The Bulletin (Australian periodical)

The Bulletin
Front cover of the 22 February 1890 edition
Editor-in-ChiefJohn Lehmann
CategoriesNews magazine
FrequencyWeekly
Founded1880
Final issueJanuary 2008
CompanyAustralian Consolidated Press
CountryAustralia
Based inSydney, New South Wales
LanguageEnglish
ISSN1440-7485

The Bulletin was an Australian weekly magazine based in Sydney and first published in 1880. It featured politics, business, poetry, fiction and humour, alongside cartoons and other illustrations.

The Bulletin exerted significant influence on Australian culture and politics, emerging as "Australia's most popular magazine" by the late 1880s.[1] Jingoistic, xenophobic, anti-imperialist and republican, it promoted the idea of an Australian national identity distinct from its British colonial origins. Described as "the bushman's bible", The Bulletin helped cultivate a mythology surrounding the Australian bush, with bush poets such as Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson contributing many of their best known works to the publication. After federation in 1901, The Bulletin changed owners multiple times and gradually became more conservative in its views while remaining an "organ of Australianism". Although its popularity declined after World War I, it continued to serve as a vital outlet for new Australian literature.

It was revived as a modern news magazine in the 1960s, and after merging with the Australian edition of Newsweek in 1984[2] was retitled The Bulletin with Newsweek. Its final issue was published in January 2008, making The Bulletin Australia's longest running magazine.[3]

  1. ^ Reinecke, Carl (2021). Books that Made Us. ABC Books, ISBN 9781460713501.
  2. ^ "The Online Books Page". Online Books. University of Pennsylvania. Retrieved 7 July 2022.
  3. ^ Jesse Hogan (24 January 2008). "The Bulletin shuts down". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 27 October 2016.