Morag Fraser recalls sitting in a friend’s house on a hot day in Sydney with a handful of faxes that had just arrived from poet Seamus Heaney in Ireland. Heaney had recently given a talk at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival and Fraser, editor of Eureka Street, had asked him if the magazine could publish the talk.
‘He said sure, but let me see what you’re going to publish. So I dutifully transcribed every impeccable word—he’s a great rhetorician—and faxed it to him. When I got it back he had not left a single sentence untouched. This is the poet/control freak/maniac. It was a great privilege to be sitting there editing the editing.’
An earlier Eureka moment that Fraser recalls is more personal. Her father died between the first issue of the magazine going to press and coming back from the printer. ‘I was at my father’s funeral in Adelaide when Michael Kelly and Adrian Lyons walked down the aisle carrying the first issue, and I thought my father would’ve really loved that.’
That first issue, published in March 1991, began a 15-year print history that comes to a close with this final May–June 2006 issue. Along the way the magazine has published some of the finest writers working in Australia and overseas, and has covered issues that were often ignored or glossed over by the mainstream media. The masthead of the March 1991 issue listed Michael Kelly sj as publisher, Adrian Lyons sj as editor and Morag Fraser as associate editor. To introduce the new magazine, its editors wrote:
But why launch a new publication at a time of recession and international conflict? We believe that with the mass media now in fewer hands than they have been for decades, the range of perspectives offered to Australian readers is too few. And the right questions—the questions behind the questions—are not being pursued vigorously enough. Eureka Street aims to pinpoint issues of importance to Australia, in the context of the region and the wider world. We are enlisting writers who report accurately, analyse perceptively and who are capable of making their own contribution to the questions at hand ... Above all, we want Eureka Street to be a ‘good read’ for thoughtful people.
By the third issue, May 1991, Fraser was editor, a role that she filled with distinction until 2003. (‘I came in with one Gulf War and went out