey bare room unamused”—the poem’s hard caesura between childhood and adulthood evokes a broken temporality, a future that arrives too soon, impoverishing the present:

That is childhood.

Not this sudden ripening

This harsh unmellowed vintage

This dull omniscience—

This damned precocity.[111]

“Childhood” reveals a more restrained poet who is already interested in the exploration of individual psychological experience.[112] Swan’s 1938 poem “Imprisonment” channels the tenor of the times, imagining the world as a gaol—“this brilliant sky / this harsh enclosing arc of / unyielding metal”—but also, curiously, envisioning freedom in darkness: “soft uncoloured / blackness.”[113] (39). Meanwhile, “Wireless” (1938) ponders the divided modern world in unconventional stanzas that alternate between internment in the “sordid” confines of a boarding house room, with its “yellow covers,” its “furniture,” and its “inmates,” and scenes stimulated, seemingly, by dreams that have gone “wireless.”[114] Swan’s more advanced poetics signal the magazine’s ongoing transformation.

The only other future Penguin to appear in Phoenix before the defining 1939 issue is Kerr. The appearance of a poem by Kerr in the magazine’s second issue can retrospectively be read as portending the emergence of not one but two radical literary programs from Phoenix. As Kerr was still only sixteen and in his final year of high school, the anonymous publication of the poem was reportedly facilitated by Pfeiffer.[115] The work of an adolescent poet, Kerr’s two-stanza poem nonetheless displays a spareness and lyric quality clouded by tragedy, which would mark his small but notable body of work, concluding:

Through all the weary weight of days,

The crushing bitterness of hopes decayed,

You had to live, with few to know

The price you paid.[116]

Miles speculates that the poem concerns the death of Kerr’s father; certainly, much of his work is characterised by a tragic mien which is amplified by the wider war-dread that characterises Phoenix. This aspect is heightened in any retrospective reading by the foreknowledge of Kerr’s premature death on 15 December 1942, when his plane was shot down over Soputa, Papua New Guinea.

Kerr entered the university as an undergraduate in 1937, and his return to Phoenix in 1938 coincided with his becoming a boarder at St Mark’s and his appointment to On Dit’s editorial staff, alongside Johnston. Kerr possessed dashingly good looks, whilst also being a dedicated, gregarious, and talented young poet, marked by a melancholic streak.[117] His influences included the metaphysical poets, who had recently undergone a revival, and the modernist giants Eliot and Auden. Dutton recalls that Kerr was “crazy about Virginia Woolf’s novels,” an “odd taste for an Aussie lad [in that era].”[118] There is a reticence to be explicit that led Jury to argue that Kerr’s poems are “too private,” but this also makes his verse ambiguously allusive.[119] His poems might be read as expressions of a deeply personal pain or the howl of a dying society. The opening lines of his 1938 poem, “Poem,” captures the anxiety of the late thirties: “The bottom has fallen from the river; / The banks closed in.”[120] The speaker urges the listener to “Drink to the death of the year” as all is “moved by the river”:

The year has no regrets; it has sinned,

And from its blindness forgiven you.

Now you move forward across its hypocrisy,

You have to laugh, but, later, you too will be torn

Down by the river to the sea.

In the face of war, chaos, and conflict, Kerr’s poem expresses the Antipodean cry of a generation being pulled down by the undertow. As the storm clouds gathered, threatening to wash all away, Phoenix 1939 would stand as a fiery radical beacon.

What unites the contributions to Phoenix 1935–1938 is a disavowal of the suitability of established aesthetic means to envision the present. The modern world, its psychic forces and atmosphere, its changing ethics and understandings of sexuality and desire, and its vastly altered material and technological conditions present a rupture with the past. This rupture aligns with left-wing radicalism which advocates the reorganisation of society and above all is impelled by a rising sense of global conflict and impending doom in a world increasingly aflame, from Asia to Africa and Europe. (In Phoenix, fire is increasingly diagnostic rather than restorative.) The tyranny of distance and of its underside, belatedness, if it ever existed, is no more. In line with modernity, female contributors and influences are not peripheral, but central to recurring explorations of psychological interiority, sexuality, and cosmopolitanism. What began partly as imitation by the magazine’s youthful contributors has led to the germination. Phoenix’s emergent modernism is radicalism without orthodoxy, eclecticism without synthesis, raw abrasion and fiery combustion as opposed to polished finish.

Phoenix Journal 1939

This number of “Phoenix” has an atmosphere of modernness that I like[.]

