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In all those Arenas: reflecting on forty years of Arena publications makes visible the fundamental transformations of the era, and what is possible for the future.

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Small magazines come and go, but Arena has come and stayed for forty years. When it was launched, in 1963, the whole of the Left was in the depths of a moral crisis, the Cold War offered the prospect of nuclear devastation, while every person or organisation that seemed sympathetic to 'them' or likely to harbour doubts about 'us' was subject to surveillance or infiltration. As historian Stuart Macintyre has noted, 'A fear of communism permeated almost every aspect of public life'.

At the beginning, Arena was quite explicitly marxist in orientation--but with a difference. Some of its supporters and editors were members of the Communist Party, some were not, but their common commitment was to the perennial ideals of socialism. Mainly university people by background, they were secular idealists who had lived through the disenchantment that followed the public admission of decades of arbitrary imprisonment and execution in the USSR.

Arena was not the first magazine to offer a left response to the new conditions. Outlook, a Sydney-based publication, was a more immediately political, as well as a humanitarian response to the crisis of the working-class movement while Overland, a Melbourne-based periodical founded in 1954, was a left-oriented cultural and literary magazine in the democratic spirit of the 'legend of the nineties'. In its prospective content Arena fell somewhere between these two. Its distinctive feature was the attempt to break out of the limitations of received marxist interpretations of the rapid expansion of the intellectually related groupings in the years following the end of World War II.

From its first issue, Arena had an open door to a whole range of possible contributors. As well as attempting to develop a theoretical framework which might contribute to the renewal of the Left, it was a platform and a rallying point. Overland, Outlook, Arena too, all drew support from those who believed that socialism was the ideal of living together in relative harmony with equality and cooperation as active and ruling principles within social life. Given Arena's theoretical emphasis, it was perhaps more difficult for this underlying ethical impulse to find full expression. That was a challenge for all of its future editors.

The first years

In the magazine's first years, the Labor Party was split as a result of the fusion of the politics of the Cold War with the agenda of the National Civic Council, led by B. A. Santamaria. The parliamentary wing of this breakaway to the extreme Right was the now more or less defunct Democratic Labor Party which for a decade guaranteed the Liberal Country Party Coalition's place in government with R. G. Menzies as the paramount figure. In these first years, Arena's editors concentrated on the critique of Cold War Catholicism as an immediate issue. Far more important, however, in prefiguring Arena's future development, were the first steps towards a theory of the intellectually related groupings: a venture which, in its later development, undermined many of the marxist assumptions within which it had its beginnings.

In responding to changes in the workforce, along with the cultural institutions and especially the universities, we referred to university and tertiary-educated graduates as the intellectually trained. In the years following the Second World War there had been a vast increase in their numbers. Production was being reconstructed in terms of intellectually mediated, as distinct from craft, technique. Professional associations --whether of pilots, secondary teachers, telecommunications workers or university staff members--had consolidated, and the Australian Council of Salaried and Professional Associations (ACPSA) had taken root as an umbrella organisation alongside the ACTU. Apart from work and work-associated organisations, the members of the new strata were key agents of the whole transformation of the urban environment and of the settings of everyday life. They were the carriers of a more individuated and post-parochial style of life, a way of living which responded to the openness of the new media, as distinct from the more restrictive rituals of the old middle class.

Arena 5 reported a weekend conference convened to discuss these issues. But rapid changes were in train. Before two more years had passed, protest against the Vietnam War was mounting. The New Left and the counter-culture, based initially amongst the younger members of the expanding new strata, were still in the process of declaring themselves when, across the Western world, the citadels of power were shaken by a social eruption which seemed to come from nowhere.

The intellectuals and the French events

In May 1968, the French students rebelled, masses of citizens joined them on the streets and, at least in the short term, the French government was forced into headlong retreat. As the Age asked at the time, 'Is it as some observers here believe an historic cataclysm heralding social changes so profound that we are only now beginning to catch a glimpse of them?' (30/5/68). Scarcely remembered now, these tumultuous events called to mind the great revolution of 1789. Arena's editors took them to be portents of quite far reaching change.

In their...

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