Much of the new activity, then, apart from Wet Ink, was confined to the eastern seaboard, until Indigo journal was born in Perth in 2007 with a policy of deliberately promoting Western Australian authors. Western Australia may have always felt ‘out of sight, out of mind’ to an extent, even despite the efforts of Westerly over at least three decades. It, too, had been publishing less frequently during the 1990s, as the original group of activists such as Bruce Bennett and Peter Cowan had moved on.

The editors of Indigo saw the magazine as nurturing local talent by only publishing people who had lived in Western Australia for at least three years. It published six issues between August 2007 and February 2011 (twice a year), publishing a mixture of unknown authors and established names. Irma Gold in a blog on the Overland website on 22 July 2010 noted that she was reviewing a magazine that was dying. ‘What makes this journal unique — and what ultimately resulted in its downfall — is that it published writing by only West Australian authors’ (n.p.). At that time, even though Indigo had promoted Western Australian authors to a national audience and had some distribution in the eastern states, the magazine had been advised by the Western Australian Department of Culture and the Arts that it would not continue to fund the magazine.

The managing editor, Donna Ward, said, ‘While they considered Indigo an important literary project for Western Australia, they felt it was not well known in the Eastern states and should receive submissions from around Australia’ (qtd. in Gold, n.p.). Indigo, through its supporters, suggested readers write to the papers and petition their members of parliament. As a result, questions were asked in the Legislative Assembly (WA) on 14 October 2010, seeking clarification from the minister responsible, and he (JHD Day) replied that there were already a number of outlets for writers in Western Australia, and that West Australians had access to the literary magazines published in the other states. Without knowing how Indigo sold in the eastern states, the market had become more sophisticated in its belief that Australians should be able to compete nationally and internationally.