— C. R. Jury, preface to Phoenix 1939[121]

strange and disturbing growths push up from the cracks[.]

— H. M. Swan, “I, Philip Henslowe” (1939)[122]

as we wait for the inescapable storm.

— Flexmore Hudson, “Modern Youth” (1939)[123]

If 1935 to 1938 had been years to keep the fires burning and test fledgling wings, 1939 was the year Phoenix truly blazed. As though to better contain the conflagration, the 1939 issue is materially larger in dimensions. In this issue, edited by Kerr and Swan, the young modernists had entered the building and taken charge. The four prior issues had already produced a groundbreaking radical literary journal and published figures who would fundamentally alter Australian cultural life. The issue of 1939, however, should be remembered as one of the most significant issues of an Australian little magazine ever published. As Dutton, the only critic to note its significance, writes, “It was the first little magazine of any kind in Australia to bring together the ideals of cosmopolitan modernism and Jindyworobak nationalism.”[124] Like all significant publications, Phoenix 1939 reshapes our understanding of what came before and after. It is the culmination of the magazine’s development: it brings the formative Penguins together for the first time, and it captures the Jindyworobaks just as their movement has launched. Their presence together in Phoenix forces a reassessment of both movements and of their relation to Australian modernism.

However, Phoenix 1939’s radical fires were nearly quenched before they could propagate: when the Vice Chancellor challenged the magazine’s literary quality, the typescript of the new issue was sent to a known classicist and literary conservative for assessment. In an ironic twist of fate, this man was none other than Jury, who would become Angry Penguins’s first patron. Jury recalls a young Kerr, who might have been “Byron himself,” arriving at his door with the typescript. Although it ran against his personal aesthetic predilections, Jury’s judgement was emphatic: “I thought […] that qualitatively it was by far the best literary document produced by young students that I had—have—ever seen […] it was astonishingly alive.”[125] Responsible for the issue’s first printing, Jury also acts as spokesperson for the issue by penning a notable preface declaring the issue’s modern intent:

This number of “Phoenix” has an atmosphere of modernness that I like. “Modernness” is almost as large, vague, and blessed a word as “Mesopotamia;” I mean it here to cover not only the absence in most of these poems of the continual end-rhymes, highly regularised rhythm, and explicitness one expects in conservative poetry, but the kinds of subjects treated and the methods of treatment.[126]

Jury was an important scholarly influence and supporter in a largely hostile critical environment. He was, however, no tame critic: Phoenix 1939 also featured what the Advertiser called a “burlesque essay” by Jury, which outrageously satirises modernist titans Eliot and Auden.[127] He would also gently parody the Jindyworobaks in his review of Phoenix in a nascent Southerly in 1940, paving the way for harsher satirical treatment by McAuley, Hope, and others in 1941 and 1942.

The largely conservative criticism which the Jindyworobaks would receive was ultimately an indication of the movement’s success. Although foreknowledge of Angry Penguins might dominate any retrospective reading, in Phoenix 1939 the Jindyworobaks were the radical literary movement. Ingamells’s triumphant update, simply titled “Jindyworobak” (1939), announces that the success of the Jindyworobak Club had been clinched after the launch of their anthology in 1938. The only anthology of local verse in Australia at the time of launch, it drew upon Phoenix alumni to gather contributions from five Australian States.[128] Ingamells proudly records that the anthology sold out in seven weeks, while the club already had 110 members, including “Walter Murdoch, Vance Palmer, James Devaney, and Leonard Mann.” Refuting the notion that the Jindyworobaks are “anti-everything not shrieking of Eucalyptus and boronia,” Ingamells declares that

The Jindyworobaks are not against overseas art, from which they have much to learn; but they insist that there are such things as environmental values; that the natural environment of Australia, particularly, requires a distinctive treatment in literature which has not yet been accorded to it.[129]

Ingamells resented the dual and interrelated cultural hegemonies of his inheritance: the endless colonial deference to imperial British culture and the lame dilettantism of that culture’s local iteration, often dictated to the provinces from the eastern seaboard.[130] In Phoenix 1939 he could, for the first time, truthfully declare the Jindyworobaks a “force to be reckoned with in Australian literature.”[131]

Figure 6. Dorrit Black’s “Lino Cut” is placed opposite Rex Ingamells’s “Jindyworobak” in Phoenix 5 (1939): 54–55. Note that although no other title appears here, this print is titled “Gum Trees” and listed as having been made in Sydney in 1933 in the Art Gallery of South Australia’s online collection: https://www.agsa.sa.gov.au/collection-publications/collection/works/gum-trees/32981/. Black’s work is in the public domain and free to be reproduced here.

The editorial positioning of Ingamells’s “Jindyworobak” opposite Black’s modernist linocut “Gum Trees” (1939) shows that in Phoenix there was no ideological division between Jindyworobakism and modernism, a fact further evidenced by the straddling of both camps by Harris, the enfant terrible.[132] Harris was initially excited by Ingamells’s radical dismissal of the “old”—both of the bush ballads of the “larrikin Australian” tradition and of the establishment’s imperial British traditionalism—and by his expression of the “new” that brought the Phoenix poets together. The relationship between Harris and Ingamells is suggested by the placement of their poems alongside each other, though these poems can also be read as foreshadowing the coming schism. Harris’s “Sonnet” (1939) and “To an Unknown” (1939) adopt the idiom of a more internationalist (and Eurocentric) modernism that more than anything defined the early Penguin poets, while the predilection with inner psychic landscapes anticipates Harris’s development towards surrealism.[133] Over the page, somewhat discordantly, lies Ingamells’s “Black Mary” (1939) The poem eschews traditional metrical structure, yet is more identifiably Jindyworobak than his 1937–1938 contributions, at once idealising Indigenous culture (through the figure of Mary) and suggesting the modern problematics of that idealism.

Likewise, the extreme experimentalism of Harris’s “Boat-Train” (1939) hints at key differences between the two poets.[134] However, Harris’s short poem “Hills Scene” (1939) also suggests early coalescence between his Jindyworobak affiliation and internationalist modernist tendencies. Intertextually linked to German Romantic Eduard Moerike’s “The Forsaken Maiden” (1832), Harris’s verse channels Moerike’s representation of internal melancholy via an external landscape. Harris, though, describes local—presumably the Adelaide hills—with a “hopeless echo of a crow” and the speaker “walk[ing] the worn / bush-track”:

There I must watch, wearily stay

Hearing the bush pain-cries,

And redream the dreams, the pain of your words,

And move in tears as my lonely herds.[135]

Harris’s poem draws on the metaphysics of German Romanticism to explore the unique creative potential of the Australian bush, whose otherness Europeans often depicted as tormenting and isolating, to act as ground for psychic exploration and reflection. “Hills Scene” shows that Phoenix was not merely a meeting ground for disparate ideas—in hindsight represented at their polarity by the Jindyworobaks and Angry Penguins—but a medium for their formative coalescence.

In addition to Harris, Phoenix 1939 also brought together, for the first time, all the early literary Penguins, excepting Dutton: Kerr, Pfeiffer, and Swan. Given Jury’s recollections, we have to position Kerr as undoubtedly the driving editorial force behind Phoenix’s final issue—a role he continued for the first issue of Angry Penguins.[136] In light of the 1939 issue’s significant elevation in quality, Kerr should be remembered as not only a fine young poet, but also an important organiser and editor of radical work. Kerr’s poetry stands in contrast with Harris’s: Kerr is undoubtedly modernist, but more restrained, echoing traditional poetic structures even as he defies them. “Lady, Amen” (1939), republished upon his death in Angry Penguins and later anthologised, evokes the form of a fourteen-line sonnet though it disregards conventions of rhyme and metre. It poignantly begins, “If we could halt this passing hour,” lamenting time’s passing through elevated moments, before culminating in another contemporary image of temporal rupture: “I know again / The black and white of broken time / The absurd before and after.”[137] Kerr’s verse is often so finely wrought that it conveys and creates its own taut patterns. By titling his second work “Poem” (1939), Kerr makes a modernist rhetorical gesture that refuses aesthetic conventions—in line with Phoenix’s program. “Poem” creates a sense of circularity, even entrapment, by beginning as it ends, suggesting that only death will truly out: “This wound will hold some truth perhaps.”[138] All of Kerr’s Phoenix poems are clouded by an encounter with darkness or death. There is a tragic mien to his work, which Angry Penguins would characterise as an “elegiac bitterness” and which retrospectively appears prescient.[139] His poems are emblematic of the atmosphere of the late-1930s which Phoenix represents, an atmosphere of temporal and societal rupture; the poems deliver moments of heightened feeling beneath the shadow of a war which would brutally maim society and the Phoenix poets alike.

Pfeiffer is the other young Penguin who, like Kerr, would also tragically lose his life in the coming war. A comparative elder statesman at twenty-two, the quiet and studious Pfeiffer has been characterised as the Yin to Kerr’s Yang, though the poetry of both is marked by qualities of restraint and technical skill.[140] Jury praised Pfeiffer in both Southerly and Angry Penguins, admiring in particular his “beautiful aubade” “At the Window”; Jury thought it recalled the “neatness of French.”[141] “At the Window” combines modern imagery and lyrical experimentation, even as it also vaguely echoes traditional forms:

The last dismantled star flung into space,

In swift graduation

Night ripens into day.

Thought patterns flailed like octopus

Dichotomize.

Hen-coop cocks crow up the dawn ….

“The guttural goose hath ushered in the day!”[142]

The poem skilfully contrasts images of disorder with the certainty of the arriving dawn, itself humorously marked by the mundane. Like Kerr, Pfeiffer also inverts convention by publishing a “Poem” (1939). It can be read as the poet’s credo. His “Poem” begins by seeking to avoid and overcome superficiality and meaningless before ending with a memorable warning: “Surfeit, ignominy of drab Gemütlichkeit.”[143] Invoking Gemütlichkeit, a German term for cosiness and comfort, Pfeiffer cautions against the uninspired and conformist life. The term is another reminder of the German cultural influence on Adelaide’s modernism.[144] Pfeiffer’s third poem “Nondum” (1939), Latin for “not yet,” suggests youthful hopefulness and indecision, opening with the line, “This young one breathes not yet,” before confessing:

We have gone a little on:

Put razor-edge to febrile antennae

Our sometimes mis-directed laughter

Wedged into thought;

Grown into trees that have

Not yet burnt out themselves.[145]

The poem is both an embrace of youth—the tendency to break convention, pursue a heightened sensitivity, and wilfully go astray—and a premonition of an exhausted and burnt-out world.[146] Quietly spoken and clear-minded, Pfeiffer’s Angry Penguins “poetry can seem quite conservative,” but his Phoenix verse suggests the obverse: a radical, even heated streak that is present throughout his body of work.[147] His Phoenix poems reject the precepts of an ever-maddening world, proffering in its place the idealism and misdirection of youth.

Swan shared editorial duties with Kerr in 1939. Jury places Swan’s “difficult and dangerous” “Collage” (1939) in the “post-Hopkins’” modern manner, though he argues that its unique rhythm and harmony manage to unite in “uncommon achievement.”[148] Heightened by the lack of grammar, images of the natural world of sunlight and stone collide with the modern—the sacred rising from the mundane and urban—which brings a motion and life of its own. Meanwhile, the absurd inclusion of death and a parrot adds a surreal dreamlike element. Echoing these ideas, Swan’s second poem, “Frozen Circles” (1939), expresses a paradox in its very title between continuity and stasis that the poem explores through contradiction and fragmentation.[149] Her opening line echoes the magazine in imagery: “Flame entrailed spirit clawing drain away,” surrounded by a “hate-horizoned sea” and a central lake where “peace has long lain drowned.” [150] The poem appears to spatialise the moral and historical impasse which the Phoenix poets confront, while also perhaps presaging the fracturing of the magazine’s project.

Swan’s short story, “I, Philip Henslowe,” represents an alternative to this impasse: a combination of the two seemingly most contradictory forces in Phoenix. The story begins in experimental modernist prose, depicting Adelaide as Joyce might Dublin or Woolf London. An ordinary day walking through the city and going to the shops becomes a swirling reality, entirely propelled by internal stream-of-consciousness monologue. However, the story changes tone, as the physically looming hills beyond the cityscape suggest another psychic influence. Silent and “scarred by the invader,” these hills become emblematic “of this dark earth’s hostility” towards a city likened to “pale, spreading fungoid growth.”[151] The isolation and alienation of settler modernity in Australia—“a nation spiritually dead,” whose “slack mouthed poet[s]” pen verse to enunciate their rejection—finds a psychic counter in this “strangeness.”[152] Swan characterises modernity’s material and representational destruction of that local environment with “images of stone and concrete and asphalt” and the planting of “alien [art] flowers,” which are doomed to wilt. In their place, “strange and disturbing growths push up from the cracks in the pavements” with “beautiful and deformed petals.” In its stylistics, critique of contemporary Australia, and search for a spiritual core beyond the established bounds of materialistic modernity, the story is an articulation of a nascent Phoenix aesthetic that foreshadows Australian modernism.

Foremost among Phoenix 1939’s “strange and disturbing growths” are poems by Mudie and Hudson. Existing at opposite ends within the broad church of Jindyworobak—Mudie being the most overtly Australianist, as well as environmentalist, Hudson the most cosmopolitan—the two men would be published together for the first time in Phoenix. Their poems’ use of trees marks organic imagery as a recurring motif in Phoenix 1939, signalling shared concerns with roots, foundations, and origins, yet also, in a bleak global landscape, the germinative potential for transformation.[153] Mudie’s “As Are the Gums” (1939) unites his environmental and nativist concerns in the figure of the gum tree: not “of bodies are we born but of the earth—/ as are the gums that grow as we should grow.”[154] While Mudie’s work was passionate and radical, it could also fall into artless simplicities, and this poem likely provided the ammunition for Jury’s satire.[155] Hudson’s more ambiguous arborescent structure in “Modern Youth” (1939) conveys hope, anxiety, vulnerability, and even the helplessness of youth in a world on the cusp of cataclysmic war, beginning: “Our roots were sunk in sand.”[156] That the trees still “thrust forth buds / and blossom” to the song of birds suggests the desire, nonetheless, to generate. The final stanza powerfully expresses the fading of youthful bravado into existential dread, insignificance, and isolation, as world war approaches, inevitably, inexorably:

Though in the loneliness of night

under indifferent stars

our courage falters and we tremble

at each soft stir of leaves

as we wait for the inescapable storm.

Hudson’s poem has the subtitle “(From a play, ‘Asoka’)”, evoking the Indian emperor who converted to Buddhism following conflict and brought peace.[157] Hudson’s poem, with its international idiom, poetic experimentation, and existential themes, could be mistaken for an Angry Penguin work, suggesting the protean qualities of Phoenix.

By having Kerr and Swan as editors and by publishing the work of Pfeiffer and Harris, Phoenix 1939 combined the early literary core of the Angry Penguins for the first time. Equally, by publishing Ingamells along with Hudson and Mudie, the issue also contained arguably the three most important Jindyworobak agitators. Thus, the 1939 issue brings together the two radical fires which had been smouldering away in Phoenix since its inception. Yet it does not merely bring them together: it captures them at a vital moment. Having launched their program and anthology the previous year, the Jindyworobaks were still in their early phase, which Harris would later admit provided the “central stimulus” for the expansion and reinvigoration of Australian poetry from its “feeble state.”[158] Meanwhile, the early Penguins were brought together for the first time in the pages of Phoenix 1939. Yet, at the very moment Phoenix gathered all the key young agitators of these two radical movements, which would radically alter Australian cultural life, the magazine was brought down by conservative elements.[159] Too radical to live, too rare to completely die, Phoenix’s demise was written in its very name. Yet so too was the resurrection of its radical energies. Upon the demise of Phoenix, Kerr would declare in On Dit that, “In its darkest hour, it is said, the phoenix shines brightest, but it thirsts for a gift of blood.”[160] The statement takes on the prophetic ambiguity of a Delphic utterance. By vanishing at its apotheosis, Phoenix never fully solidified nor became conventional, instead birthing two movements which would develop into contraries and antagonistically provoke further development.[161] This schism between the Angry Penguins and Jindyworobaks is detectable in Phoenix 1939, but the issue also captures evidence, in the work of Harris, Swan, and Hudson, of nascent cross-experimentation.

Phoenix 1939 shows that the magazine’s significance was not merely as a vehicle and context for the Jindyworobak and Angry Penguin poets’ later emergence, though their presence signals its importance. Phoenix as a magazine had its own unique atmosphere and program, shaped by the temporal and spatial situatedness of its existence. It provided the stimulus and energy for these two movements, yet it cannot be reduced to them. Phoenix’s “strange and disturbing growths” show how what began as imitation led to cross-pollination and propagation. The magazine’s radicalism had not yet congealed into orthodoxy or outright antagonism: its abrasiveness and contrary elements reveal it to have been the kernel of these later forces. Phoenix presages a mature Australian modernism in ways in which the Angry Penguins and Jindyworobaks—understood in isolation—cannot. Upon the passing of both movements’ flames, marked by death, tragedy, and farce, the embers of Phoenix would remain and light the way for those traversing the postwar cultural desert that was Australia.[162] But that is another story for another essay.

Little magazines often exist at the margins, and Phoenix lived in the margins of a local literary culture upon the edge of global modernity. The extinguishing of its revolutionary fire and the transitioning of its energies into two subsequent movements also explain its relative absence from literary history, even as they provide proof of the magazine’s agency. To borrow Miles’s terminology, Phoenix was the “pilot-ship” that guided into their haven the two contrary movements that would exert untold influence on Australian letters, before it was itself set ablaze. Out of those dark and moody waters, Australian modernism would have to chart its own course.