The inaugural number opened with a cheerless story by Dal Stivens, an earnest essay by A.D. Hope and some mawkish poems by those soon-to-be-notorious tricksters, James McAuley and Harold Stewart. There has been no shortage of big guns since – White and Wright, Malouf and Murray, a hat trick of Porters, and so on. Some things have changed, of course. For starters, Southerly now has wide margins and snazzy graphics; previously, it appeared in a migraine-inducing octavo format. Since 2007 each issue has been accompanied by an online supplement (styled The Long Paddock), containing an overflow of writing not included in the paper version. Uncharacteristically in this payper-view era, the pastures of The Long Paddock are freely available to anyone grazing in cyberspace.

Getting a poem published in an Australian literary journal these days must seem like trying to elbow your way onto a crowded bus. To its credit, Southerly has long displayed a serious commitment to poetry (Kenneth Slessor was editor for five years), but without, one surmises, having any particular axe to grind. More than a dozen poets are represented in this latest issue, most of them prize-winners or otherwise established, ranging in style from the darkly enigmatic Andrew Taylor to the wildly vertiginous Pam Brown. Especially appropriate for the warmer months is Ainslee Meredith’s ‘Blue Tonic’, where asphalt ‘melts to feet in December / like it is lonely for skin’. No axes to grind here, but there is a curious image of a different sort of sharpening when a teething baby is said to ‘strop her gums’ on the night air.

Presumably it is by editorial design that the travails of ageing feature prominently in some of the stories included in this birthday number. Anne Myers movingly recreates the last weeks of an elderly woman in ‘Letting Go’ (a contributor’s note records that the author also works as an intensive care nurse). Here, readers will learn details they might prefer not to know, such as how a bedridden patient can develop infected blisters ‘caused by overzealous rubbing from praying relatives’. In Bronwyn Mehan’s ‘While She Waits’, a bookish senior citizen finds some quantum of solace in literature; everyone else at her retirement village seems to prefer tai chi, singalongs, stale shandies or canasta. This, of course, has always been one of the things that naturalistic fiction does peerlessly well, registering the thousand tiny sorrows of lives being lived out in hospitals and nursing homes, and all those other ordinary places that John Updike once called ‘the sweatshops of reality’.

Most of the stories in the present number are written in this vein, the notable exception being some experimental prose pieces by Christopher Conti. These consist of bizarre monologues, blending comedy and paranoia in slab-like paragraphs (the author acknowledges a debt to the Austrian master Thomas Bernhard). In ‘Labyrinth’, Conti’s narrator recounts a meeting with a celebrated professor, ‘one of the world’s foremost authorities on the work of Franz Kafka’. Instead of discoursing on all things Kafkaesque, the professor chooses to spend the evening denouncing his colleagues as charlatans until he ‘gave us the impression the university was a shadowy place that only rewarded schemes of low cunning and impostures of high craft’. A sobering thought indeed, especially when it appears in a journal like Southerly, where much of the space is taken up by what could best be described as hardcore academic prose.

One of the big-ticket items in this anniversary number is just such a piece of academic writing: a long and erudite essay by Kevin Hart on the poetry of Robert Gray. Visual experience has always had a certain primacy in Gray’s writing: ‘the world is reliably as it appears’, he maintains in his recent memoir, The Land I Came Through Last (2008). For Hart, this makes Gray a kind of phenomenologist, concerned not with things as they are (like William Carlos Williams) but with how they are seen or perceived to be (like John Ashbery). This leads Hart to emphasise the hidden religiosity of Gray’s work. Such a reading might seem to go against the grain (think of the earthy scepticism of poems like ‘Telling the Beads’), but Hart is persuasive in making his case.

This is heady stuff, full of insights derived from Husserl and Merleau-Ponty and a school of Japanese Zen masters. As an introductory note explains, Hart’s essay first saw the light of day in July 2009 as the University of Sydney’s Blaiklock Memorial Lecture. This shouldn’t surprise anyone: with its daunting philosophical vocabulary, the essay is certainly not for untutored minds.

