An Australian Literary Treasure

I arrived in Australia as a French-speaking five-year-old, without a word of English, and started school in Sydney within only a few weeks of arriving. Today, I am an internationally-published author of children’s books, writing with complete and happy ease in a language—English—that’s become the language of my imagination. How did this happen? In part, the answer comes directly from the influence of the School Magazine, one of the world’s great literary treasures, which (rather incongruously) emanates from the very heart of a bureaucratic behemoth, the New South Wales Department of Education.

The School Magazine is the oldest literary magazine in Australia and, I think, the oldest children’s literary magazine in the world. It was first published on February 1, 1916, just in time for the new school year. Its full title then was School Magazine of Literature for Our Boys and Girls, and its function was to provide every primary school child in New South Wales with good stories, poems, plays, extracts from novels, facts and fun—all for free. From the very first issue, the magazine demonstrated that its central ethos was that “only the best was good enough for children” as Walter de la Mare once said. And that best included Australian writers, such as Mary Gilmore, and those further afield, such as William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson and Samuel Coleridge, as well as nursery rhymes, fairy tales and animal stories, all illustrated by line drawings and reproductions of pictures.

These days, the School Magazine is no longer a humble little black-and-white single-part monthly journal, but a glossy full-colour production, in four monthly parts (these, named Countdown, Blast Off, Orbit and Touchdown, serve different reading ages). Sadly, though, a misplaced zeal on the part of bean-counters has meant that the magazine is no longer available to every primary school child in New South Wales, as was the case till the 1980s, but by subscription. Fortunately, many New South Wales primary schools still purchase it every year—the magazine has a healthy subscription list.

Its commitment to high literary quality, its sense of wonder and fun, and its accessibility have persisted throughout the decades. What’s more, the magazine has not only nurtured generations of readers, it has also been one of the single most important factors—perhaps the most important factor—in the rich flourishing of Australian children’s literature. Most Australian writers and illustrators have had work published—often for the first time—in the School Magazine. And the magazine has also been staffed by an impressive roll-call of some of Australia’s most celebrated creators, such as Patricia Wrightson, Lilith Norman, Anna Fienberg, Geoffrey McSkimming, Ursula Dubosarsky, Duncan Ball, Tohby Riddle and many more. Though the magazine has periodically been eyed by education ideologues wanting to “bring it up to date”—that is, turn it into a boring teaching aid instead of a children’s literary magazine—thus far it has withstood such attacks, contriving to preserve the depth of tradition with the freshness of modernity. Classic and contemporary blend happily in its attractive pages; children are both entertained and challenged.

For me, it had a huge effect. I don’t remember a single word of any of my primary school textbooks; but I remember, vividly, more than a few issues of the School Magazine. I remember the excitement of the days the magazine would be distributed at school and how I would read it all the way home along the busy Pacific Highway in suburban Sydney, so absorbed I occasionally bumped into telegraph poles.

Through the magazine I was not only introduced to a whole world of stories and pictures, I was also brought into contact with the living world of the Australian imagination. I began to understand that Australia, the country I lived in, but which wasn’t the culture I was most familiar with, was a source of the most wonderful stories every bit as much as Europe. For instance, an extract from Patricia Wrightson’s The Rocks of Honey (which sent me scurrying to the library to find the book) made me realise that Australia had not only an Aboriginal past, but also an Aboriginal present. But because the magazine always published the best, most fun, most enriching and most accessible of not only Australian literature but that of the whole world, I came to love and feel at ease within an imaginative world that was both local and international.

My confidence grew enormously from it. In time I came to feel I could add to it myself, I could reach out for my dreams, because in this world that we were so generously given access to—all of us, wherever we came from, whatever social background or kind of school we went to, state or private—we had the freedom to roam, to lose ourselves in a world of the imagination that was intensely real at the same time. It was a true education—if that means not being force-fed with rote learning and sound-bite platitudes; it was one that opened your mind and your heart. It furnished your mind; yet it gave you the freedom to dare, and to dream. It was the most perfect nurturing of a reader, and a writer, that could be imagined.

As an adult, and a writer for children, like so many others I got my first real break in the School Magazine, when a story of mine, “Platypus Daybreak”, was published there when I was twenty-eight. It was so exciting to be published in the pages of a magazine I’d so loved in childhood. And, how amazing and wonderful it is, when you are a struggling writer, to have a story accepted in a magazine whose readers number not in the hundreds or the thousands but in the hundreds of thousands! What was more, writing for the magazine, and the subtle help of the excellent editorial staff, helped me to develop so swiftly that eighteen months after “Platypus Daybreak” was published, my first children’s novel, Fire in the Sky, was published by Angus & Robertson.

It’s not only as a writer and reader that I love the magazine, though. As a mother of children who grew up in the New South Wales school system, as well as a visiting author to schools, I have seen first-hand how the magazine is still loved, by children and by teachers. And that’s because it’s fun. In the often Gradgrindish world of educational policy, fun is all too often neglected. But I tell you what: it turns reading from something you must do at school to something that will never stop enriching you, no matter what age you are. And that is why this great literary treasure that is the School Magazine, which has endured over ninety-three years of our history, deserves to be celebrated as the rare and precious thing that it is. 

Sophie Masson’s next novel is The Hunt for Ned Kelly, due for publication by Scholastic Australia in February.