I was the co-editor of The Alpine Review, which we liked to call a slow magazine for turbulent times. It was a tough creature to describe, but my favourite attempt is in Ruth Jamieson’s excellent book Print is Dead, Long Live Print, where she describes it as “The Economist’s cooler, better dressed sister.”
Other than that, I’ll just say that before I was asked to join as an editor, I thought of it as one of the most exciting independent mags on the planet. Now that I make it, I can’t rightly say that, but I can say that over 400 or so annual-ish pages, we had a lot of fun, with a lot of great writers, traversing time and space and playing with the big questions of what and why we are, who we’ve been and who we will be.
I steered the ship for Issue 3 alongside Louis-Jacques Darveau, working with the brilliant team of Elise Eskanazi, Anna Duckworth, John Di Palma and Eli Burnstein. Here’s magCulture’s review of the issue, where it was magazine of the week and they said nice things.
Previously, I was the editor of the quarterly Australian magazine Dumbo Feather, a magazine about extraordinary ideas and the people behind them. It’s a magazine that’s beautiful and radical in form and content, largely based around long (really long) interviews, beautiful photography, and diversions inspired by the featured conversations. In collaboration with Stuart Geddes, Jessica Friedmann and the team at Small Giants, I reinvented everything about this magazine, building something that was entirely new but retained the soul of what came before. In my time at the helm, the magazine grew rapidly, both within Australia and overseas. To this day it’s a deeply loved and unique creature, thriving under a new editorial team. They also made a lovely new website recently, it’s well worth a rummage. A good feature for me, selfishly, is that you can get a nice list of all my features in one place.
Though this was by no means a solo operation, and some of my best relationships with fellow magazine makers (fellow edit staff, writers, photographers, art directors) began here, I did get to speak to some pretty incredible people for Dumbo. These are some of my faves that are still online: