Often our reviews are the only North American notice of Australian books; thus we are a journal of record in taking account of what is being produced in Australia today. Since most of the reviews are written by Americans, we also offer another perspective, extracted from local polemics and rivalries, on the nature and merits of specific texts. We also feature cover art by Australian artists, past and present: Lin Onus, Alex Wanders, Dawn Csutoros, and Margaret Olley are among those whose images have graced our cover. Hu Ming’s 2006 nude cover portrait of the academic David Goodman, Of Mice and Goodman, created controversy among some readers in the United States, permitting me a simulacrum of what it must have been like for early modernist avant-gardes to be ‘banned in Boston’.

Still, I am often told that Antipodes is not well known in Australia. I intend here both to explore why this is so and to focus on certain larger cruxes in the journal’s history. First of all, as Paul Giles, the new occupant of the University of Sydney’s Challis Chair of Modern Literature, pointed out at the recent conference on Australian–United States cultural relations held in Sydney, Australia is not the literal Antipodes of the United States; not the territory one would encounter if one were to burrow under the earth until one reached the opposite side. This would be somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean. (If Australia were actually our Antipodes, it would be even more arduous to get to from the United States than it already is.) The term ‘Antipodes’ presupposes a British, not American, association; and it is in the strictly post-colonial sense of permutations and reversals of Britishness that recent criticism, such as Ian Henderson’s, has utilised the term.

It is interesting how relatively little the idea of ‘Antipodes’ has been used in Australian literature: David Malouf’s 1985 short story collection, and Geoffrey Dutton’s 1958 poetry volume Antipodes in Shoes – a witty quotation from Andrew Marvell – are about it. The only work of American literature I know of utilising the term, Brooks Hansen’s novel The Chess Garden (1995), is about a fantastic land more like South Africa than Australia. When ‘Antipodes’ is used in mainstream British literature not explicitly referring to Australia or New Zealand, it is often used inversely, pointing to the domestic and the assimilable: as in Jane Eyre when Mr Rochester, despairing of his marriage to the madwoman in the attic, looks for ‘the antipodes of the Creole’, that is, a solid Englishwoman. ‘Antipodes’ as a term can liberate, but can also serve to deflect tensions.

Furthermore, ‘Antipodes’ is plural, denoting more than one Antipode. Yet our journal has never covered New Zealand literature. I am often asked why. There have simply been bureaucratic blockages preventing New Zealand’s formal incorporation as a topic, though we have covered some New Zealand topics, and liminal writers such as Oliver certainly find a home with us. I also think that, even though New Zealand had its own ‘Patrick White’ in Janet Frame, it did not have an equivalent film boom and, though some among the leftist US literati would never admit it, the anti-nuclear policy of the Lange government rankled with some Americans.

 took over the journal from its estimable founding editor, Robert Ross, in 2001. At that point, few of our essay contributors were from Australia. They were mostly from the United States and continental Europe. This was laudable in showing that Australian literature was an international, not a national practice. But, like Antaeus, we needed to go back to our source. I tried to bring in more Australian writing by focusing the journal more on the cultural debates transpiring within Australia. My third issue contained Binoy Kampmark’s treatment of the media reception of the Tampa affair. A more systematic refereeing system encouraged younger academics to see the journal as a venue for their work. We had always been comparable to journals such as Southerly, Meanjin, and Westerly in our format and creative contributors; during the 1990s, however, journals based in Australia had become more interdisciplinary and theoretical than Antipodes. In the 2000s, I sought to align Antipodes more closely with what, despite our physical distance, we have always seen as our peers.

To give a sample of what I consider strong recent issues of the journal: in December 2008 we featured a creative essay on Olley’s painting by Anne Collett; a piece by Lyn McCredden on the Lindy Chamberlain case; Fiona Probyn-Rapsey on Kelly Oliver’s theories of ‘witnessing’ in Thomas Jackson’s memoirs; Gaetano Rando’s account of two Italian–Australian writers; Helen Gildfind’s highly inventive creative meditation on Frame; and Mark Kipperman’s essay on Fergus Hume’s 1886 novel The Mystery of a Hansom Cab. In the current issue (December 2009), we include two essays on Patrick White, by Deb Narayan Bandyopadhyay and James Clements, which ballast the reconceptualisation of White now underway; Huang Dan’s essay on Ouyang’s Eastern Slope Chronicles, Erica Hateley on Jindabyne; Helen Hewson on the poetry of John Shaw Neilson and its concomitants in the visual arts; Bruce Bennett continuing his exploration of espionage in Australian fiction and culture, several instalments of which have appeared in Antipodes, as well as Adi Wimmer on Brian Dibble’s biography of Elizabeth Jolley and Daniel Vuillermin on the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature.

The chords struck here – of scholars from all over the world addressing Australia; of flexible definitions of just what an Australian text is; of veteran and new scholars intermingling – is reflective of my hopes for what the journal can be. I like the sense that we are encouraging newer scholars in a field that needs them. Nurturing fresh talent is always what an editor, of any sort, should be measured on. The ‘new names’ that Marcel Proust famously, if somewhat cynically, said a literary culture needed sometimes have to be coaxed into manifesting themselves.

We have also been experimenting more with special issues: Lyn McCredden, Frances Devlin-Glass and Bill Ashcroft put together an issue on the sacred in 2005, followed by Nathanael O’Reilly and Jean-François Vernay’s assemblage on ‘Fear in June 2009’. Another special issue, on Australian/Latin American/Caribbean connections, will appear in December 2010.

But is a bilateral conception of the relationship between the United States and Australia still viable? Should we become Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian Literature? My fear is that when some readers see ‘American’ in our title, they think it means something like ‘Americanist’. This perhaps is why I have been disappointed that little of the work connecting British Victorian and modernist writing with their Australian counterparts has made its way into our journal.

A bilateral conception of culture may be impossible in any context these days. This was the problem with the inexplicably acclaimed film Lost In Translation (2003), which was limited by its bilateral view of US–Japanese cultural contexts when, today, Chinese and Korean discourses, as well as alternative registers like that of African American culture, would also circulate in that space. Whatever the film’s other problems, the bilateral focus alone would have ensured its limitation. As sundry recent publications have urged, we need to orient ourselves more transnationally. In a sense, Antipodes was doing this from the beginning. In another sense, our identification with bilateral approaches has perhaps hindered us. Aside from the slight title change mooted above, another option might be to publish much more of the journal on the Internet, to honour the idea of transnational space. After all, the key transnational space implicating the United States and Australia has been cyberspace. But would this, then, take away our distinctiveness? And in that way, does the national frame still make an impact? Cyberspace is no utopia. For one, it tends to unite speakers of the same language, which can be both cosmopolitan and parochial. As Russell West-Pavlov noted at a recent symposium on Australian literature held in Berlin, translation may be a vital new paradigm for Australian literary studies. But if we stressed translation we would need to honour other languages within both the United States and Australia, and wean ourselves from the celebration of the global Anglophone. All this remains to be worked out. The question on the table is the role to be played by a biannual journal of Australian literature published in the United States. Antipodes has done yeoman service in illuminating what for most Americans is, to repurpose Marvell’s phrase in the same stanza in which he uses ‘Antipodes’, a ‘dark hemisphere’. However heartened I am by our achievements, the 2010s will probably register, in one way or another, the journal’s long-term destiny.