No less learned is Ian Henderson’s Freudian analysis of A.A. Phillips’s well-known polemic ‘The Cultural Cringe’. (Another birthday: Phillips’s essay turns sixty this year.) Henderson rightly points out that the term ‘cringe’ was coined to describe our reception of culture, rather than our production of it; what interested Phillips was the inner dynamic of reading and how this might manifest all kinds of neuroses. Freud does pop up briefly in Phillips’s essay. For Henderson, this is a sign of the intellectual complexity that underpinned the whole notion of the ‘cringe’. Indeed, it is salutary to remember that the now somewhat démodé concerns of cultural nationalists such as Phillips were not only radical in their day but were also remarkably well-schooled. Henderson’s essay offers a detailed rereading of this seminal text, ending on an ironic note that surely would have delighted Phillips himself. But, as its references to Lacan suggest, this is also an essay produced and consumed within an academic setting (an earlier version was apparently presented to an Australian Studies conference).

The same could be said for most of the other essays in this issue. In two of them, the terrain of Australian Literature is peered at through the looking glass of Continental theory – Bachelard in Laura Joseph’s reconnoitre of Alexis Wright, Irigaray in Fiona Morrison’s remapping of Christina Stead. The results of these surveys are then cast in the arcane dialect of contemporary academic discourse. Where else but in the seminar room would one hear talk of ‘the maternal imaginary’ or ‘zones of inter-structural contact’? This is not to imply that any of these essays is somehow lacking; but it is the case that they are all highly specialised pieces of work, addressed to an equally specialised readership.

To some extent, Southerly has always had an academic orientation. From its earliest days, it has been closely associated with the University of Sydney’s English Department, where almost all of its editors have taught. Most of the essays it now publishes appear to be meant for readers already on the inside – inside the university, that is. It seems worth pointing this out because there has been considerable discussion of late about the direction of Australian literary studies, especially about how the treasures of our canon might best be passed on to future generations. This discussion is taken up with some gusto in Elizabeth McMahon’s editorial in the present number. Appropriately for this anniversary occasion, McMahon wants ‘to think about Southerly’s place in the creative and scholarly fields of Austral ian literature and to ask questions about its particular brief and identity’. One of the answers that she seems to be supplying draws on the notion of ‘curatorship’ recently advanced by the University of Sydney’s Robert Dixon (advanced, among other places, in the November 2009 issue of ABR).

On the face of it, curatorship seems a noble aim for university literature departments. Dixon suggested that this newfound curatorial role might even redirect literary scholarship away from the type of finger-wagging critique that has been so extensively practised over the last few decades: in short, that teaching and writing about Australian literature might be done positively, ‘in the same way that an art gallery is responsible for exhibiting and promoting informed, intelligent discussion about its paintings’.

Do the essays in this issue of Southerly fulfil that role? For McMahon, they certainly do; in fact, she makes large claims for Hart’s essay as signalling ‘an important moment of change in the practice of Australian literary criticism’, precisely because it undertakes this sort of curatorial labour. Frankly, though, it is hard to see how this or any of the other criticism in the present issue could speak to anyone not already within the four walls of the academy. If this is curatorship, then it is curatorship of a very narrow kind. Indeed, it seems a world away from Dixon’s analogy of the art gallery promoting public discussion. As the essays here show, the modes of literary criticism practised at our universities usually sound more like a group of monks talking among themselves.

Perhaps these misgivings are unjustified. University-based scholars of Australian literature are no doubt as entitled as any other researchers to their own special vocabularies and special theoretical tools; nor are they under any particular obligation to communicate their work to a wider public. Nevertheless, one cannot help wondering whether the readership of journals such as Southerly now falls into two distinct groups – a division, that is, along creative and scholarly lines. That may not have been the intention of the journal’s founders, and it need not be the case today. This birthday number includes two fine poems by Andy Kissane that suggest rapprochement is always possible. Their titles – ‘Skipping Lectures with Raskolnikov’ and ‘Chewing the Fat with Captain Ahab’ – show how Kissane is performing his own variety of curatorship. Indeed, it would be a good thing if our poets and novelists somehow became more involved in the various forms of curatorial endeavour that are always necessary to embed the literature of the past in the guts of the living. Curatorship seems too big and too important a task to be left to the universities alone, not least because the groves of academe are seldom open to the public in the same way that poems and novels and art galleries are. Moreover, the university scholars are just as capable of making errors about the past as the rest of us. Elizabeth McMahon’s editorial twice gets wrong the name of Southerly’s original editor, R.G. Howarth. Curators should perhaps take special care when handling the bones of their ancestors.