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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria University College, Wellington N.Z. Vol. 21, No. 10. August 6, 1958

[Introduction]

A writer with something new to say, or a new way of saying it, is obliged, as Coleridge noted, to create the taste by which he is to be judged. The same goes for a magazine which attempts to do something which has not been done before; it must arouse the kind of interest which it hopes to satisfy. In doing this, it has to set the standard it expects its readers to demand of it.

When "Landfall" started in 1947, [here was no New Zealand precedent that it could follow. The country had never had a literary and critical journal which was also concerned with the arts and with public affairs. Its models, if any, had then to be overseas ones. But no overseas model would serve for what was to be the distinctively New Zealand journal that some of us had talked about for years. We had talked about it ever since the time of the student journal "Phoenix", which came out at AUC in 1932, and whose contributors were to form the nucleus of writers for "Landfall". But they alone could not keep it going: would there be enough good writers to do so? Above all, would there be enough young writers coming on? And could all these, older and younger, be persuaded to do what they had not thought of doing before, that is, write for a journal which would depend on frequent, and perhaps regular contributions? Lastly, would there be a public for such a journal?

These were some of the imponderables before us in 1947. Everything was tentative. What did it mean, for example, that "Landfall" was to be "a New Zealand quarterly"? The country was, and is, in process of discovering itself, and it would be discovered imaginatively only very gradually, in the work of many writers over many generations. Hence the title, "Landfall", implying that we had set our eyes on the country, but didn't yet know what sort of country it was going to be.